Anyone who says that China’s President Xi Jinping does not have a sense of humor is definitely not following the news from the Pacific these days.
China last week applied for membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the trade deal that was originally negotiated by President Barack Obama precisely to counter China’s economic power in the Pacific. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump promptly tore it up rather than learn what it was about and get Congress to ratify it, and the Democrats have since then made no move to revive the deal, known as the TPP.
Beijing applying to join the TPP is the diplomatic equivalent of the U.S. asking to be a member of China’s “belt and road” trade and investment initiative in Asia, or Russia applying to be a member of the new NAFTA because it controls part of the Arctic north of Canada. In other words, a deliciously mischievous ploy.
But it’s a ploy that exposes a real weakness in U.S. foreign policymaking toward China, which has become the biggest challenger to American pre-eminence in setting the rules of today’s international system in both trade and diplomacy.
China’s announcement came the day after Britain, the U.S. and Australia took geopolitical competition with China to a new level by announcing a historic security pact to help Australia deploy the most advanced nuclear-powered submarines, to counter Beijing’s growing naval clout in the Asia-Pacific region.
But we need a strategy for not just containing China with submarines that could take years before going on patrol. We need a strategy for changing China’s behavior today, which is what the TPP was partly designed to do.
China was never formally excluded from the TPP by its Obama administration designers. But the message to Beijing was: If you want to be part of this American-crafted 21st-century trade pact, you have to play by our rules. That’s why reformers in China were intrigued by the TPP — they saw it as a lever to open the Chinese system — and hard-liners feared it more than submarines.
But after the U.S.-U.K.-Australia sub deal, the Chinese obviously said to themselves: “Let’s have some fun. After the Americans were so stupid as to never join the trade pact that they designed to keep us out, America in and its Pacific allies close, the 11 other partners went ahead without them. They even renamed it the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). So, let’s try to use the attraction of easier access to China’s giant market to take over the TPP on our terms instead of America’s! And what better way to counter the American submarine deal with Australia?”
It was a brilliant move. As The Wall Street Journal reported last Friday: “A decade ago, it was a trade club led by the U.S. seeking to limit the influence of China’s economic model. Now Washington is out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Beijing wants in — as the group’s biggest member.”
While China’s admittance is not likely anytime soon (it requires unanimous consent of the members), just by applying Beijing is exposing how unserious the American far left and far right are when it comes to China. They rail against Beijing’s human rights policy and then they block one of America’s most effective tools to nudge — and that is the most we can ever do — China toward more transparency and the rule of law, i.e., TPP.
“Reformers in China carefully monitored the original TPP negotiations with the hope that China joining the TPP could lead to domestic reforms,’’ said James McGregor, the chairman of the consultancy APCO Worldwide, Greater China. “Those days are gone. In its new bid to join, China will likely try to use the lure of its huge market to entice the other members to live with China meeting some TPP requirements while muddying others.’’
What makes this Chinese maneuver more ridiculous is that Trump was so ignorant about the contents of the TPP before he tore it up — his main objection was surely that Obama had negotiated it — that when he was first asked about it in a campaign debate in November 2015, Trump incorrectly suggested that China was in it from the start. Trump was just ahead of his time!
But Trump’s foolishness had a lot of tacit support from Bernie Sanders and his fellow progressives with their knee-jerk opposition to the pact — even though it was designed by Obama to address all the core labor and environmental issues that the left did not like about free trade.
Let’s go to the videotape and recall what the Obama team — not Trump, not the G.O.P. — O-B-A-M-A — built into the original TPP, which also included Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.
One of the largest multilateral trade agreements ever negotiated, it included restrictions on foreign state-owned enterprises that dumped subsidized products into our markets. It detailed intellectual property protections for the newest and most advanced American-made tech products — like free access for all cloud computing services, which China restricts. It set out explicit anti-human-trafficking provisions that prohibited turning guest workers into slave labor. It banned trafficking in endangered wildlife parts, a practice still common in China that may have played a role in the pandemic. It required signatories to permit their workers to form independent trade unions to collectively bargain and to eliminate all child labor practices.
Indeed, speaking on a trip to Australia in 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “this TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field.” It would build in “strong protections for workers and the environment. … Respecting workers’ rights leads to positive long-term economic outcomes, better jobs with higher wages and safer working conditions.”
Typical of a Democrat, though, candidate Clinton ran away from the deal when she ran against Trump, rather than explain that some 80 percent of the goods from our 11 would-be TPP partners were already coming into the U.S. duty-free, while our goods and services were still being hit with some 18,000 tariffs in their countries — tariffs that the deal would have eliminated. By accounting for 40 percent of global G.D.P., the original TPP would have become a real standards-setter in the Pacific.
The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated that U.S. national income would also have grown by some $130 billion a year by 2030 with the TPP. Not huge, but a nice bump.
This is all the more a tragic comedy because our Pacific allies actually gave America trade concessions to create the agreement that they would not do before — precisely because they wanted us in the neighborhood as a bigger economic counterweight to China’s growing domination. And then we walked away, and now China wants to take our place — on its terms.
It is not too late for America to get back into the TPP and even strengthen it by insisting on stricter rules of origin (which Trump added to the new NAFTA). This would ensure that if somehow China were admitted to the partnership, it could not get around U.S. tariffs on certain Chinese exports by moving their final assembly to Vietnam, while keeping the core value chain in China.
I’ll take America joining the TPP today over helping to deploy submarines years from now. By then, if America continues to stay out, the CPTPP surely will be renamed again. It will have the same initials but they will stand for the “Chinese People’s Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
Now wouldn’t that be funny. …
The Origins of New US-Turkish Relations
For several years, there has been a significant shift underway in U.S. strategy toward the Middle East, where Washington has consistently sought to avoid combat. The United States is now compelled to seek accommodation with Turkey, a regional power in its own right, based on terms that are geopolitically necessary for both. Their relationship has been turbulent, and while it may continue to be so for a while, it will decline. Their accommodation has nothing to do with mutual affection but rather with mutual necessity. The Turkish incursion into Syria and the U.S. response are part of this adjustment, one that has global origins and regional consequences.
Similarly, the U.S. decision to step aside as Turkey undertook an incursion in northeastern Syria has a geopolitical and strategic origin. The strategic origin is a clash between elements of the Defense Department and the president. The defense community has been shaped by a war that has been underway since 2001. During what is called the Long War, the U.S. has created an alliance structure of various national and subnational groups. Yet the region is still on uneven footing. The Iranians have extended a sphere of influence westward. Iraq is in chaos. The Yemeni civil war still rages, and the original Syrian war has ended, in a very Middle Eastern fashion, indecisively.
A generation of military and defense thinkers have matured fighting wars in the Middle East. The Long War has been their career. Several generations spent their careers expecting Soviet tanks to surge into the Fulda Gap. Cold Warriors believed a world without the Cold War was unthinkable. The same can be said for those shaped by Middle Eastern wars. For the Cold War generation, the NATO alliance was the foundation of their thinking. So too for the Sandbox generation, those whose careers were spent rotating into Iraq or Afghanistan or some other place, the alliances formed and the enemies fought seemed eternal. The idea that the world had moved on, and that Fulda and NATO were less important, was emotionally inconceivable. Any shift in focus and alliance structure was seen as a betrayal.
After the Cold War ended, George H.W. Bush made the decision to stand down the 24-hour B-52 air deployments in the north that were waiting for a Soviet attack. The reality had changed, and Bush made the decision a year after the Eastern European collapse began. He made it early on Sept. 21, 1991, after the Wall came down but before the Soviet Union collapsed. It was a controversial decision. I knew some serious people who thought that we should be open to the possibility that the collapse in Eastern Europe was merely a cover for a Soviet attack and were extremely agitated over the B-52 stand-down.
It is difficult to accept that an era has passed into history. Those who were shaped by that era, cling, through a combination of alarm and nostalgia, to the things that reverberate through their minds. Some (though not Europeans) spoke of a betrayal of Europe, and others deeply regretted that the weapons they had worked so hard to perfect and the strategy and tactics that had emerged over decades would never be tried.
The same has happened in different ways in the Middle East. The almost 20-year deployment has forged patterns of behavior, expectations and obligations not only among individuals but more institutionally throughout the armed forces. But the mission has changed. For now, the Islamic State is vastly diminished, as is al-Qaida. The Sunni rising in Iraq has ended, and even the Syrian civil war is not what it once was. A war against Iran has not begun, may not happen at all, and would not resemble the wars that have been fought in the region hitherto.
This inevitably generates a strategic re-evaluation, which begins by accepting that the prior era is gone. It was wrenching to shift from World War II to the Cold War and from the Cold War to a world that many believed had transcended war, and then to discover that war was suspended and has now resumed. War and strategy pretend to be coolly disengaged, but they are passionate undertakings that don’t readily take to fundamental change. But after the 18 years of war, two things have become clear. The first is that
- the modest objective of disrupting terrorism has been achieved, and the second is that
- the ultimate goal of creating something approaching liberal democracies was never really possible.
Consistency
The world has changed greatly since 2001. China has emerged as a major power, and Russia has become more active. Iran, not Sunni jihadists, has become the main challenge in the Middle East and the structure of alliances needed to deal with this has changed radically since Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. In addition, the alliances have changed in terms of capability. The massive deployments in the Middle East have ended, but some troops remain there, and to a section of the American military, the jihadist war remains at the center of their thinking. To them, the alliances created over the past 18 years remain as critical as Belgium’s air force had been during the Cold War.
There is another, increasingly powerful faction in the United States that sees the Middle East as a secondary interest. In many instances, they include Iran in this. This faction sees China or Russia (or both) as the fundamental challenger to the U.S. Its members see the Middle East as a pointless diversion and a drain of American resources.
For them, bringing the conflict to a conclusion was critical. Those who made their careers in this war and in its alliances were appalled. The view of President Donald Trump has been consistent. In general, he thought that the use of military force anywhere must be the exception rather than the rule. He declined to begin combat in North Korea. He did not attack Iran after it shot down an American drone or after it seized oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. After the attack on the Saudi oil facility, he increased Saudi air defenses but refused offensive actions against the Iranians.
Given the shift in American strategy, three missions emerge. The first is the
- containment of China. The second is the
- containment of Russia. The third is the
- containment of Iran. In the case of China, the alliance structure required by the United States is primarily the archipelago stretching from Japan to Indonesia and Singapore – and including South Korea. In dealing with Russia, there are two interests. One is the North European Plain; the other is the Black Sea. Poland is the American ally in the north, Romania in the south. But the inclusion of Turkey in this framework would strengthen the anti-Russia framework. In addition, it would provide a significant counter to Iranian expansion.
Turkey’s importance is clear. It is courted by both Russia and Iran. Turkey is not the country it was a decade ago. Its economy surged and then went into crisis. It has passed through an attempted coup, and internal stress has been massive. But such crises are common in emerging powers. The U.S. had a civil war in the 1860s but by 1900 was producing half of the manufactured goods in the world while boasting a navy second only to the British. Internal crises do not necessarily mean national decline. They can mean strategic emergence.
Turkey’s alignment with Iran and Russia is always tense. Iran and Russia have at various times waged war with Turkey and have consistently seen Iraq as a threat. For the moment, both have other interests and Turkey is prepared to work with them. But Turkey is well aware of history. It is also aware that the U.S. guaranteed Turkish sovereignty in the face of Soviet threats in the Cold War, and that the U.S., unlike Russia and Iran, has no territorial ambitions or needs in Turkey. Already allied through NATO and historical bilateral ties, a relationship with Turkey is in the American interest because it creates a structure that threatens Iran’s line to the Mediterranean and compliments the Romanian-U.S. Black Sea alliance. The U.S. and Turkey are also hostile to the Syrian government. For Turkey, in the long term, Russia and Iran are unpredictable, and they can threaten Turkey when they work together. The American interest in an independent Turkey that blocks Russia and Iran coincides with long-term Turkish interests.
Enter the Kurds
This is where the Kurds come into the equation. Eastern Turkey is Kurdish, and maintaining stability there is a geopolitical imperative for Ankara. Elements of Turkey’s Kurds, grouped around the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, have carried out militant attacks. Therefore it is in Turkey’s interest to clear its immediate frontiers from a Kurdish threat. The United States has no overriding interest in doing so and, indeed, has worked together with the Kurds in Iraq and Syria. But for the Turks, having Kurds on their border is an unpredictable threat. American dependency on the Kurds declines as U.S. involvement in the Middle East declines. Turkey becomes much more important to the United States in relation to Iran than the Kurds.
Trump clearly feels that the wars in the Middle East must be wound down and that a relationship with Turkey is critical. The faction that is still focused on the Middle East sees this as a fundamental betrayal of the Kurds. Foreign policy is a ruthless and unsentimental process. The Kurds want to establish a Kurdish nation. The U.S. can’t and doesn’t back that. On occasion, the U.S. will join in a mutually advantageous alliance with the Kurds to achieve certain common goals. But feelings aside, the U.S. has geopolitical interests that sometimes include the Kurds and sometimes don’t – and the same can be said of the Kurds.
At the moment, the issue is not al-Qaida but China and Russia, and Turkey is critical to the U.S. for Russia. The U.S. is critical for Turkey as well, but it cannot simply fall into American arms. It has grown too powerful in the region for that, and it has time to do it right. So Trump’s actions on the Syrian border will result in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s visit to Washington and, in due course, a realignment in the region between the global power and the regional power.
Trump Hasn’t Killed the Global Trade System. Instead, He Split it in Two.
Allies find relations modestly tweaked, despite the president’s rhetoric, while relations with China are entering a deep freeze
When Donald Trump entered the White House on a platform of defiant nationalism nearly two years ago, many feared he would dismantle the global trading system the U.S. and its allies had built over the past 70 years.
He hasn’t. Instead, he is presiding over its realignment into two distinct systems.
- One, between the U.S. and its traditional, democratic trading partners, looks a lot like the system that has prevailed since the 1980s: free trade with a smattering of quotas and tariffs like those Ronald Reagan once deployed.
- The second reflects an emerging rivalry between the U.S. and China carrying echoes of the Cold War. On trade, investment and technology, the U.S. is moving to undo some of the integration that followed China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.
There are two big questions hanging over this realignment. The first is deciding how far the U.S. is prepared to decouple from China. The U.S. has given China until March 1 to avoid higher tariffs by addressing complaints it discriminates against foreign companies and steals their technology. Mr. Trump is counting on a deal that avoids a trade war. But many in his administration and Congress don’t trust China to make the necessary concessions and would likely advocate a sharper break.
The second question is whether the U.S. can persuade allies to join a united front to contain China. Other countries don’t relish the choice. Their economic ties to China are far greater than they ever were to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Nor are the ideological choices as clear cut. China isn’t waging an ideological struggle against the West as the Soviet Union did, and Mr. Trump, while enacting policies reminiscent of President Reagan, lacks Mr. Reagan’s commitment to alliances and free trade. Defense Secretary James Mattis’s decision to resign after Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria underscores the president’s ambivalence toward international engagement.In his first week he withdrew from the unratified 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership. He prepared to pull out of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (Korus) and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Earlier this year he imposed steep tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum, using a little-used national security law, and threatened the same for autos.
Today, Korus and Nafta have been replaced by updated agreements(one not yet ratified) that look much like the originals. South Korea accepted quotas on steel. Mexico and Canada agreed to higher wages, North American content requirements and quotas for autos.
These represent a step back from free trade toward managed trade, but they will have little practical effect: The limits on how many cars Mexico and Canada can ship duty-free to the U.S., for example, exceed current shipments. Mr. Trump hasn’t stopped threatening auto tariffs, but for now his officials have elected instead to seek broader tariff reductions with Japan and the European Union.
.. Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit that incenses Mr. Trump has grown during his presidency, especially with China and Mexico, as a strong American economy sucks in imports. His exhortations to manufacturers to bring jobs back to the U.S. have largely fallen on deaf ears.