A point that seems to be missing from a lot of the discussion of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere is the role of China. It's darned hard for the Nicaraguas, El Salvadors, and Costa Ricas of the world to keep their positions as low-cost labor supplier when there's a China pumping out all sorts of goods with labor costs significantly lower.
On another (but not completely unrelated) subject I'm having difficulty reconciling the Mexicans' complaints about competition from U. S. bean growers (lowering agricultural tariffs part of the next NAFTA phase) when they're importing so many beans from China and Brazil.
Dave Schuler
The Glittering Eye "
Dear Dave: Hear! Hear! Your point can't be emphasized enough! But do you recall the Pundita Pharaoh essay? China's great success at undercutting the cheapest labor and goods is made possible by the rich countries and the policies of the IMF-World Bank. They subsidized China's emergence as the cut-rate capital of the world. And they aided and abetted China's ruling party in entrenching a pharaonic style of government for the modern era, which renders large numbers of China's workers virtual slaves.
So I don't know where all the rosy projections are coming from. I've read analyses that breezily predict China's success will soon price them out of the cheapest labor markets. How is that supposed to happen, if China's government can force hundreds of millions of their citizens to continue laboring for slave wages?
I honestly don't know what's to be done about the situation, but if your point continues to be ignored by China's biggest trading partners, the day of reckoning will come. More of the world's poorest countries will take a sharp turn to the extreme Left. And they will reject with a vengeance the trade policies of the WTO; indeed, they'll reject globalized trade. Regionalism will triumph over internationalism. Flags have already been raised; Ortega's victory in the Nicaragua election is another flag.
Thank you for the news; I had no idea the Mexicans were practicing bean sophistry. I think this is what's known as "full of beans."
"Dear Pundita,
With the shift in power in Washington, lots of people are trying to find an alternative to Rumsfeldian neo-conservatism. I'd be curious what you think about this (new?) approach known as "Ethical Realism." It comes from my friends at the New America Foundation, so please don't be too hard on them.
Dr. Ernie"
Dear Dr. Ernie:
I would not term Donald Rumsfeld a neoconservative; remember that neoconservative means "newly conservative" and I don't recall Rummy ever characterizing himself as a liberal. But I get your drift.
Pundita dutifully skimmed a few essays posted at the New America Foundation website; this one by Michael Lind seems representative of their view of the current state of US foreign policy. Pundita will make you a deal. If you can find as much as one sentence in the essay that indicates the USA is currently fighting a defensive hot war on many fronts, I will not be mean to your friends.
For readers new to the term 'ethical realism,' it's the title of a book. Here's part of a New York Times review that Dr. Ernie sent:
Ethical Realism represents yet another turn of the doctrinal wheel. One of the authors, Anatol Lieven, is a brilliant, fiery pamphleteer of the left who has described the neoconservative enterprise as “world hegemony by means of absolute military superiority.” The other, John Hulsman, is a former fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation who supported the war in Iraq and applauded Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s rhetorical partition of Europe into the anti-American, played-out “old” and the rising, pro-Washington “new.”I will put reading the book on my To-do list. But for now -- Dr. Ernie, if you've read the book, can you tell me whether it contains a chapter -- or even a paragraph or sentence -- that discusses the world war the US is fighting? If not, the Fellows at the New America Foundation are not the only ones with their head in the sand.
The fact that these two thinkers have found enough common ground to write a book together is an astonishingly perverse achievement of neoconservative theory and practice. It has also become something of an inside-the-think-tanks cause célèbre, since Hulsman has said Heritage fired him soon after the book project was announced.
Pundita searched Thomas P.M. Barnett's books in vain looking for a clear acknowledgement that the US is involved in a hot global war rather than a police action dressed in military garb.
At State, the CIA and in foreign policy circles -- indeed, among factions at the Pentagon -- one is hard pressed to find people who acknowledge that Iraq is not a stand-alone war and that it's just one theater in a world war.
Michael Lind called for fresh ideas in working out a foreign policy for this era. How can there be fresh ideas, if the majority in the foreign policy establishment don't want to acknowledge that war, and not theorizing based on grand strategies, must drive American foreign policy at present?
How many times must it be said before it sinks in? This is not a cold war we're fighting. The Soviets threatened war, but never attacked the US homeland. Not only did al Qaeda and their backers successfully attack the USA, they nearly got away with devastating the seats of the US military establishment and the government. Just as importantly Saddam Hussein, with the help of China, Libya and North Korea, nearly got away with building nukes at a facility in Libya.
But that's just it: real war tends to mock policy theory, so quite naturally the theorists tend to avoid what is plain as day and ignore intelligence reports that deflate their theories.
There is only one 'realism' for the United States at this time: victory or defeat. I am not sure where ethics comes in, beyond deciding whether to abandon the US double standard about democracy. That question, I am afraid, will continue to be decided on a case-by-case basis until the war ends. I say that's wrong; that it plays into the hand of the enemy. In a perfect world I am right. But for the love of sanity, we're in a war. What's the theory behind that? The theory is to fight.
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