Thread by @geoffreygertz

I’ve been meaning to get around to writing up some thoughts on the @rodrikdani et al proposal for managing US-China trade, and prompted by some recent debates on here finally got around to it. A brief thread: 1/

cdn.shanghai.nyu.edu/sites/default/…

My core point: There are two big issues on US-China trade -- A, how do you manage trade between countries with very different economic systems, and B, how do you manage trade between geopolitical rivals.

The proposal is a great answer to A, but doesn’t really answer B. 2/

For A, the proposal is to stake out a middle ground between deep integration and full decoupling. I won’t do full justice to it here, but I think they come up with a very sensible approach that at least could form a starting point for more specific negotiations. 3/

So if there wasn’t a big geopolitical rivalry hanging over everything, we’d be in great shape. But that’s not the world we live in. Economic security and national security are converging, but the proposal doesn’t really have much to say about that. 4/

This isn’t particularly a criticism of the proposal – their answer to question A is good, and there are various reasons why this group might not also want to tackle question B. But it does mean that it’s difficult to apply their ideas in a geopolitical vacuum. 5/

To frame this point slightly differently: The accompanying Project Syndicate op-ed is titled ‘How to Get Past the US-China Trade War’. 6a/
project-syndicate.org/commentary/fra…?

But it’s not a trade war (cc @BaldingsWorld), and I don’t think ‘getting past’ it is possible. US-China rivalry is a background condition for today’s economic order, and will be for foreseeable future. 6b/

The geopolitics questions do sprout up in two places in the proposal. One is the individual ‘concurring statements’ of the members (esp @howserob’s). They’re worth reading in full, but @zeithistoriker has a good thread summarizing here 7/

https://twitter.com/zeithistoriker/status/1192626396365041665

The other is this section in main text; to extent that proposal itself tackles geopolitics, the view seems to be that we should seek to isolate economic exchange from geopolitical rivalry. 8/

I haven’t yet made up my mind if I think this is desirable – given conditions of rivalry, is it better to channel such competition through economic instruments or seek to delegitimize economic statecraft and preserve economic integration? Honestly not sure. 9/

Either way though, I’m also pretty sure it’s not feasible any time soon. The ‘economic security is national security’ mantra is not going away. This is the world we live in. 10/

In sum: if you believed decoupling was necessary b/c China’s mixed economy model is in some important ways incompatible with liberal market economies, this is the proposal for you. But there are still a lot of broader geopolitical questions to be resolved. 11/end