Douthat and the only-two-countries-in-the-world model of Grand Strategy

Mahjong tiles revealing that China has words for "north", "east", "south", and "west".

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, takes his Grand Strategy chops out for a spin ("The Chinese Decade"):

richer-but-not-freer China proved that it was possible for an authoritarian power to tame the internet, to make its citizens hardworking capitalists without granting them substantial political freedoms, to buy allies across the developing world, and to establish beachheads of influence — in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, American academia, the NBA, Washington, D.C. — in the power centers of its superpower rival....

So China has won twice over: First rising with the active collaboration of naïve American centrists, and then consolidating its gains with the de facto collaboration of a feckless American populist. Four months into the coronavirus era, Xi Jinping’s government is throttling Hong Kong, taking tiny bites out of India, saber-rattling with its other neighbors, and perpetrating a near-genocide in its Muslim West. Meanwhile America is rudderless and leaderless, consumed by protests and elite psychodrama and a moral crusade whose zeal seems turned entirely inward, with no time to spare for a rival power’s crimes.

Furthermore, Trump’s likely successor is a figure whose record and instincts and family connections all belong to the recent period of American illusions about China. 

One of those naïve American centrists, he means, Joe Biden, and of course sneaking in the reference to the familiar smear for the cognoscenti, because that's how Ross rolls—Biden's "family connections" meaning the bogus story from Peter Schweitzer's fabrication factory according to which Hunter Biden took some kind of illicit profit from associations with the Chinese government (I dealt with it briefly here in the form of a Radio Yerevan joke).

Documents, and different things

Operatic Monkey, via, is a great hero, and in the end of the story a Buddhist saint, but the part of the story everybody loves is the part where he's making maximum trouble.

Remarks from the press availability aboard Air Force One, on the way to Hanoi, this morning:

It's been a -- I think it's been a great trip. In certain ways, it's been very epic. I think things have happened that have been really amazing. Prime Minister Abe came up to me just at the end, and he said that since you left South Korea and Japan, that those two countries are now getting along much, much better. That's from Prime Minister Abe -- that there's been a real bonding between South Korea and Japan. So that was great.

Yes, they're working as hard as they can to revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement without the United States. Since Trump ended US membership in the TPP at the beginning of his term and pulled out of the US-South Korea FTA in September, they've seen more and more incentive to work together, in spite of the obvious rivalry between the two similar economies, through the current insanity. They have to come up with ways of stabilizing the situation without US participation, and they hope to do it without surrendering to Chinese hegemony. It's the same for Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam. They are united in the face of the threat posed by Donald Trump to the Asia-Pacific order.

TPP News

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is, of course, dead, as Loomis reports at LGM:

I can’t really comment on how this affects U.S. relationships with its allies in Asia but given the utter disaster that Trump’s foreign policy is going to be, I imagine China is going to be a huge winner in the next 4 years with or without the TPP. Not subjecting even more workers and more national laws to the ISDS courts is a good thing. Rejecting the TPP is at least a sign that maybe, just maybe, the U.S. is going to start revisiting its 50 year tradition of encouraging American jobs to go overseas and then call anyone who questions that as the greatest thing in history a moral monster.

The end of TPP is an enormous victory for China in its own right, right at the start, since it eliminates competition with China's own scheme, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) bringing together Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. Just as China and India were missing from the TPP, so the United States is uninvited to RCEP, and in this way China will now be setting the terms of trade as well as labor and environmental standards (i.e., none) for the region without the participation of the US.

Never mind

Separated at baking? Trumpkin pie, via Pinterest.

Seems like just days ago old David Brooks was fearful and gloomy about the direction our country was taking, our inveterate materialism and selfishness and focus on the achievement of affluence, our drive to occupy increasingly vast spaces, our inability to submerge our individuality in the plasma of community,

the possibility that our culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.... According to the World Health Organization, people in wealthy countries suffer depression by as much as eight times the rate as people in poor countries.

In fact it was just days ago, ten days to be exact, but now he's as peppy as Tom Friedman:

Is Our Country as Good as Our Athletes Are?

Spoiler: You bet!

The athletes are great on a Trumpian scale, with a Trumpian exclamation point:

If anything, the coverage gets a little boring because we’re always winning!

Calling forth, as you won't be surprised to hear, Brooks's 147th and 148th career uses of "amazing/amazingly", with a bonus "astoundingly":

Exceptionalism, again

The Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1735-96), via Venice Clay Artists.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Democrats need to worry about letting ourselves get infected with the virus of American Exceptionalism.

Really? Shouldn't we be doing the opposite? Shouldn't we be protecting ourselves against rightwing accusations that we're not Exceptionalist enough, with our pacifist instinct and insistence on letting all the big bully countries do whatever they want? Shouldn't we be wrapping ourselves in the flag a little more, with symbolic gestures, to show how patriotic we are?

No, we should not, at least not in the way we've been doing it, with these big denunciations of attacks on our national sovereignty, like the one Jared Bernstein insists on tacking onto a recent routine denunciation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership:

We should eliminate provisions that allow investors to challenge sovereign laws...

The TPP is dead in any case, people, though the 3200 international agreements currently in force with provisions for Investor-State Dispute Resolution arbitrations are still there, and still don't threaten US sovereignty in any way (they can "challenge sovereign laws" but they can't make the challenge stick, or at least they haven't succeeded in doing it yet). It can't be just voted on in some Friday-night session in November; before votes can be scheduled, there need to be congressional hearings, and those would have to start in September, in the middle of a presidential campaign in which the Democratic candidate is going to have to be out proving she's really against it every day while the Republican candidate has succeeded in making it a Republican issue too. (The Republican platform committee has decided it's too hot for the convention and cut it out altogether.) There will still be Republican votes for the agreement, but not enough to pass it.

Oh, guess what, Orrin Hatch is currently against the TPP too, because it doesn't protect Big Pharma enough:

Is Dr. Krugman evolving? It's probably bad politics to talk about it

The views at the Albanian site this comes from, at www.civitas.al, probably do not correspond to my own, but the idea of "Marxism-Sorosism" is pretty cute.

It's another curious case of a dog not barking, and even the same presumptive intruder the dog is not barking at as in that Taibbi piece the other day, this time in Dr. Krugman's column on the unexpected way international trade has become an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Namely, like Taibbi, Krugman doesn't mention President Obama; and he specifically doesn't mention the Obama-linked object that has made international trade an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement or TPP (which now seems most likely to be voted on in Congress in the lame-duck session after the November election, if at all). Without Obama pushing the TPP for most of his time in office, forcing the candidates to take positions on the thing, nobody would be discussing this intensely boring subject in the campaign.

But I think the reason for his not mentioning them is very Krugman-particular: it's that if he did, in the course of the argument he's making today, he'd be forced to endorse the damned thing, and he's not ready to do that. I'm really suspecting that he is "evolving" in his position on the TPP in a way analogous to how Obama "evolved" toward support of marriage equality, by which I definitely don't mean it's a bad thing, and beginning to prepare us for the shift.

He starts off with an apparent paradox:

Antislavery elements exposed in US government—Who knew?

Migrants from Myanmar in a Malaysian shrimp processing facility. Somebody finally did something. Image via Quartz.

Somehow in spite of his passion for the enslavement of Southeast Asians, which caused him to foist on our helpless country a trade agreement that is the first trade agreement in history to require all countries in the agreement and Malaysia specifically by name to eliminate slavery, indentured servitude, and any and all kinds of forced labor and "adopt and maintain in their laws and practices the fundamental labor rights as recognized by the ILO" and take specific steps to put an end to forced labor and ill-treatment of migrant workers, and subjects governments that fail to protect workers to the same dispute resolution processes used to protect investors, only it might not work really well so that just goes to show that he doesn't care at all—Somehow,

Barack Obama is set to sign a law that would ban all US imports of fish caught by slave labor in south-east Asia, closing a loophole that has allowed seafood from forced labor to enter the country for decades.

Yo Canada

I don't think Canada was meant to have a Thatcherite revolution; it took them an awfully long time to try one out, getting around to it only in 2006, and it was only scandal that got the "natural governing party of Canada", the Liberals, out in the first place—though a scandal that seems by US standards ludicrously mild-mannered, like Dr. Evil's extortion demand; the government was found to have improperly awarded $3.75 million in contracts to some Montréal ad agencies, almost half of which involved no actual work, or what Pentagon insiders commonly refer to as "a typical Tuesday". And in the end none of the party's leaders were implicated.

But in the meantime, Canadian voters just don't like criminality even of such a modest sort, and while the country as a whole is normally of the left, the left is always divided, among liberal Liberals, progressive New Democrats, and the ethnicist Bloc Québécois, and so the vile Stephen Harper slipped into office with 36% of the vote, and 124 of the parliament's 308 seats, which is allowed in Canada's parliamentary system as long as enough people in the opposition put up with it (because, say, they don't want another election).

Worse than a crime

It's an unforced error.

Not how I pictured it at all. Image by Taylor Whitney.

The worst thing about Hillary Clinton's démarche against the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement isn't that it represents some kind of treacherous backstabbing against her old boss, because it doesn't. I agree with BooMan's judgment that it's nothing personal. In fact it's just the kind of thing Obama'd do himself (and indeed did do, in the 2008 campaign, on the subject of vague proposals to renegotiate NAFTA, among the few promises that he's shown no interest whatever in keeping), and he's hardly likely to take it seriously; nor is it likely to weigh at all one way or the other in the congressional debate on the agreement.

The worst thing is that it makes her sound really stupid:

Told you so: TPP

Update at bottom: Scoop! And another update 10/7

Image via BiggerPockets.com.

You Knew the TPP Was Bad. Here's How It Gets Even Worse - http://t.co/421jEQIzZF

— terry vee (@redot2005) October 4, 2015

Well, really? How? The link leads to a an editorial at Common Dreams that links in turn to a Reuters story from last week about how a supergroup consisting of the American Farm Bureau Federation, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers and other groups has sent a letter to the negotiators in Atlanta asking them not to go through with a plan to exclude certain dangerous products, like tobacco, from the ISDS dispute settlement mechanism:

"As you all enter the potentially final hours of negotiation, we ask all of the TPP governments to reject the exclusion of products from the coverage of the TPP and its enforcement mechanism," said the letter.... Such exclusions are unnecessary and would be highly damaging to the international rules based trading system and the prospects for the TPP." 

The products in question being at least tobacco, and according to sources on the Australian position anything affecting health and the environment. The Common Dreams writer comments,

Told you so

Sagano bamboo forest, Maui. Image via Nimbus Eco.

Well, maybe not exactly. I didn't tell you the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations were going to blow up in Maui and the chances of an agreement this year more or less ended, and how it's going to happen in presidential year 2016 I certainly don't know.

But I did tell you repeatedly that this wasn't what it's been presented by some self-denominated leftists as being, a vast corporate conspiracy to impose its will on the humans of the Pacific Rim, but a struggle among twelve governments, each seeking a different agenda, and there was no telling how it was going to turn out; and that interpreting the WikiLeaked documents without studying the brackets, as some kind of precise preview of what the final draft might contain, was an elementary error: they were documents of disagreement.

And it was inevitably not the eager demonstrators or Senator Warren that stopped it, or at any rate postponed it for a good long time, but that obscure and unradical institution the Australian Senate; or at least, as John Quiggin of Crooked Timber is explaining for anyone who wants to know, the Australian Senate is probably the biggest single obstacle:

The TPPing point

Now updated with Paraguayan Super Snacks

Invasion of foreign ketchup. Indonesian kecap manis, via Roda Dua.

An exchange at LGM started off like this, and my riposte to Erik Loomis's rejoinders got too long to post there, so here it is.

Yastreblyansky says:

June 24, 2015 at 10:13 am

Maybe the worst thing about the way this debate is being conducted is the continual speculation over what ISDS mechanisms “will” do in the event the TPP is passed, as if the idea were a novelty that has never been tried before. There are some 3200 bilateral investment treaties using ISDS, in which the US has a track record going back to 1982 and belongs to some 50 treaties with ISDS provisions. If you’d like to investigate what the ISDS process has done, some helpful factual documents are here and here.

These help to explain why there has never been an outcry in the US over ISDS before now; there’s never been anything to cry out over. The US government has never lost a case. The resolution can impose money damages only, it cannot overturn legislation. The most frequently sued countries are the countries with the most inefficient legal systems: Argentina, Venezuela, Czech Republic, Egypt, Ecuador, and India in that order; the process starts only if the local legal system fails to find a resolution (there have been cases, like the Hong Kong Philip Morris suits against Australia and Uruguay, where big corporate money has been able to keep a suit going for an incredibly long and expensive time, but they still have not won).

It is very painful and weird for me to be in disagreement with the entire labor movement on this issue, but the fear of ISDS is just not rational. We’ve already had it for years and it isn’t a problem.

reply

Trading aces

Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr. (1924), via.

Well, here's a challenge: David Brooks out with the big guns in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, forcing me to take a hard critical look at some arguments I'd just wave at if somebody else was writing them because I don't especially want to fight with the conclusion.

Actually there are some superficial signs that somebody else was writing them. The piece is basically entirely coherent, and remarkably sourced, with a total of seven links to information backing up his assertions. That is not Brooksian, particularly when we're talking about a subject as boring as trade policy; he had to look at seven different things, possibly more, in order to crank this out? On the same weekend he was putting out an entire, though feeble, repetitive, and recycling-filled, Dartmouth commencement address?

My first thought was that it must have been altogether ghosted, by some bright young person at the Manhattan Institute or wherever. But there are structural signs he did in fact lay it out himself: the characteristic form of a listicle of italicized representations of the bad things rejecting the TPP will accomplish:

More in sorrow

Image via The Rumpus.

OK, I'm so sick of this I can hardly stand it any more, but David Atkins, whom I really like, is on the one hand correct when he writes this about the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations:

The secrecy is somewhat understandable given that it’s a multilateral international negotiation. Still, it should be much more transparent given the dramatic potential domestic consequences. The loss of manufacturing jobs, while a potent political argument, loses some of its sheen in the face of evidence that trade has already been so liberalized that TPP can’t do much further damage.

And on the other hand really wrong when he writes this:

White House Fool Report: Down to the wire

Eastern gray squirrel. Image via Chris Vaisvil.

I need you to make a phone call

Inbox

x

Elizabeth Warren info@elizabethwarren.com via proofsender1.gc.cuny.edu	12:59 PM (23 hours ago)

David, We have one last chance to stop Fast Track on trade – right now! The House has scheduled a vote for Friday, and dozens of members of Congress are still undecided (or undeclared) about which way they will vote. Will you take a minute right now to call your representative’s office and tell him or her to vote NO on Fast Track?

You need me to make a phone call? Honestly, if I'm doing it, I'm not doing it for you. I hope this great American progressive is not slowly turning into Alan Grayson.

Fast-trackless waste: Footnote

Bull kelp forests provide numerous habitats for nearshore fish and invertebrate species in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, permanently protected from oil drilling in a move announced this morning by the Obama administration. Credit: Jared Figurski, UCSC.

A new WikiLeak from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, reported in today's Times, provides a really helpful example of something I've been trying to say and had a hard time finding language for:

Facing resistance from its Pacific trading partners, the Obama administration is no longer demanding protection for pharmaceutical prices under the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, according to a newly leaked “transparency” annex of the proposed trade accord.

Fast-trackless waste

Bulgarian Army officers fighting over cards, sidearms drawn, 1936 or 1937. Wikimedia Commons.

Pointless argument going on at Political Animal this weekend over the stupid Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which I swore I was going to stop defending, but the bros keep tricking me into it. There's something toward the end of this exchange, though, that gets to the meat of what really bothers me about the anti-TPP campaign, and the question of internationalism.

I'm not copying it here because it's a Disqus thread and Blogger doesn't like the formating, but it started off with somebody called ninjascience suggesting I don't know the TPP isn't a treaty, and kept insisting if the fast-track authority was not passed the negotiating teams would just buckle down and finish writing the thing anyway.

Mind the Gap

Floating around in my drafts file is a Times business column by Eduardo Porter, discussing the (lack of) progress in talks toward next December's Paris climate change agreement, a problem, of course, with corralling the world's two largest greenhouse gas producers, China, and the United States, into a worthwhile pact. For example,

What if every other advanced nation, as a way to encourage energy efficiency and spur investments in alternatives to fossil fuels, agreed to put a price of $25 per ton on carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere? As a tax, that would add some 22 cents to the price of a gallon of gas, something few American politicians — fearing public anger — are yet ready to consider.

According to calculations by William Nordhaus, an expert on the economics of climate change at Yale, the United States, on net, would gain $8 billion a year by benefiting from everybody else’s efforts to slow down the Earth’s warming without having to exert any effort itself.

But then, what if the other nations had some mechanism for pushing the US into less anti-social behavior?

if the other advanced nations had a stick — a tariff of 4 percent on the imports from countries not in the “climate club” — the cost-benefit calculation for the United States would flip. Not participating in the club would cost Americans $44 billion a year.

This is a great idea in my view, but it also sounds "Draconian", as Porter says; it's an idea for using a trade agreement to interfere with the sovereign ability of the United States to do whatever the hell it wants. What's the progressive position on that, Senator Warren?

My position is I don't really care about the sacred sovereignty of the United States in a context like this. At all. Like the original progressives negotiating a League of Nations in Versailles in 1919 while the conservatives back in Washington conspired to make sure the US would not take part in such a thing, I would like to see the US give up some sovereignty in return for some international progress.

Which brings us to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, sort of. Why would we trust the US government better than a hammered-out body of international regulation? On the basis of what experience?

White House Fool Report: I give up

The green card goslings I first saw a couple of weeks ago nestled around a tree trunk in Riverside Park South with their Canadian parents are now fluent swimmers.

Last night BooMan put up a post on the Trans-Pacific Partnership which articulated some things I hadn't understood about how the Senate is voting, which doesn't seem to be on any clear left-right axis but geared more to local issues, and also his informed sense, which I found really surprising and intriguing, that the administration doesn't really know how much it wants the treaty passed, if at all. I left a comment, which I'll just reproduce:

Thanks, that was very clarifying. A lot of the argument on both sides has been very propagandistic; I'm especially disappointed with Warren, who is saying things about the ISDS aspect that are really at odds with reality. The way they've been denouncing TPA as if it were the end of democracy is shameful, and I'm glad you point out that it's the only way the treaty can get written--and voted down if necessary--at all.

It's the left thing to do!

Oxen moving lumber down skid road in Mendocino County before the railway. As non-fast a track as you'd want to see. Mendocino Coast Model Railroad and Historical Society.

I think I may be able to figure out what's stopping me from joining in on the hate for TPP, and spread it out in a clear enough fashion that somebody can explain to me why I'm wrong; it doesn't start so much with what's in the treaty—what do I know about trade policy?—as with the language the opponents are using, which sounds to me a lot like propaganda, for example with Senator Warren at NPR on Tuesday on the subject of the provision that upsets her the most, the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism:

Look, I have three objections. The first is that the president is asking us to vote to grease the skids on a trade deal that has largely been negotiated, but that is still held in secret.

The second is that we know that corporations under this deal are going to get to sue countries for regulations they don't like and that the decisions are not going to be made by courts, they're going to be made by private lawyers.

And the third problem is that he wants us to vote on a six-year, grease-the-skids deal.

Well, there you go, that's two, two-and-a-half tops. But she knows very well that the deal is not exactly secret from her (she's been allowed to read it, though apparently not to take notes), and will not have been secret from anybody for at least 60 days by the time she actually does get to vote on it, up to 90 if the Senate behaves according to coffee-cooling tradition. And when it gets there she can vote against it, as can the other 99 Senators. The skids may be greased, but no sled can get through a brick wall, even if it has six years to do it with.