Tag Archives: foreign policy

No Nation is an Island

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That’s the concern of The Wall Street Journal in one of its Thursday editorials.

President Trump’s biggest achievement has been the revival of faster US economic growth, but past performance is no guarantee of future results. The White House should be worried about growing economic strains in the rest of the world, and policy makers need to prepare. The US is not an island.

The WSJ went on to note that the Germany economy shrank 0.2% in the last quarter, the Japanese economy shrank by 0.3% in the same quarter, and the PRC’s economy “only” grew by 6.5% year-on-year in the same quarter.  The WSJ particularly worried about the German auto industry.

However.

It’s true enough that the US is not an economic island, but there are many, and serious, factors that are beyond our control and that the WSJ chose to be silent about.

Take Germany, for instance. Its labor laws are almost as draconian as the French and, together with German regulations, leave that economy much less nimble in changing conditions than it needs to be.  And even though the German auto industry wants a zero-tariff trading regime, at least with its products, the German government has shown its disinterest with its lack of action at the EU level.

The Japanese economy also is heavily regulated and inflexible, for all that it’s not a centrally planned one.  There’s no economic flexibility there.

That’s especially true with the especially heavily regulated and overtly, deliberately centrally planned economy of the PRC.

Our other trading partners? The EU as a whole has rejected any concept of a tariff-free environment with the US, it routinely attacks our companies’ competitive success across Europe, it constantly seeks to raise taxes on our companies rather than lowering their own to competitive levels, and on and on.

There’s only so much we can do with trading partners whose government denizens are more interested in their personal political and fiscal powers than they are in the welfare of their citizens.

A European Army

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There’s a nascent move afoot to create a European army to which, presumably, all the member nations of the EU would contribute men, equipment, and money.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested to the European Parliament last Tuesday that such a force

would complement NATO.

I’ll leave aside the question of how the EU’s member nations would pay for such an establishment when they’re having so much trouble finding ways—or reasons—to pay for their commitment (of all of 2% of their respective GDPs) to NATO.

There’s another question that badly wants answers.  While the US—and the free individual nations of Europe and of Asia—have benefitted from the existence of their standing armies, our own Founders had misgivings about such an establishment, to the point that for some years after our own birth, we had neither standing army nor standing navy.  Such a thing was, they feared, the stuff of tyranny.  Even though the formal raison d’etre of a standing army was, and is, outward-looking and for defense of the nation against foreign threat, a standing, professional military facility (they feared) ultimately would become a domestic threat: Government would come to use the thing to suppress and then to oppress the people over whom such a well-equipped Government ruled.

So far, those fears have not been realized in those nations where the people remain free enough to choose at more or less regular intervals the persons they will have as members of their governments.  Such free peoples have checked the power of their governments.

But what of the European Union?  That organization does not have a universally freely elected governing body.  The European Parliament, to be sure, is elected by the citizens of the member nations.  However, that body has no governing authority; it can only make recommendations.  The real power of the EU’s Government is shared among the European Council, which consists of the heads of state of the EU’s member nations; the President of that Council; and the President of the European Commission, whose members are European Council appointees.  That’s a lot of power concentrated away from the will and the choices of the citizens of the member nations.

It’s a power that gets freely and broadly exercised, too, as illustrated by the EU’s Government presuming to reach inside a member nation—Italy—and dictate to that nation what its domestic budget must be.  Were [Italy] to remain intransigent, and were the EU to have its own standing army, what might be an outcome of a future dispute between [Italy] and the EU?

The peoples of Europe, the citizens of the individual member nations, need to think very carefully whether they want to arm so well a system of governance over which they have so little say.

Brexit Talks

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In a Wall Street Journal article about the general government paralysis in Great Britain as the Brexit question is allowed to consume all of Parliament’s energy, one statement jumped out at me.

Instead, her [Theresa May’s] premiership is being defined by the Brexit negotiation itself.

What negotiations? Brussels is dictating punitive terms, and May and her team are meekly rolling over and accepting them. They’re even agreeing to discuss an effective partition of Great Britain rather than rejecting the question out of hand and walking out of all of the “negotiations” over the calculated insult and attempt to dismantle Great Britain.

Cold War Mentality and Objectivity

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As Australia and Papua New Guinea work together to reconstitute a WWII naval base on the island, a People’s Republic of China official objected to those two nations moving to improve their ability to defend themselves.  Lu Kang, the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of Information Director-General, said

We hope the relevant countries, and relevant people, can discard the Cold War mentality…and view China’s relations with Pacific islands in an objective way.

In light of the PRC’s occupation of other nations’ islands in the South China Sea, its installation of military bases and equipment on those islands, its claim of the entirety of the Sea as its private lake, and its constant threatening of other nations’ shipping for sailing in those international waters, it would be good, indeed, if the relevant PRC discarded its Cold War mentality.

The other nations rimming the South China Sea and those whose shipping transits the area already view the PRC and its “relations” with Pacific islands—and with those nations—in an objective way.

Trade and the People’s Republic of China

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The Wall Street Journal wrote in its Thursday edition that the US was “refusing” to resume trade negotiations with the PRC until the latter made a formal offer to us.  That’s a bit of a misnomer, though, since there’s nothing about which to negotiate until the PRC makes an offer.  Absent that, any discussion about trade would be just idle musings over an afternoon tea, a whiling away of some time between more important things.

A couple of other things jumped out at me in that article, too.

For Beijing, making a formal offer presents a number of risks, according to individuals briefed by the Chinese. First, it would reveal their negotiating position. Second, Beijing fears that Mr Trump could make any offer public in a tweet or statement as a way to lock in any concessions by China.

First, honest negotiating requires positions being known to both participants.  If the PRC wants to keep its position hidden, it could only be to keep moving its demands, keep adjusting its goals as we make offers more and more in its direction.

Second, if the PRC doesn’t want to commit to this or that concession—or to any other aspect of its negotiating position—it doesn’t matter whether any of that is public.  The nation wants to be able to walk away from any of its negotiating commitments at its convenience, and that makes the PRC untrustworthy.

As the WSJ noted,

There is history behind Beijing’s concerns. During negotiations over China’s entry to the World Trade Organization in 1999, President Clinton turned down an offer by China’s premier at the time, Zhu Rongji, that included deep concessions and a reorganization of the Chinese economy. The Clinton administration made Mr Zhu’s offer public, hoping to prevent the Chinese from backsliding. Instead, Mr Zhu was pilloried at home by hard-liners, and it took months of negotiations to finally convince China to accept a deal similar to the one it initially offered.

There are two lessons from this bit of history that we still need to learn.  The first is that the PRC’s intent of walking away from its commitments even as they’re made—that hardliner pillorying—is a long-standing policy of dishonesty.  The second lesson is that, in the realization, the PRC walked away from that “similar deal;” it has no concessions from the deal extant and no serious reorganization of its economy even tried.

The Trump administration is wise to waste no time on empty negotiations over a chimera.  It’s chancy enough to negotiate a hard proposal with them, but that’s still infinitely preferable to negotiating PRC fog.