I can't say that I have an informed opinion about this editorial but, at least, Rantburg commenters may help me put it into proper context.
Zhang Fei, are you out there? ;-)
#2
The Chinese government wants what's good for China. (This seems bizarre to me, as our American government doesn't give a shit about what's good for America.) They'll do what they think is right without any regard for what those white hairy barbarians think. Gotta respect it, actually.
#4
I'm a staunch free trader, so I don't really think protectionism will do a whole heck of a lot for the American economy. However, i don't think it will do a lot of damage either. Overall, I'm really indifferent.
The real benefit of reciprocal tariffs* on Chinese goods is that it will weaken China and strengthen China's neighbors as goods destined for the US market shift production facilities from China to those other countries. A side benefit is that it gives other countries cover for raising tariffs on Chinese goods. The best of all possible worlds would be a virtual embargo on China, much as existed before the Nixon opening. It's more political than anything else - if China's neighbors are stronger, the US will have to do less in terms of intervening directly when the PLA Navy conducts its live-fire exercises cum regional land grabs in the years ahead.
Think of China as Japan in the pre-war era, but with 25x the land area and 20x the population, and any number of historical maps from different eras laying claim to all of East Asia and vast chunks of Central Asia. China's territorial ambitions are like an onion. Remove one layer, and there's another layer under it. Better to scotch these ambitions by economic means than by military means later on.
It's a classic dilemma. Some blame Roosevelt for provoking the Japanese into WWII with economic sanctions. But in reality, he was merely trying to get them to stop their territorial expansion without the US having to resort to military force. Still - in the end, no fundamentally peaceful country launches a continental-scale war in response to economic sanctions. The US certainly did not invade the Middle East in response to the Arab oil embargo.
* Meaning that the US levies the same high tariffs on Chinese imports as China levies on US imports.
By Charles Krauthammer
"He was looking for choices that would limit U.S. involvement and provide a way out," writes Woodward. One can only conclude that Obama now thinks Afghanistan is a mistake.
Maybe he thought so from the very beginning. More charitably and more likely, he is simply a foreign policy novice who didn't understand what this war was about until being given the authority and duty to conduct it -- and then decided it was all a mistake.
Fair enough. But in that case, what is he doing escalating it?
Sen. Kerry, now chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, asked many years ago: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Perhaps Kerry should ask that of Obama.
"He is out of Afghanistan psychologically," says Woodward of Obama. Well, he may be out, but the soldiers he ordered to Afghanistan are in.
#1
In addition to Obama's obtuseness, the USA really has no idea of what 'victory' in Afghanistan could possibly consist of. That lack of clarity goes back to 9/12/2001. Our current situation is very much like that of Woodrow Wilson leaving American troops floundering in the Arctic while fighting the Red Army with totally inadequate resources and no clear mission. That happened in 1919.
#1
Outside of the obvious direct nuclear attack on Israel, is this situation: The allures of Boston and Silicon Valley, where intellectual and financial opportunity await without the burdens of war and the shadow of extinction, will be too difficult to resist. Those who now stay in Israel do so, in large measure, because they sense they are part of a historic transformation of the Jewish condition. Absent that awareness, however, the most mobile of Israels citizenswho also happen to be those whom the state most desperately needswill be the ones who abandon it.
In this way, Iran could end the Jewish state without ever pressing the button.
Iran going nuclear could also be the end of the current jihad, although I suspect some buttons would be pressed and tears shed.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
