In the inquiry into who would be the strongest Democratic Presidential nominee in 2020, Donald Trump is what might be called a hostile witness. “Joe Biden is a dummy,” the President said last week, on his way to Iowa, where Biden, who spent more than three decades in the Senate and eight years as Barack Obama’s Vice-President and one of his closest advisers, was campaigning.
After overcoming significant political and economic headwinds during the past decade, the US economy now appears to have undergone its longest sustained expansion in history. Yet, behind the data showing historically low unemployment and long-awaited wage growth lie vulnerabilities that cannot be ignored.
Photo courtesy: White House/Flickr
Almost every week of late, it seems something new, startling and historically unusual is happening in U.S. trade policy. President Donald Trump’s actions are undermining the credibility of American negotiators, increasing uncertainty for traders and investors, domestic and foreign, and potentially threatening to throw the economy into recession.
Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since. But was the death of the United States’ extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behaviour?
The dispute is part of a much bigger issue. Washington is trying to keep its southern neighbour in check, and it’s trying to remind Mexico, which has been pursuing a more independent foreign policy of late, that the U.S. is the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. The revival of the Monroe Doctrine is one of the most important processes underway in North America right now, but it’s challenged by the fact that the U.S. and Mexico have different visions for Central America.
U.S. foreign policy suffers from systematic flaws in the thinking of the informal policy collective which former Obama aide Ben Rhodes dismissed as “The Blob.” Perhaps no official better articulated The Blob’s defective precepts than Madeleine Albright, United Nations ambassador and Secretary of State.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.” Thus Charles Dickens begins “A Tale of Two Cities.” Would that the greatest of all novelists could return to us for a week. For it would take Dickens in his prime to do full justice to President Trump’s state visit to Britain this week. At its best, a state visit to Britain dazzles the foreign head of state. Not much dazzles Trump, aside from his own very stable genius, but being greeted by Her Majesty the Queen on Monday should come close. She has, after all reigned since Trump was five. She has been receiving presidents since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Modern circumstances continue to bear out the prescience of America’s founders. Especially George Washington’s warning against “entangling alliances.” In contrast, U.S. policymakers today treat military allies like Facebook friends, the more the merrier, something to brag about. However, most of Washington’s existing alliances are harmful, expensive commitments with little relevance to American security.
President Donald Trump took office promising to make great deals with trading partners, foreign rivals and Democrats. After more than two years in office, his tactics have left him at intractable loggerheads with all three.
The heart of the proposal is a turnaround on who the United States accepts as legal immigrants. Currently, two-thirds of new immigrants are granted stay because of some kind of familiar connection already living in the United States; immigration enthusiasts refer to this as family reunification, while immigration restrictionists refer to it as chain migration.
