1. The Chinese aren’t actually fretting for a deal. They’re playing it quite tough in fact, counter-tariffing us and running lots of stories about how China won’t be humiliated and succumb to bullying. This is totally unsurprisingly. Nationalism a powerful force,& Trump voters /2
would demand the same were the US in China’s position.
2. There’s no evidence of huge capital flight or that it’s being driven by US tariffs. T’s tariffs are mostly being passed on to US consumers & intermediate suppliers as higher prices. This is pretty well established /3
now, not that Trump cares.
3. China - and Russia & N Korea - all want Trump re-elected. He’s an alliance-wrecking, domestically hugely divisive, ignorant incompetent. That’s why Putin supported him to begin w/. He’s done more to damage US power than anything since Iraq War. END
ADDENDUM:
To those arguing that low inflation means the tariffs are not being passed on to US consumers and suppliers, here's @paulkrugman: nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opi…. One effect of the tariffs I didn't mention was trade diversion (to Vietnam, Mexico, etc.), but that's not /4
relevant to Trump's claim that the tariffs are driving Chinese K flight, nor the unadmitted reality that Americans are paying for the tariffs: princeton.edu/~reddings/pape….
To those arguing that the trade war means China doesn't want Trump re-elected, you are missing the larger /5
picture. Yes, Trump is a pain for China, but any POTUS would be at this point. An anti-Chinese strategic consensus is congealing in Washington: washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/0…. Any other D or R POTUS tough on China like Trump, if not necessarily in the same way. But Trump has the added/6
benefit of crippling US power through: staggering incompetence and shambolic governance; deeply dividing Americans against each other and possibly firing racial or electoral violence next year; undercutting US alliance relationships, including those which help counteract China /7
(Japan, South Korea, Australia); and similarly undercutting international institutions which mirror US values (NATO, the EU, the UN, the TWO, and TPP especially). So yeah, if you're China you'll take another 4 years of Trump, because he's burning down the liberal international /8
order. Trump is a gleeful, agenda-less, wrecking-ball. And every US opponent is hoping he'll win again, while allies are praying desperately he won't:
Good thread, nicely illustrating how de-linked the GOP evangelical base is from the rest of America.
They wanna go after abortion, IVF, birth control, gay marriage, and the rest. GOP leaders know this is electoral suicide, but they don’t know how to get around it. If Biden is
smart, he’ll make personal family & sexual freedom the center of his campaign.
Evangelicals may overwhelm the GOP internally, but the rest of the country thinks they’re weird & creepy
This is the result of social isolation: churches which provide a whole separated lifestyle,
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a TV ‘news’ network which only tells you what you want to hear, home-schooling, a sealed media ecosystem of faith-based movies and influencers telling you that social change is the apocalypse.
Catholics once had parallel institutions like this, especially the schools. But we
This thread makes a point political science emphasizes a lot - and which I tell my students constantly:
Competent democratic government is actually really boring. A lot of it is unappealing trade-offs, wonks diving deep into detail the public won’t track, maintenance instead
of flashy new initiatives politicians can put their name on, compromise between parties which leaves no one happy, incremental, unexciting improvements only visible over the medium-term, and so on.
This is not entertaining or engaging, & doesn’t make for exciting journalism.
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But it is how you mostly want democracies governed. This is why you don’t elect showboats like Trump or Jesse Ventura, and you do elect competent administrators like George W. Bush or Biden.
Sometimes I think Fukuyama is right: wealthy democracies get so bored that they
Yes, NK's rhetoric seems more belligerent lately. Yes, this Kim seems to enjoy making scary threats more than his father did. Yes, the US is distracted by Ukraine & Gaza. But
NK constantly talks like this. I made this point back in 2013👇when Kim told foreigners to leave SK bc war was imminent (jerk). Perhaps Kim means it this time. That is possible,of course. But it's impossible to reliably infer that f/ NK rhetoric anymore
National elites say outlandish stuff all the time. Look at Putin. Threats are a cheap signal. What matters instead are costly signals, which in the NK case would mean something like a seventh nuclear test, a missile test flight over SK, or border skirmishes.
Latent capacity is not capability. Khrushchev said we will bury you, and Mao thought he could fight a nuclear war bc of China’s huge population.This is not how conflict works
Sacks says stuff like this all the time. I’ve no idea why he’s taken seriously as a geopolitical thinker
In fact, Biden’s dealt with these crises pretty well.
In Ukraine, he’s helped that fledging democracy fight off increasingly overt fascist imperialism. On Israel, he’s robustly supported Israeli security while discouraging Netanyahu’s legal coup, and has encouraged Israelis
and Palestinians toward the negotiated solution which is the only durable way out of the cycle of violence they’re locked in.
Yeah, it’s choppy and messy, but that’s how the sausage gets made and it could easily be a lot worse.
Were Trump were POTUS, Russia would be on the
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Dnipro and NATO would be fracturing as Eastern Europe armed to the teeth while Western Europe dithered.
In Israel, the hard right government would feel unbound in the coming offensive, and the US and Iran would probably be in a shooting war by the end of the month.