Tag Archives: MAI

About casting lead upon the waters

You have heard this from me before, but I’ll say it again – in broad strokes, Biden’s foreign policy is kind of awful. We knew this was coming back during the 2020 presidential campaign, when Biden’s web site had near-zero entries for foreign affairs. What I should have included in my ad-hoc assessment is his tendency to create policy off-the-cuff. This may be the only trait he shares with Trump – leading with his mouth.

Sure, I’m deeply concerned about Biden’s foot-dragging on reestablishing the Iran nuclear deal, his disinclination to revisit Obama’s Cuba policy, and his refusal to bury the hatchet with Afghanistan in some respect. But Biden’s tendency to speak personally about public policy is bringing us close to the brink of global war, and that’s not a good place to be. No, he’s not as nuts as Trump was. I think, though, that the world takes what Biden says a bit more seriously.

Pivot to aggression

You probably heard about Biden’s comments regarding Taiwan. I have to think that he raised this issue intentionally, as many both inside and outside the administration have elevated the China/Taiwan issue since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Roughly speaking, the feeling early on was that Russian success might encourage Beijing to move against the island. Most of what I heard on this score was a lot of hand waving, but the fact that that story has been out there says something about our Asia policy.

The Democratic party foreign policy establishment has been anxious to make their “pivot to Asia” since the mid Obama years. That characterization always struck me as odd and belligerent, summoning the image of a corpsman turning on his heel to point his weapon eastward (once again). I have to think that Asians were about as excited over this as Africans were over Bush’s announcement of the “Africa Command” back in the 2000s (or as Martians were over Trump’s announcement of the “Space Force”). But the focus, as always, is ascending China, and not so much the self-determination of Taiwan.

Countering what, exactly?

There’s plenty that China does that should be criticized, but is it a budding military hegemon? Not likely. The press’s hair was on fire over the story that China has more military vessels than we do. Numerically true, but (a) they are predominately smaller ships than the U.S. has, and (b) the calculation doesn’t take into account forces allied to the U.S. military. (See this article in The Diplomat.) The United States has an enormous presence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, maintaining hundreds of bases and fleets of vessels many thousands of miles from its national territory. Can China make that claim?

Last year Biden announced a joint plan with the British to sell nuclear submarines to Australia. Again, this is more about China than Australia. The United States is trying to head off regional consolidation in the Asia Pacific region under the leadership of China. Obama tried to pull China’s neighbors into the Trans Pacific Partnership, another neoliberal multilateral investment agreement along the lines of NAFTA, the MAI, and others. Now Biden is trying an opt-in, a la carte type of pact that is explicitly not neoliberal (this is what his administration claims). Their hope is to get more people behind the pact, of course. (TPP went down in flames.)

Block v. block

The core of this dispute is not democracy; it’s economics. Washington’s nightmare scenario has long been the rise of China as an economic power to the point of displacing us as the center of the global economy. That they are willing to flirt with military conflict is obvious, and it speaks volumes about our leaders’ priorities.

World War II rose from a world divided into competing trading blocks – the dollar block, the sterling block, etc. We should learn from that bitter experience.

luv u,

jp

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Short takes.

So many things going on in the news that it’s hard to pick which one to pull my blowhard routine on. So I’ll blow a little less hard this week, so to speak. Here goes.

Trust me on this. Again.TPP / MAI – It’s been a full court press on the Trans Pacific Partnership fast-track authority issue currently facing the House of Representatives. As it happens, WikiLeaks has released another leaked chapter of the agreement, this one dealing with “Transparency for Health Care”, so to speak. The more that emerges on this agreement, the more it seems like the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) that was killed in the early 2000’s – basically an investors’ rights agreement, written by corporate lobbyists seeking to elevate the status of their superhuman client conglomerates to a status above that of sovereign nations. The House has turned fast track legislation back, fortunately, but this is truly the thing that wouldn’t die. We will have to remain vigilant on this issue.

Boots in Iraq, Missiles in Europe – Obama is getting in touch with his more bellicose side this past week, with threats to base medium range missiles in Europe (with which to threaten Russia and counter their recent cruise missile deployment and “aggression” against Ukraine) and a promise to send another 500 or so “advisers” to Iraq’s Anbar Province to join the campaign against ISIS. One would think that these two items would be hard to reconcile – a thrust against unwarranted extraterritorial aggression … paired with unwarranted extraterritorial aggression. Still, when the empire does it, it’s not contradictory or ironic.

Jail Break – One of the biggest stories since the last sporting event our news organizations obsessed over. Pretty impressive display of ingenuity, getting out of that massive prison. I can’t help but feel sorry for their alleged accomplice, whose name and face are being displayed across the media with the usual abandon.

Texas Hold-em – This time, we have video of a police officer – a trainer, no less – wrestling a bikini-clad black teenager to the ground, pulling a gun on some other kids, doing a dramatic shoulder roll, etc. He has resigned, blaming his dramatic behavior on having had a difficult day responding to two suicide attempts. Wait … they send THIS guy to talk someone off the ledge? Hope to hell they were white.

luv u,

jp