Tag Archives: foreign policy

Defanging the PRC

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At least by a little. As part of the People’s Republic of China’s economic war that it’s waging against us, they have moved to block important mergers involving American and non-PRC companies and today are threatening our major tech companies (and by extension our smaller tech companies and those companies that supply or otherwise do business with these).

Beijing has already said it is investigating Nvidia and Google over alleged antitrust issues. Other American companies in its sights include Apple, Silicon Valley tech company Broadcom, and semiconductor-design software vendor Synopsys, said people familiar with the matter. Synopsys has a $35 billion acquisition awaiting approval by Beijing.

And

[The PRC] said it had opened an antitrust probe against Google.

And

In 2018, amid US-China trade conflicts in the first Trump administration, Qualcomm terminated its proposed purchase of Dutch chip maker NXP Semiconductors after failing to obtain clearance from China.

And

US chip maker Broadcom’s takeover of VMware, valued at $61 billion when it was unveiled in May 2022, was in peril until a meeting between Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in November 2023.

If these companies did no business with companies domiciled in the PRC and did no business within the PRC, that nation would be unable to go after them at all, including having no ability to block mergers between US and non-PRC companies. The PRC’s ability to damage our economy would be restricted commensurately. Of course, withdrawing from the PRC would be expensive in the short run, but it’s a large economic world, and while the PRC is a major player in it, that nation is not the only player. The magnitude of its role, too, would shrink as we reduce our economic ties with it.

Another, central, question is this: what’s the cost of letting an enemy nation have so much influence over our economy?

Why do we Care?

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President Donald Trump (R) is moving to transfer as many as 30,000 illegal aliens with violent criminal histories to Guantanamo Bay for temporary housing until their final disposition is determined. A couple of Fox News‘ news writers are in such a tizzy over the prospect that they enumerated the 15 remaining prisoners—terrorists, the lot of them—along with brief biographies, who are still housed there. The writers seem worried in some inchoate manner about the potential for interaction between the two groups. The writers don’t say so in so many words, but why else would they feel constrained to point out the juxtaposition?

The larger question, which apparently hasn’t occurred to those writers, is this: why would any of us care that violent illegal aliens are being housed in the same facility as violent terrorists? After all, the former already are hardened criminals in their own right.

Don’t Accept His Credentials

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The British government has nominated Lord Peter Mandelson to be their ambassador to the United States. I write “nominated” because he’s not it until we accept his credentials as British ambassador.

This is what Mandelson has said about Trump in the recent past.

What Donald Trump represents and believes is an anathema to mainstream British opinion.

More:

Even those who have a sneaking admiration for Donald Trump because of his personality, nonetheless regard him as reckless, and a danger to the world.

Especially this:

little short of a white nationalist and a racist.

Now he says,

Frankly, I think President Trump could become one of the most consequential American presidents I have known in my adult life.

Mandelson already has shown what he means by this circumlocution.

And this:

I made those remarks six years ago in 2019, led rather along this by an Italian journalist….
I consider my remarks about President Trump as ill-judged and wrong.

Of course those prior remarks weren’t his fault. Never mind that he’s an experienced politician (even though he pretends otherwise) in which profession words are the stock in trade, and he has years of experience dealing with the press. Aside from that, of course he’s claiming to have changed his mind: he wants the prestige and wealthy perks of an ambassadorship.

This is a “diplomat” who’s already demonstrated a level of integrity and bias that shows he can’t be trusted to report to his government objectively about our government’s doings or to treat with our government honestly in his government’s name.

He’s not worth the trouble of dealing with. Don’t accept his credentials.

Dealing with an Enemy Nation

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The good editors of The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece on the challenges to Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent, on the assumption he’s confirmed. The editors, though, have misunderstood some of those challenges.

Hitting China with enormous tariffs will compel Beijing to dig in, not change its economic model, but Mr Bessent might use the threat to urge China to recognize its self-interest in rebalancing.

It’s not important whether the People’s Republic of China changes its economic model. The nation is an enemy of the United States, openly averring its goal of supplanting us on the world stage, and from there controlling our actions on that stage. The PRC needs to be isolated and contained.

By contrast, a mercantilist purchasing deal would fail to address China’s fundamental problem. The Trump administration would be better positioned to rebalance with China if it weren’t simultaneously declaring economic war on the rest of the world.

Mercantilism is irrelevant to the PRC’s fundamental problem, which the editors don’t recognize in their piece. The PRC’s fundamental problem is their shrinking population which is caused by their birth rate being far below even the replacement rate necessary to maintain an existing level. A critical subset and outcome of that problem is that its population is aging and already doesn’t have enough workers to sustain their retired and aged citizens, much less to man its factories. Aside from raw bigotry, this is another reason for the forced labor of Uighurs in PRC factories.

There’s less than no need to rebalance with the PRC: that nation is an enemy nation bent on replacing and controlling us. Rebalancing, along any dimension that doesn’t include gaining, regaining, and expanding our superiority, would only facilitate its effort.

It’s true enough that an economic war with the rest of the world is counterproductive, but it’s relevant to the need to isolate and contain the PRC only to the extent that mercantilist tariffs on so much of the rest of the world waters down the effects of foreign policy tariffs on the PRC and our ability to get other nations to support that isolation.

At bottom, the editors have confused tariffs used to influence an enemy nation—foreign policy tariffs—with mercantilist tariffs—protectionist tariffs used to make other nations’ exports to us more expensive relative to our domestically produced products. I’m surprised that the editors do not understand the distinction.

Testing?

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Some folks think that Baby Kim, the gang leader of northern Korea, is beginning to question the loyalty of the youngest adult and near-adult cohorts in that area.

He is particularly worried about the foreign media trickling into his information-repressed country….
At risk is Kim’s ability to maintain the illusion of North Korea as a socialist paradise, which is key to his ability to maintain power. And no group is more vulnerable to ideological slippage than North Korea’s youngest citizens.

Thus,

That is why Kim has handed a central propaganda role of late to the Paektusan Hero Youth Shock Brigade. …hailed as national heroes for helping to rebuild a western border region leveled by summer floods. Over four months, they erected 15,000 houses, schools and hospitals, the country’s state media claimed.
…
The construction work, Kim was quoted as saying in state media, had represented a “good opportunity for training our young people to be staunch defenders and reliable builders of socialism.”

That’s one test. Baby Kim also has sent 12,000 soldiers to fight on the side of the Russians against Ukraine. Those soldiers, despite their claimed reputation for prowess, are performing extremely poorly, even after accounting for the Russian tactics they’re expected to operate within.

Could Baby Kim be testing Ukraine as his version of being sent to the Eastern Front? It’s true enough that a severely wounded northern Korean soldier kills himself rather than risk capture, or his comrades murder him to prevent that capture, even as they run away from the battlefield. Those incidents, possibly representing a newly claimed loyalty in an attempt to protect the family left behind, are quite rare, though, compared to the casualty rate they’re experiencing.