@Hellbound Hellhound
Hey I’m back and you’re wrong.
I mean, we’re meeting in the middle on a few things but you’re still mostly wrong.
The ties which bind a fruitful diplomatic relationship absolutely can unravel if each party's intentions are not clearly understood, which is precisely the importance of good negotiation. A big reason Brexit happened was because David Cameron and his European counterparts failed to negotiate a settlement which could have appeased the British people, and the result was that neither party got what they wanted. All this, despite the fact that the UK already had more than generous concessions from the EU, and the EU the economic benefit of being tied to one of the world's largest economies.
A mutually beneficial relationship, destroyed by inept negotiation.
If I recall, the EU concessions largely consisted of the UK being subject to EU oversight and regulation while not having any kind of representation. That doesn’t strike me as particularly generous.
But I will admit that you’ve reminded me how the items in balance in international negotiations are not always material. In the case of the UK, they just happened to put more stock in their sovereignty and cultural independence than they did in economic dependencies; something I’d be cautious and take note of in a hypothetical where economic and defense relationships are seriously shaken up.
To bring this back to Trump, US trade relations with China is arguably a good place to start. From the very beginning, Trump made it clear that he wanted to negotiate a more equitable trade relationship with China, while apparently failing to understand any of the important structural reasons why the US and China had such an inequitable relationship to begin with: namely, that US wages are not competitive. He ignored advice from economists (1100 of whom attempted to reach out to him), and very soon started placing tariffs on Chinese imports.
The result? The US economy took a hit, American purchasing power took a hit, American farmers took a hit, US manufacturing jobs took a hit, and China? The trade deficit with China only increased, as did the strength of Chinese exports worldwide. From the US side, it was a resounding failure by any measure.
This is why I stress the importance of having competent leaders in power. It's not enough to understand the material realities which bind international diplomacy; you have to make sure that the people you elect also share this understanding, and I haven't seen much evidence that Trump genuinely does. The most important measurement of any leader's success is how accurately the results of their actions achieve their stated goals, and on everything from trade, to international relations, to America's domestic management of the current pandemic, Trump's leadership has ranged from inept to disastrous.
Myself having conceded that there’s more to a diplomatic relationship than material terms, I’m curious as to why you’re the one suddenly taking a myopic view of the one between the United States and China.
For starters, I’m curious how you can accuse Trump of undermining global democracy while ignoring the fact that he’s been the first president in forever to take real economic measures against one of the most abusive and authoritarian regimes on the fucking planet.
Trump’s policy on China has two major motivations. First, as you’ve mentioned, is inequitable trade, something he was happy to publicize in the 2016 campaign. Second, which you’re choosing to ignore, is disentangling the United States from a brutal communist state, and weakening that state’s influence.
Trump’s fears of overreliance on China and the fallout from their negative global reach have been so thoroughly vindicated that you now have the Biden campaign weakly chiming in about how he’d be even tougher on China.
You can’t look at the immense political reach that China has in the US public square and argue that we have nothing to lose by becoming even more reliant on their exports and media/service markets. Especially not if you’re truly concerned with the health of democracy and Western ideals.
So pardon me if I don’t give a shit how 1100 economists are bitching about how their portfolios will shrink if we get in a trade war with China, when I believe there’s a lot more on the line. The status quo of growing economic cooperation with China may look good on quarterly reports but I’m rather on board with diversifying American imports with countries that have better human rights standards. If some of those jobs come back to American soil, all the better.
Plus they can get 1000+ “experts” to agree on anything if it’s politically expedient, including how mass public protests are totally okay and not a risk vector for Covid-19 but protesting the shutdown is totally going to get you sick.
http://archive.is/G7Hdc
As for suffering American markets, the Trump administration has been happy to prop up the farmers in the meantime. Although that may not be necessary in the long run; China has recently been making record corn and soybean purchases to make up for crops lost in record rainfall and flood mismanagement.
Maybe we had more negotiating power than we thought.
It's not rhetoric and decorum I'm especially concerned about, it's the carelessness with which Trump seems to forge international relations. I'm not convinced that he has a serious understanding or appreciation of how to implement policy or conduct diplomacy, irrespective of how clumsy his public statements may be, and I haven't seen any hard evidence that could sway my opinion.
Even the famous example of NATO defense spending that we've been talking about is hardly something that Trump can take credit for. NATO members agreed to a pledge to commit themselves to spend 2% of GDP on defense back in 2014, and they don't appear to be any more or less on track to do that by the specified date than they would have been otherwise. Admittedly, this is a difficult thing to assess, but the fact that the current upswing in European defense spending began in 2014 would seem not to vindicate Trump here.
Returning to the issue of diplomacy, where rhetoric and decorum undoubtedly is important, is the effect that it can have beyond the personal relationship that exists between leaders: there's also the matter of what each leader's public statements communicate to the population of the country they're dealing with, and the pressure that this can place upon the leader they're attempting to negotiate with.
If we take the NATO example for instance: when Trump disparages European countries and their leaders as weak and freeloading, that might poll well among his supporters, but it makes him broadly unpopular across Europe; the downstream impact of which is the creation of a political incentive for European leaders not to want to work too closely with Trump, and by extension, the United States. In other words, Trump's careless statements are not without consequence; they come with the very real possibility that America's allies will wish to delay full cooperation with the US until Trump is firmly out of office, to "sit it out", as you put it in regards to Russia.
It looks like we fundamentally disagree with the degree of leverage the US has over Europe in defense negotiations. We agree in broad strokes on likely outcomes of hypothetical defensive actions, but despite my best efforts you seem to be under the impression that NATO member states are free to walk away from the table. They are not. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
I will grant you the point that coordination and cohesion suffer if diplomatic relations are strained, but I’d still maintain that the US is the critical centerpiece to European defense, to the point where European leaders are as motivated now to coordinate with the US as they’ve ever been. Hell, if readiness and spending are taken into account, they’re more willing now than they were under Obama.
Speaking of Obama, the 2014 commitment to increased spending was likely a direct result of his own neglect towards Europe, and it’s obvious looking at the numbers that the real increase in spending from major NATO members did not occur until Trump started taking a more aggressive stance.
It’s also important to clarify that you are incorrect in your assumption that Trump’s criticism of European leadership has decreased his popularity in Europe. His popularity has grown in nearly all of the major NATO players, although he did start from an even lower point than Bush. While leadership decisions and popular opinion may differ, as you’ve stated, popular opinion will still have a material impact on policy as long as those nations remain democracies. I also maintain that Trump’s initial low popularity is vastly more a function of hostile players in the media than it is his own decisions, hence Obama’s vastly higher polling despite his vocal shift to the Middle East and Asia in terms of his diplomatic policies.
As a side note though, I did find it fascinating that confidence in Trump and confidence that the US would intervene on behalf of a NATO member were largely not correlated.
Lastly, I roundly reject the idea that a breakdown in diplomacy alone would somehow be a substantial enough factor to cause Europe to sit on the sidelines in the event of a great power war involving the US. There are so many other moving parts that I can’t ever imagine a scenario where the US is in a major war and this doesn’t somehow affect Europe in an immediate existential way. US-China leaves Europe vulnerable and toward between its two largest trading partners. US-Russia means Europe is likely the battlefield. Any other war on terror style global policing has been done without Europe for over a decade to begin with, and the majority of NATO does not even have the capacity to meaningfully contribute outside a European theater in the first place.
As far as I'm aware, Israel isn't believed to have developed functional nuclear capabilities until after the Six-Day War, and the world wouldn't even know that they had them until the Vanunu leak in 1986. Whatever limited nuclear capabilities they may have had during the Yom Kipper War, it wouldn't have been in their interest to use them for the simple reason that they had the support of the United States.
It made far more sense for Israel to fight a conventional ground war against the far less functional Arab armies, and the alternative of nuclear escalation could very well have led to large-scale nuclear war. Let's not forget who the Arab coalition's principle backers were: the Soviet Union! There's just no way an Israeli nuclear strike could have been on the table as an option given that surrounding context.
So no, I don't accept the comparison between the two scenarios. If the United States truly did withdraw from NATO, and a desperate Russia posed an existential threat to the rest of Europe, a nuclear exchange would very much be on the table.
“I see no similarities between the two scenarios while also admitting that nuclear parity was the main reason there wasn’t escalation to begin with.”
You kind of played yourself here.
A nuclear exchange may be on the table, but fundamentally unlikely. Especially considering that fact that you’re assuming the alliance can maintain cohesion in the face of incremental aggression.
I don't believe they would. I have never denied that Russia could successfully push it's luck with the Baltic states in the absence of US hegemony; I even stated explicitly that I think they would in a prior post to you. We seem to be talking past one another here. Your argument appears to be that in the absence of the US, Russia would be emboldened to encroach into the borders of it's Eastern European neighbors, while I have been arguing that the impact of a total US withdrawal from NATO wouldn't fundamentally flip the odds in favor of Russia as far as Europe as a whole is concerned. These arguments are not mutually exclusive, and we appear to agree on both of them.
I think we’re reaching a general understanding, but I need you to consider the vast difference between “flipping the odds”, and the loss of an overwhelming deterrent. The difference between a European victory with the US and one without it is incredibly vast, and this lies at the heart of my other arguments. Knowing that you are likely to win a conflict is a cold comfort when the conflict was allowed to start in the first place, has already taken a devastating toll on your nation, and will cause yet more destruction and misery before it can end. Just ask the Allies circa 1943.
It’s also crucial to consider the impact on European stability once Russia becomes a serious threat to EU member states and other continental allies. Europe does not want this, and they will fight to keep the US around to make sure it doesn’t happen.
I never said that public perceptions don't matter, only that they're not necessarily reflective of how a nation is going to decide upon a policy or plan of action, especially in a time of crisis. Members of the public selected at random aren't charged with making these sorts of consequential decisions, their elected representatives are.
Whatever happened to democracy, friend? Who elects those representatives?
I agree that material realities affect policy more potently than perception alone, that’s really what I’ve been saying since the start, but it’s naïve to assume that a nation immediately becomes an autocracy the second there’s a major crisis. In fact, that’s largely what you’ve stated (and I agree) we want to avoid in the first place.
I’d encourage you to look at the history of the World Wars and other 20th century conflicts to see how crucial the will of the people and their perceptions are to the balance of power and rules of engagement, even in times of existential threat.
I would still add that “the people” in most cases are more sensitive to rational material realities than they are to popular perception alone, although these days the balance is way closer than I’d like.
I'm not debating the dangers of incremental Russian aggression, nor that NATO would be significantly weakened without the support of the United States. What I find dubious is the insinuation that this would have significant ramifications for NATO beyond the countries most immediately effected: all of whom became members during the fifth enlargement of NATO back in 2004, in an obvious political move against Russia.
NATO membership would more than likely have to be scaled back if the United States ever did decide to withdraw from it, but I maintain that the overall character of the alliance and the strong economic and political incentives which bind it's most significant players would not change. Russia isn't strong enough to shake that, and economic realities between Russia and the EU being what they are mean that they're never likely to try.
I’m just gonna have to disagree with you on most of this one considering there’s no conflict at stake currently, yet somehow that hasn’t stopped a wave of populism and Euroskepticism from shaking up internal cohesion in a major way. Are you European? I’m genuinely interested if you have a different take on this if you are, but from where I’m sitting, it looks to me like the Europe and the EU have a whole lot lose if the US is no longer subsidizing their defense.
And I’m curious as to how a major scaling back of NATO membership doesn’t constitute a “significant ramification” following a US withdrawal, which itself constitutes the exit of a literal superpower and changes the strategic landscape of Europe overnight, especially for eastern Europe as you’ve admitted.
If exits from NATO and the EU do occur, Russia is no longer facing the same unified Europe they are now, in terms of diplomacy and trade. This alone weakens Europe’s leverage immensely.
I don't claim to know what Obama's true fiscal priorities were, only what happened under his watch. I also doubt that it was the Republicans who introduced any concerns about getting the deficit under control, given the fact that they voted for an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts and the continued military presence in Afghanistan while Obama was in office. The fact remains, whichever party you give the most credit to, that the deficit was effectively reduced under the Obama administration, which is not the case now.
I think we can agree to leave this point aside considering how the 2020 deficit makes the discussion largely pointless.
I will say however that if you do view a Biden presidency as a DNC presidency by proxy, then I would very much remain concerned about ballooning domestic spending.
If Biden's plan to expand the ACA includes a genuine public option (as was planned, and then later abandoned, in the original bill) then it's quite possible that it would save the US taxpayer money, not cost more. Most universal healthcare systems cost less taxes per capita than Medicare and Medicaid, and it's because they utilize the benefits of government procurement to drive down prices.
The mantra that healthcare provision should be left entirely to markets is almost solely an American one. Most countries recognize the inherent inelasticity in the demand for healthcare, and they prepare accordingly. If either candidate can sort out America's healthcare system, I think that would be a good thing.
Most universal health care systems cost less taxes than American programs (and health care in general) for two main reasons:
1) Countries outside the US are sucking the teat of American medical innovation.
2) Medicaid and Medicare deal with poor people and old people respectively, two of the most high-risk groups medically that have the highest associated health care costs.
It’s not a fair comparison.
You cannot, in a million fucking years, convince me a public option is going to result in anything but bloated bureaucracy at best and catastrophic decline in quality of service at worst.
Trump has taken steps to try and get more transparency for health care billing and costs, which shows some positive focus on the subject.
The ACA was so ineffective that they relied on a bait and switch for premiums as well as outright coercion in the form of a fine. In my opinion it existed solely as a means to keep people reliant on the government once they had broken out of the Medicare bracket.
On top of that, I remain skeptical of any form of government price fixing due to the overwhelming body of historical evidence pointing to how it typically ends in disaster.
I don't think this election really hinges on whether or not Biden is personally up to the task of governing, but on who he nominates as his Vice President, and who he's likely to put in his cabinet. If Biden wins, then I think the best case scenario would probably be for him to take a backseat, and delegate the most important diplomatic functions to his deputy and chiefs of staff.
I have some pretty serious concerns about the mental state of both candidates, to be honest. Trump is impulsive and vindictive, while Biden is showing some very obvious symptoms of cognitive decline. Neither are qualities I'd want in a leader, under the best of circumstances.
This is the mother of all copes, and I hope you take a minute to think about the stance you’re taking here, especially in light of your other statements. Trump may be brash and impulsive, but you’re not willing to give his cabinet and administration any credit for their ground game, even while facing historic resistance from the existing executive bureaucracy. For all his faults, he at least attempts to project confidence and strength. Biden is literally incapable of doing so. If he were, we would have seen a lot more of him over the past few months.
Biden would not be selecting his cabinet, his handlers would. Or Goldman Sachs. Or whatever multinational with ties to China that happens to be pulling the strings of the DNC come January 2021, if Biden wins in the first place.
Biden would only be a figurehead, ans a pretty shitty one at that, while the morally bankrupt collective conscious of the Democratic Party do everything they can to spread the divisive, destructive force seen in Chicago and Seattle.
I think both are undermining American democracy, and I think that both heavily feed off of one another. The most damaging development in American politics over the last decade, I think, has been the erosion of sensible voices who can unite the country and steer it in a forward-looking direction. I first started to see the rot set in with the emergence of the Tea Party Movement and Occupy Wall Street, although there is little doubt that the discourse has declined further in the age of social media.
My hope is that whatever happens in November, the United States can heal from it's current crisis, although I don't have a lot of optimism, given the choice that America is being presented with. Ultimately though, it is a choice the American people have to make, and I will support the result regardless of the outcome.
Yeah but who are you voting for? Assuming you’re American that is. I’m curious, I really am.
I think there’s a decent chance you’re a Shareblue shill or similar, given how you go from ignorant about topics to suddenly knowledgeable about surface level talking points while opening other lines of attack. All with a “how do you do, fellow conservatives” kind of vibe. But I’m curious how you plan on voting nonetheless.
(Although if you are a paid shill, you are absolutely in the wrong fucking neighborhood).
Anyway.
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were symptoms, not the problem; a collective realization across the political spectrum that “holy shit, the people in power really don’t give a shit about us, do they?” All the while, we’ve started giving less a shit about ourselves and those around us.
The current crisis in America is the degradation of the American identity. The conveniences of a post-industrial economy have weakened our sense of community and collective culture to the point where it’s been more viable than ever for people in power to exploit division. And they’ve been more than happy to oblige, to disastrous effect.
Trump at the very least thinks that being American means something. It means a commitment to individual liberty, industry, and a chance at success, if we’re willing to work together when we can and leave each other alone when we can’t. Biden’s DNC handlers have shown a willingness to endorse a militant left wing that is happy to watch America burn if it means they get more influence. You may accuse Trump of fomenting disunity, but he has only ever shown antagonism towards the groups who sow violent disunity themselves while screaming at the top of their lungs that it’s what we deserve. All while having the absolute hubris to then propose collectivist policy that without any kind of cultural cohesion would require totalitarian power to enact and enforce.
That’s the real threat to democracy, my dude.
Not true. Globally, democracy was on the increase for more than a century before the 2008 financial crash. It's only in the last decade that this has started to reverse.
Due in no small part to the rise of Chinese influence, yet a couple paragraphs ago you were lamenting at how our prosperous trade relationship with the glorious PRC had soured.
