Tag: Trade and investment
Stevenson’s army, December 19
Atlantic Council has a China strategy.
CNAS has ideas for economic statecraft.
WSJ laments loss of social trust among Americans.
Stimson Center says DPRK may be building nuclear components.
WSJ says its economy is near collapse.
Pompeo openly blames Russia for cyber attacks [which still seem to me to be espionage rather than “act of war.”]
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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The nightmare is over, now the hard work begins
I spent an hour this morning on Zoom with Italian colleagues at the Institute of International Affairs (IAI) talking about the American election and its consequences for foreign policy. Here are the points I prepared for them,
most of them all too obvious I’m afraid:
- While Biden is better informed and experienced on foreign policy than any president in decades, his most immediate priorities will be domestic: first and foremost stopping Covid-19 infections and moving as quickly as possible to revive the American economy, which is still in bad shape, and fix our social cleavages, which are severe.
- That said, he is putting in place a formidable foreign policy team: Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Avril Haines and Linda Thomas-Greenfield are among our finest. Janet Yellen at Treasury will make an excellent counterpart on the economic side.
- Jake and Tony are both strongly committed to a revived domestic economy and solutions to America’s social challenges as prerequisites for a strong international role. You can expect them to be less transactional but just as aggressive as Trump on trade and investment issues, where America will need to satisfy more of the demands of its domestic producers.
- Missing so far from the Biden team is the Secretary of Defense. I’d still bet on Michele Fluornoy, but I admit I have little idea why she hasn’t been named yet. Defense industry ties may be the reason.
- Whoever gets Defense, Biden will seek to reinvigorate trans-Atlantic ties. He has a basically positive attitude towards NATO and America’s allies, whom he views as force multipliers whose basic values are aligned with ours.
- He is not opposed, as Trump was, to the European Union. I doubt he will prioritize a free trade agreement with the UK and might even try to revive the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe, or something like it.
- Willingness of the US to return to the JCPOA will help his effort to renew the Alliance, but it will require reciprocal Iranian willingness to return to the status quo ante. I’m not convinced Tehran will be willing before the June presidential election, and maybe not even after.
- Biden will want to cooperate quickly with Europe in responding to Russia’s regional challenges in the Baltics, the Balkans, and especially Ukraine, though he will be hampered on Ukraine by the allegations against his son Hunter.
- The US will return, likely on Day 1, to the Paris Climate Change Agreement, which I trust will be a welcome move in Europe.
- The big looming problem for both the US and Europe is how to meet China’s global economic and political challenge. Biden will want to pursue both cooperation and competition with China.
- He is not interested in a new cold war, but he will be far more committed globally to democratic values and human rights than Trump has been. He will not be sword dancing in Riyadh, encouraging President Xi to imprison Uighurs, or staying silent about repression in Hong Kong.
- Renewed American support for human rights and democracy will unsettle relations not only with China but also with the Gulf, Israel, Brazil, and possibly with Hungary and Poland.
- Biden will not be able to restore everything to where things stood four years ago. He’ll need to prioritize.
- But I think all those who want to see American global leadership based on a rational assessment of both values and interests will feel a lot better about things on January 21 than they did on November 2. The nightmare is over, but the hard work is just beginning.
In addition to foreign policy, the Italians pressed me on the future of the Republican Party and reports that black men and Hispanics shifted towards Trump. I responded more or less this way:
- The numbers are still iffy, but at least some of the shift among Hispanics was due to mostly white Venezuelans and Cubans who fled socialist countries and were frightened when Trump told them Biden was a socialist. Some Latinos in Texas appear to have shifted as well, possibly due to the employment impact of border wall construction.
- The Republican Party now has a choice to make between continuing as a right-wing extremist and racist party or reverting to right-of-center social and economic conservatism. Trump will try to keep the party on the former track and can boast of an enormous turnout of voters, and relative victories in the House races, to help him. So far, only Senator Romney seems courageous enough to point in the direction of more conventional conservatism. We’ll have to wait and see which direction Republicans choose.
On the domestic side, I also emphasized the importance of the January 5 Senate run-off elections in Georgia, which will determine how far Biden can go on the legislative front.
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Any functioning adult would be better
We can never know exactly what Hillary Clinton would have done had she won 3.5 years ago, but let us count the ways the United States could have been better off if just about any normal functioning adult–Republican or Democratic–had become president:
- Well over 150,000 Americans would not have succumbed to Covid19, the epidemic would have receded faster, the economy would have reopened months faster and far safer, the US would be leading the world’s economic recovery instead of dragging it down, and the US debt would be trillions less.
- Millions of now unemployed people would have jobs, and no one would risk losing the health insurance and coverage for preexisting conditions available under Obamacare.
- The Paris Climate Accord would be more effective in limiting greenhouse gases that have contributed to this summer’s record number and intensity of storms in the Atlantic and the unprecedented wildfires in California, causing many billions of dollars of losses.
- The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership might have been concluded, with real advantages for US producers rather than the marginal replacement for NAFTA and the trade war with China that has damaged US agriculture, manufacturers, and consumers.
- Iran would still be a year from having enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon and negotiation of the follow-on to the nuclear deal would be in progress, including on missiles and regional issues.
- The Voting Rights Act might have been revived in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, along with legislation curbing police abuse, and there would be no discussion of imaginary anarchy in American cities or use of the military against peaceful protests.
- The US would still have the confidence and support of its European allies and China would still be observing the agreement it reached with the Obama administration on commercial hacking.
- Russia would be showing some respect instead of owning the President of the United States, whom it only needs to quote to make its points.
- There would still be hope for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine and a possibility of curbing the North Korean nuclear program, which has instead inaugurated a missile possibly capable of hitting the US with multiple nuclear warheads.
Of course lots of things would not likely be different: we might still be outside the Trans Pacific Partnership looking in, Maduro might still be president of Argentina, Syria, Yemen, and Libya would still be catastrophic, and the Saudi Crown Prince might still have ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, though MbS would not have been shielded from accountability by the US President.
The United States would be in a far stronger position under any functioning adult, Democratic or Republican, than it is under the false flag of “Make America Great Again.” For anyone interested in foreign policy, that is all you really need to know while filling out your ballot at home and popping it into the mail, provided the US Postal Service doesn’t follow President Trump’s instructions to ensure it doesn’t arrive on time.
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Stevenson’s army, July 31
– Tata is out. Good.
– Diplomats push back at returning to offices.
– Postal Service cuts back just when it’s needed for elections. That’s one of several threats to the elections discussed in a good CFR session.
-CFIUS had increased workload in 2019. Here’s the official report.
– The USG didn’t run its pandemic playbook, as it should have.
– Intriguing idea: non-kinetic ASAT
– Back to normal: approval of Congress falls
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Biden will have his hands full
Time for a summer update on President Trump’s diplomatic initiatives, more or less in his priority order:
- Trade with China: importing less than half of what is called for in the “first phase” agreement.
- Re-initiating nuclear talks with Iran: Trump said more than a year ago he would talk with no pre-conditions. Tehran won’t, despite “maximum pressure.” Iran wants sanctions eased first.
- Getting rid of North Korea’s nuclear weapons: Kim Jong-un has in effect said “no.”
- Ending the war in Afghanistan: The withdrawal is proceeding, but progress in intra-Afghan talks is minimal.
- Removal of Venezuelan President Maduro: He has weathered the challenge and remains firmly in power.
- South China Sea: The US has rejected China’s sovereignty claim but is doing nothing about its military outposts.
- Helping Ukraine force the Russians out of Donbas: The Administration has provided lethal weapons to no avail.
- Reducing Saudi oil production to jack up world prices: Saudi production is down, but world prices are still in a trough.
- Initiating a democratic transition in Syria: Congress has beefed up sanctions, but Trump can’t even begin to get Assad out.
- “Deal of the century”: Not going anywhere but into the shredder. Even Israeli annexation of part of the West Bank is blocked.
This skips a lot. For example:
- the President telling Chinese President Xi that it was fine to put (Muslim) Uighurs into concentration camps,
- withdrawing from the Paris Climate accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and several favorable arms control agreements with Russia,
- moving US troops out of Germany to the delight of Moscow,
- failing to counter Russian bounties for Taliban who kill US soldiers in Afghanistan,
- saying the right things about Hong Kong and withdrawing its trade preferences, but with not discernible impact,
- not responding to foreign initiatives to undermine the US elections, and
- withdrawing from the World Health Organization in the midst of a pandemic.
American foreign policy has rarely been so ineffectual, never mind whether the priorities are right. The Administration doesn’t think past its own next move. The President is incapable of it and won’t let others do it for him. He behaves as if the adversary has no options. Much of what the Administration does is for show, without considering however how most of the rest of the world sees the situation. The only customers for this foreign policy are the domestic audience of China hawks, Russia doves, oil and coal producers, and evangelical Christians, along with President Putin, Prime Minister Netanyahu and a few other would-be autocrats around the world.
Getting out of the foreign policy hole Trump has dug will be a big challenge. President Biden, if there ever is one, will have his hands full even if he pays attention only to the first three of the items above. Let’s hope he can somehow save us from the consequences of four dreadful years.
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Stevenson’s army, July 15
In presidential election years, think tanks produce numerous reports suggesting an “Agenda for the Next Administration .” I send links to many of them, some because they’re representative of a school of thought, others because they seem interesting and worthwhile. AEI’s Derek Scissors, for example, has clear suggestions on how a partial economic decoupling from China might work.
This week, I’ve noticed a lot of big reports that strike me as job hunting in a possible Biden administration. Remember, there are a lot of smart people who expected to work in a Hillary Clinton administration who are now jockeying for jobs with Biden. Michelle Flournoy at CNAS has a comprehensive defense strategy, and she’d like to be SecDef. Bill Burns is obviously marketing himself for Secretary of State. There are already inner and outer circles of foreign policy advisers to Biden, so watch for the stream of published articles to burnish their resumes. Pete Buttigeig now has a piece in FP.
In other news, I was troubled to see this academic article on civil-military relations citing polls which show that opinion on basic questions now lines up with partisanship. With Trump as president, Democrats believe presidents should do whatever the military recommends; when Obama was president, the parties switched on military advice.
There’s a bidding war for Space Force HQ — 26 states! Decision due in Jan 2021 — before or after the 20th??
Dan Drezner reviews Trump’s economic statecraft.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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