Category Archives: foreign policy

Bad Policy

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Recall that President Donald Trump has threatened a sequence of rising tariffs on all Mexican goods in an effort to get Mexico to take seriously its broad contribution to the crisis we have on our border with that nation.

Republican lawmakers are gearing up for a vote to potentially override President Trump’s planned tariff on Mexico this month….

These lawmakers are concerned that the tariffs could jeopardize passage of the USMCA, and they’re worried that they will hurt Americans.  These folks have lost sight of some important facts.

One is that, after the announcement of the upcoming tariffs, the Mexican government said it intended to move ahead with ratification of the USMCA. The only ones in the way of its final acceptance are Congress’ Progressive-Democrats, who generally don’t like the deal in any event, and these Republicans.

Another is that international trade, including tools of international trade like tariffs, have nothing to do with economics and everything to do with foreign policy.

A third is the nature of conflict.  These Republicans need to understand that no conflict is bloodless for either side.   They need to stop worrying so much about their own stubbed toes and consider the effect these particular tariffs would have on Mexico and whether they just might have the intended effect.

Any attempt by Congress to get in the way can only undermine Trump’s foreign policy move to push Mexico to get serious about those whom Mexico is allowing illegally to cross its own southern border and the resulting flow of these illegal aliens north to illegally enter our country.

Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R, SD):

Congress is going to want to probably be heard from.

If Congress wants to be heard from, it should get serious about immigration, beginning with immigration legislation, that beginning with something akin to Trump’s offer of a year or so ago that offered a path to legalization for DACA beneficiaries plus a million more who were similarly situated.  Along with the means to better physically secure our own southern border.

Trump Commentary

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There is much commentary, generally negative, over President Donald Trump’s statements, among others, that he likes the idea of Boris Johnson succeeding outgoing British Prime Minister Theresa May.  It’s unbecoming. It’s unpresidential. Mostly, though, it’s simply not supposed to be done for one foreign dignitary to comment on the doings of another nation’s political debate.

I’ll ignore the foolishness of “unbecoming” and “unpresidential;” those objecting on these grounds routinely shy away from saying what they mean by “unbecoming” or “unpresidential.”  We’re simply supposed to accept their august pronouncements without question.

There’re a couple of larger issues in play here, though.

Why shouldn’t Trump weigh in on this or that British political debate?  After all, the Brits, including Sadiq Khan and Jeremy Corbin among several, routinely weigh in on American political debates.

More important than the triviality of such tit-for-tat, though, objecting to his speaking up—or to Khan’s/Corbin’s speaking up—insults the citizens of both countries: those objecting are saying that the citizens are so droolingly stupid that they’ll actually be swayed by what a foreign leader says about their own leadership or what that foreign leader says about any other domestic matter.

Venezuela is not Grenada

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That, there, is a true fact. The University of Georgia’s Emeritus Professor (of Agricultural and Applied Economics) Glenn Ames used that as an argument for why the US ought not invade Venezuela in his Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal.  After all, he wrote,

Venezuela is a large, complex country politically, not a tiny island in the Caribbean.

Also a true fact.  But then he went astray, here and on a couple of other points.  For one, our military is not the disjointed, uncoordinated collection of disparate forces that went into Grenada; it’s much better integrated, and it has demonstrated that improvement many times since.

The Venezuelan military is indebted to President Nicolás Maduro for their perks and subsidies. They are not going to give them up easily.

This badly overstates the case. The Venezuelan military leadership is indebted to Maduro.  The field-grade officers and especially the junior officers and soldiers have no such “loyalty;” they are not going to fight seriously in support of that “leadership”—which steals from their paychecks as much as they do from the civilian citizens of Venezuela.

Cubans and others are embedded in Venezuela’s security apparatus.

As Cubans were in Grenada, and they folded rapidly in the face even of that confused operation.

That Venezuela is not Grenada also is an irrelevant fact.

“Normalize Relations”

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Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif travelled to the People’s Republic of China in an effort to get its help in saving the nuclear weapons deal with Iran that the US walked away from and that Great Britain, Germany, and France, along with Russia and the PRC, remain in.  Zarif insisted that

the world must normalize economic relations with Tehran and take “practical steps” to save the nuclear accord….

No, we don’t.  There’s nothing to save: all the accord did and does is create a brief delay in Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons so it can use them against Israel and, through its proxies and affiliates, others.

Aside from that, though, again: no, we don’t.  Not until Iran normalizes relations with the other nations in the Middle East and then with the nations of the world at large.

Full stop.

A Shift May Be Beginning

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As the tariff volleys in the People’s Republic of China’s years-old economic war (of which trade is just one component) against us begin to grow, some potential changes in international trade and production for trade are becoming visible.  If these apparent changes represent the beginning of a solid trend, the changes and the trend will not be to the PRC’s benefit.

It’s true that consumer prices might start to rise in both our nation and in the PRC, but as a population—and as a people—we’re better able to absorb those increases than is the population of the PRC.  Our per capita GDP is $62,500, more than three times the PRC’s $19,520.

It might get worse from there.

  • Sweden-based telecom gear-maker Ericsson AB is preparing to shift some manufacturing from the PRC to the US, Estonia, Brazil, and Mexico
  • Republic of China-based AsusTek Computer Inc has been moving some production bases domestic facilities and Vietnam from the PRC
  • Foxconn, which assembles a huge share of iPhones, has been considering producing the devices in India and Vietnam
  • The 25% tariff on PRC-made lithium batteries means PRC producers will have difficulties competing with Korea’s LG Chem and Japan’s Panasonic Inc, both of which already have lithium battery production facilities in the US

If that sort of thing spreads and grows, and if US exporters find other markets (as US farmers are doing for next year’s crops, while others change the crops they grow for export), it won’t be good for the PRC’s economy—or for PRC President Xi Jinping’s political standing in his Party.