Questions and Answers #3
An Ask Me Anything post
And we’re off …
John J. Brown
Hi Thomas, looking at the economic events of this past week, do they factor into your North-South model currently or does the model need to be adjusted?
Hmm, not really suggesting a different path, for now.
The three structural reasons why North is incentivized to integrate South versus let it stew on its own are all still there: climate change, demographics, Global South-centric middle class consumption growth. Now, they’re all long term stuff, and, in the short term, they’re easy to blow off.
As for the recent events, the way the South interprets many of them may surprise you.
For example: Not everyone in the South is going to miss USAID, the gripe being that it was always too bossy, and patronizing, and unrealistic in its demands. Very Neo-colonial. I don’t agree but that sentiment is out there.
In a wider sense, not everyone in the South is going to miss the US, having come to view China as the better model/partner.
Will gutting USAID lead to suffering in many countries throughout the South? Yes, it will.
Might it put people on the move? Eventually, most definitely.
Does that change my sense of North-South integration being the answer? No, it does not. All it is likely to do is speed up the local pain driving people northward and/or open the door for the Chinese to step in and gain all that influence that we’re no longer interested in harvesting.
In both instances, Trump’s policies are accelerants to our eventual realization that these are not good answers: blowing off the South; failing to compete with China across the world. So, as far as I am concerned, recent events are likely to drive this train faster, not slower.
If your reference was more about advanced economies turning on one another in trade wars triggered by Trump, my macro answer would be similar: to the extent all these threats turn real and send the global economy into a tailspin, that just brings us collectively closer and faster to even stronger northward migration pressures from a suffering South.
But, as I have noted here a couple of times recently: America freaking out on trade may not have the great impact we all assume WRT the rest of the world (ROW). The ROW is moving ahead on trade and deals and Belt & Road, etc. We are no longer the great demand center of the global economy like we once were, as now Europe and Asia are their own huge demands centers.
So, one development stemming from Trump’s push to turn all trade into chaos in the short run may well be encouraging the Eastern Hemisphere to pursue and conclude big-time trade deals on their own, like the EU and India pushing for a broad deal by year’s end, or the EU trying to wrap up that deal with MERCOSUR, or maybe the EU surprising us and doing a similar breakthrough deal with China.
We may well find that the ROW is RWA (ready, willing, able) to move on with globalization that largely excludes an inward-turning America. If that is the case, such exclusion might just make us more hemispherically possessive, in the way that Trump is suggesting (i.e., Monroe Doctrine-like fear of China moving into West Hem) — so, again, an accelerant dynamic more than anything that says the future ISN’T North-South integration.
Gary P.
Is the new axis of evil - China, Russia, USA?
My instinct was to chortle the second I saw that question come over my phone, but then the laugh got stuck in the back of my throat.
I have tended to view the good guys as US and EU and the bad guys as Russia and China, with India as the swing vote/rubber match/etc.
But, it is now fair to ask the question of whether or not we’ve switched sides, so to speak, to the revisionist/revanchist/irredentist side. Will the Administration make Greenland an offer it cannot refuse (revisionist)? Will we take back the Panama Canal (revanchist)? Does Trump want to renegotiate the border with Canada (irredentist)?
Beautiful land that should have been ours, maybe it once was ours … and now we want it back because America is BACK! We need it for world security.
That’s all pretty much rogue state behavior per historical US definitions, so, when the jibes stop being funny and the threats are acted upon, then we are definitely on the other side of the superpower correlation of forces (from good to bad).
Not only that, but we’d be condoning all such mirror-imaging behavior by Russia and China (already well underway with the former: e.g., we invaded Iraq over non-existent nukes and Russia invaded Ukraine over non-existent Nazis).
Modeled behavior is a bitch, just like Karma.
Does that mean we’re in some true “axis” with Russia and China? No, more like fellow travelers. But frankly, that’s true of CRINK (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) and we toss that term around with them rather carelessly, so, sure, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the same coming our direction — particularly from a pissed-off Canada and the EU.
We will have earned it.
Michael Moran
If the Dept. of Education is gutted, will federal financial aid for students, currently requiring the uniform FAFSA, be returned to the states, and calculated by each state with 50 different formulas for instate and out of state colleges? Sounds like a huge morass to me….
If Education goes away — enough — to effectively orphan federal financial aid programs, including those managed through FAFSA, then, yeah, it would seem to fall to individual states to administer what is presently about $120B annually, unless those funds got shifted to another cabinet department (Treasury?). I mean somebody would have to still accept and pass through the fed funding.
Say it goes to Treasury and it just block grants it to states. Then, each state would likely develop its own methodology for calculating eligibility, leading to a patchwork situation, probably with those states that already have their own financial aid programs simply using those as the same standard for evaluating where to direct federal funds.
Thing is, if you’re getting rid of Ed and student aid is a huge part of what it does, aren’t you thus saying the USG shouldn’t be in that business either as an administrator nor as a funder? So, maybe all that money goes away. That would be my strong expectation but maybe not?
In truth, that decision would be no less cruel than whacking USAID as an agency while also zeroing out its funding of projects (perhaps giving some to other departments that couldn’t care less about them and so let them die of “natural” bureaucratic causes).
Thomas Leto
How does Pakistan and, perhaps Bangladesh, deal with an India rising and have the possibility of a economic and political union / integration once Hindu nationalism plays out and China is seen as the force to compete with?
Fascinating scenario to raise. I’ve never considered that.
Given the “way out” nature of it (and how out of depth I am on this subject), I would have to say that I could see Bangladesh moving down that path more so than Pakistan — China’s one true ally in the world.
Also to consider: both Bangladesh and Pakistan are involved in a slate of Belt and Road projects with China.
Just saying “once Hindu nationalism plays out” sounds to me like second-half-of-this-century stuff.
I would be interested to know how you even got to the point of asking that question.
If I were going to name countries for a still Hindu-nationalist India to ally with against China in the years ahead (say, through my Zone of Turbulence out to 2075), I would — in the region — start with Japan, Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia and Mongolia. You’d go with those states made most nervous by China’s rise and most eager to help India rise as a counterweight.
Andrew Allen
For my wonderful brother who plans to subscribe: Is there anything good in all that Trump is doing ?
From my perspective, the dumbest thing out there is our tendency to package up every possible nation-state threat as some “global conspiracy” to defeat us (see CRINK above), so I get and approve of Trump’s instinct to try and load-shed that quartet one by one (detente with Russia, isolate Iran with threat of attack and maybe get nuke deal, mega-trade deal with China that maybe takes Taiwan off the table, and then there’s Lil’ Kim all by his lonesome).
If Trump can make the first three threat vectors go away, leaving us just to babysit Kim, that would be an amazing feat worthy of the Nobel he so desperately wants.
So I do get and appreciate Trump’s perspective in the manner of Nixon in his first term: he wants to break out of all these old obligations and fights so he can husband his resources to “make America” you know what.
To me, as the US inevitably shifts from heavy emphasis on its Cold War-centric market-making role to a more selfish market-playing role, this sort of load-shedding was inevitable — the only question being how accomplished.
Part of me says Trump does it all so crudely; another part says America was always slated to be crude in any such pendulum swing (just who we are).
That’s my glass-half-full on Trump: it had to happen, and maybe he was/is the only person capable of making it happen.
Andrew Allen
What is your best guestimate on the relationship Trump has with Putin?
Trump clearly admires him and Putin has a KGB education in manipulating people (not at all hard with Trump). I think it’s as simple as that.
Putin’s manipulation of Trump and our political system will go down in history as a stunning victory for Russia — and it should. It is an amazing feat totally driven by this interpersonal relationship.
