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A while ago I wrote a piece called “The end of American optimism” which argued that, for various reasons, American politics has become much more pessimistic over the last decade. This week I have two pieces out which touch on this from two different angles - one in The Guardian about immigration (link here) and another in World Politics Review about international economic policy (link here).
Both of these are areas in which the current state of American politics limits the country’s options in undesirable ways. I’ll start with international economic policy, because it receives less attention in the media as a whole.
As I think everyone knows, Donald Trump was strongly opposed to America engaging in more trade deals, and very skeptical of international trade itself. As a result of his candidacy and election in 2016, America backed off from joining the Trans Pacific Partnership, a large agreement with many countries in Asia which was supposed to be the lynchpin of America’s future trade and security system in the region. Since then, nobody serious in American politics has proposed new trade deals because they are assumed to be too politically toxic, particularly in Midwest swing states.
The Biden administration didn’t change this. They posited that many people who voted for Trump did so because they had been harmed by globalization and that one way to defend American democracy against Trump was to make globalization work better for average Americans. They promised to run a “foreign policy for the middle class” which would deliver concrete economic benefits for everyday Americans, and save the republic in the process. It sounded like a bargain.
The problem is that, as I explore in the WPR piece, it’s not clear what exactly the “foreign policy for the middle-class” is doing to actually help most Americans. The most notable feature of it is what it won’t involve, which is negotiating new trade deals. Its positive features are much less clear. In fact, over time, Biden’s international economic policy seems to have morphed from something that was mostly about helping Americans to something which is mostly about harming China.
The administration is now focused on using sanctions and export controls to try to keep China’s industrial growth down, while at the same time reorienting America’s trading relationships via so called “friendshoring”. This aims to limit the vulnerability of international supply chains in the event of a war or other disaster by basing trade on considerations of security rather than economic efficiency. But as I wrote at WPR:
Perhaps the biggest drawback of the new consensus is what it leaves out. Offering access to the U.S. market is the primary carrot that U.S. policymakers have in their trade negotiations with other countries. Open trade has lifted hundreds of millions of people in the Global South out of poverty in recent decades. It’s also a key tool for strengthening partnerships that might help shape China’s economic and geopolitical behavior, as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the U.S. abandoned, was intended to do. The new Washington consensus, by contrast, seems instead to consist mostly of sticks.
It is also notably more pessimistic and zero-sum than the worldview it replaces, discarding the aspiration—however imperfectly realized—of globally inclusive growth with one of competing economic blocs. Whether the new policy is successful or not will depend a great deal on how it is implemented. And while the Biden administration claims to be careful about not taking economic coercion too far, its successors may not be. Either way, the global economy is in for a bumpy ride, and one from which the U.S. will not necessarily emerge richer and stronger.
Zooming out, I think the main problem here is that the American political consensus blocks the policies that would actually help the country deal with the dislocations of globalization. Europe has also experienced significant deindustrialization and job loss associated with globalization, but it has weathered the storm better because it has strong welfare states and job retraining programs. The U.S. has a much weaker welfare state, and it might get even weaker as a result of ongoing negotiations over the debt ceiling. “Friendshoring” and sanctions on China are not going to change that. If it’s true that American democracy is threatened because of economic inequality, then the lack of American politics to fund programs which help the poor has more to do with it than globalization.
Immigration
Another aspect of this problem is immigration.
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