Mexico Plays the ‘China Card’

The possibility President Trump will pull out of NAFTA has prompted his Mexican counterpart to court China.

.. This week, while his country is renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto was in China to pursue his country’s Plan B. Rumblings of a free-trade deal between the two nations have grown since President Trump took office this year, but they’ve mostly been seen as political posturing. But with Trump threatening regularly to dump the deal—even taking time last Sunday, during Hurricane Harvey, to say he “may have to terminate” NAFTA—the possibility of Mexico opening up to China seems ever more real.

.. Peña Nieto’s will participate in the BRICS summit in China, named for its participants, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. And he also met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, a sign the two countries are seeking a closer trading relationship.

.. NAFTA changed the waythe U.S. eats, and without NAFTA, consumers stand to lose their perennially fresh and cheap vegetables. But the sector that stand to lose the most is auto manufacturing, because U.S. companies have invested heavily on being able to send car parts to Mexico, assemble them there, then bring them to the U.S. to be sold.

..The WTO tariffs for the auto sector are much higher than for most other industries, so not only would consumers have to pay more for cars, but it would likely disrupt the current chain of manufacturing.

.. if NAFTA did end, it’s trade would likely continue at WTO tariff rates, making many products from Mexico more expensive, but leaving intact the flow of trade.

..Mexico sends about 75 percent of its exports to the U.S., which comes to about $290 billion. By way of comparison, Canada is its second-largest export market at $23 billion, and China its third at $7 billion.
..And as recently as June, China’s ambassador to Mexico, Qiu Xiaoqi, said his country was open to a free-trade agreement. But while a deal like that could benefit China (and scare the U.S.), it probably wouldn’t benefit Mexico that much. Dussel told me Mexico imports about 14 Chinese products for every one product it exports.
.. “The thing you want to think about is what is Mexico’s competitive advantage,” Adam Collins, a Latin America economist with Capital Economics, a London-based research and consultancy group, told me. “In both cases it’s low wages. So really the place Mexico should look to are other developed countries, like in Europe, and richer East Asian countries. But even that is an uphill battle because of geography, by which I mean Mexico’s other competitive advantage is its location next to America.”

The ‘Free Speech’ Hypocrisy of Right-Wing Media

Last May, after a video of a commencement address I delivered at Hampshire College circulated on the internet, Fox News created a segment out of the 30 seconds or so in which I called President Trump a “racist, sexist megalomaniac.” The network ran the clip repeatedly over four days with the headline “Princeton professor goes on anti-Potus tirade.”

That a junior faculty member of Princeton was critical of Mr. Trump in a speech at a small liberal arts college should not be surprising. Nor was it newsworthy in any meaningful sense of the term. But it did incite Fox viewers.

Within hours, invective filled my inbox. I received emails that promised I would be lynched, shot and raped, and Princeton’s department of African-American studies, of which I am a member, was so flooded with hate that the locks on the doors had to be changed.

.. The clip fit perfectly into the Fox News narrative about the dangers of leftist radicalism on campuses. It also perfectly encapsulated the network’s hypocrisy about defending “free speech.”

.. The American Civil Liberties Union and the PEN organization have gone out of their way to defend the rights of provocative speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to speak on campuses, but have been virtually silent on cases involving leftist or progressive faculty members who face suspension for provocative comments. Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at Essex County College in New Jersey, was fired after she appeared on the Fox News program “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to explain why black people might gather for an all-black celebration of Memorial Day.

Trump has been making ominous threats his whole life

The crisis we now find ourselves in has been exaggerated and mishandled by the Trump administration to a degree that is deeply worrying and dangerous.

From the start, the White House has wanted to look tough on North Korea.

.. In the early months of President Trump’s administration, before there could possibly have been a serious policy review, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned that the era of strategic patience with North Korea was over.

.. Last week, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said that North Korea’s potential to hit the United States with nuclear weapons was an “intolerable” threat. Not North Korea’s use of weapons, mind you; just the potential.

.. So why do it? Because it’s Trump’s basic mode of action. For his entire life, Trump has made grandiose promises and ominous threats — and rarely delivered on any.

When he was in business, Reuters found,

  • he frequently threatened to sue news organizations for libel, but the last time he followed through was 33 years ago, in 1984.
  • Trump says that he never settles cases out of court. In fact, he has settled at least 100 times, according to USA Today.

..In his political life, he has followed the same strategy of bluster.

  • In 2011, he said that he had investigators who “cannot believe what they’re finding” about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and that he would at some point “be revealing some interesting things.” He had nothing.
  •  During the campaign, he vowed that he would label China a currency manipulator,
  • move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem,
  • make Mexico pay for a border wall and
  • initiate an investigation into Hillary Clinton. So far, nada.
  • After being elected, he signaled to China that he might recognize Taiwan. Within weeks of taking office, he folded.
  • He implied that he had tapes of his conversations with then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Of course, he had none.

Does he think the North Koreans don’t know this?

.. The secretary of state seems to have been telling Americans — and the world — to ignore the rhetoric, not of the North Korean dictator, but of his own boss, the president of the United States. It is probably what Trump’s associates have done for him all his life. They know that the guiding mantra for him has been not the art of the deal, but the art of the bluff.

Fears of Missiles, and Words

But Mr. Trump is president of the United States, and if prudent, disciplined leadership was ever required, it is now. Rhetorically stomping his feet, as he did on Tuesday, is not just irresponsible; it is dangerous. He is no longer a businessman trying to browbeat someone into a deal. He commands the most powerful nuclear and conventional arsenal in the world, and any miscalculation could be catastrophic.

.. This is a president with no prior government or military experience who has shown no clear grasp of complex strategic issues.

.. his inflammatory words were entirely improvised and took his closest associates by surprise. Intentionally or not, they echoed President Harry Truman’s 1945 pledgeto inflict a “rain of ruin from the air” if Japan did not surrender after the first atomic bomb was dropped at Hiroshima, which made them seem even more ominous.

It is hard to believe that they would condone Mr. Trump’s risky approach, and on Wednesday, the damage control began.

  • While Mr. Mattis reinforced his boss’s belligerent tone and expressed confidence that North Korea would “lose any arms race or conflict it initiates,” he more prudently focused on the North’s concrete “actions” rather than on vague threats and voiced support for a diplomatic solution.
  • Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he saw no reason to believe that war was imminent.
  • Meanwhile, some White House aides reportedly urged reporters not to read too much into the president’s remarks.

.. Since Truman, presidents have largely avoided the kind of militaristic threats issued by Mr. Trump because they feared such language could escalate a crisis.

.. Mr. Trump has again made himself the focus of attention, when it should be Kim Jong-un, the ruthless North Korean leader, and his accelerating nuclear

.. Engaging in a war of words with North Korea only makes it harder for both sides to de-escalate.