Turnabout intruder

Trump 2.0 America mirror-images China's trade protectionism -- to our detriment

Kirk, the Trumpiest of Star Trek captains … oh, you know what I mean!

It was the last of episodes, it was the worst of episodes:

In the Star Trek episode "Turnabout Intruder," Captain Kirk's former lover, Dr. Janice Lester, uses an ancient alien machine to switch bodies with him. Lester, now in Kirk's body, takes command of the Enterprise, while Kirk is trapped in Lester's body. Kirk must convince his crew that he is the real captain, while Lester tries to maintain her disguise and eliminate Kirk. The episode culminates with Spock discovering the truth and the body swap being reversed when Kirk's body rejects Lester's consciousness.

PERPLEXITYai

Okay, first off, you can just stuff a sock in your bitchy comments about Spock’s Brain being the truly worst episode.

All I will say in reply is:

A rather brilliant bit of analysis by Michael B.G. Froman (gotta like a guy with two middle initials — self-important much?), current chair of the Council on Foreign Relations and former US trade rep under Obama, prodded me to this tortuous Star Trek comparison.

• Lester wanted to be Kirk but she couldn’t because she was trapped in a weak woman’s body!

• Trump wants to be Xi but he can’t because he’s trapped in a weak body politic!

Oh, why can’t I become king and why can’t America become an autocracy? It’s just so unfair …

JANICE: Ohh! I've lost to the captain. I've lost to James Kirk! I want you dead! I want you dead! I want you dead! Oh, I'm never going to be the captain. Never. Kill him.

If I had a nickel for every ex-girlfriend who broke it off with me EXACTLY like that … I would have 5 cents.

Okay, so we’re about four years from any such a dramatic climax, but you get the idea. It’s going to be a scary final episode of Star Trump, who won’t go any more easily into the night than that other attention-hog Shatner.

Here is the gist of Froman’s argument, which I covet:

Tariffs and protectionism, restrictions on investment, measures designed to drive domestic production: Washington’s economic policy suddenly looks an awful lot like Beijing’s policies over the last decade or so—like Chinese policy with American characteristics.

The U.S. strategy of engagement with China was based on the premise that, if the United States incorporated China into the global rules-based system, China would become more like the United States. For decades, Washington lectured Beijing about avoiding protectionism, eliminating barriers to foreign investment, and disciplining the use of subsidies and industrial policy—with only modest success. Still, the expectation was that integration would facilitate convergence.

There has indeed been a fair degree of convergence—just not in the way American policymakers predicted. Instead of China coming to resemble the United States, the United States is behaving more like China. Washington may have forged the open, liberal rules-based order, but China has defined its next phase: protectionism, subsidization, restrictions on foreign investment, and industrial policy. To argue that the United States must reassert its leadership to preserve the rules-based system it established is to miss the point. China’s nationalist state capitalism now dominates the international economic order. Washington is already living in Beijing’s world.

That is one kick-ass opening.

The rest of the article is a bit Foreign Affairs-y in that it bombards you with details and events, but the underlying logic still shines through.

As I argued in America’s New Map:

This is where our national infighting becomes self-destructive: the world is watching how America navigates a future where our leadership is not a given, nor our ideals naturally preeminent. We witness Americans increasingly resenting—even as we increasingly resemble—a globalization originally made in our image but now no longer with our likeness.

A globalization that no longer looks and acts like us is generally perceived along two self-critical lines:

• We were fools to believe we could ever change China!

• We lost globalization!

Designed to self-flagellate, as democracies are won’t to do, neither of these judgments is accurate.

We were not fools and we did change China and — through it — the world for the better. It’s just that China remains stuck in its export-aggressive rising phase BECAUSE it is unable to turn itself over to a middle-class-centric political future like we did across our lengthy Progressive Era, following our own brutal, unequal, rise to the top in the decades previous.

America toyed with all manner of radicalism as this middle class emerged, but we threaded the needle, as I like to say, with the two Roosevelts — Theodore and Franklin.

And you know what? That’s when we became a true superpower in the world.

As long as China remains an autocracy and America remains a democracy, we remain the superior model.

My God! We’re headed right into the Singularity! If anybody thinks that journey can be directed from above, they’re kidding themselves. China still needs to democratize before it can become truly great.

America was basically an oligarchic single-party state from 1790 until about 1840, when you started to have a serious two-party system. Half a century on that score, with slavery to boot.

I still look at modern (as in, post-Mao) China as being only about forty years old at this point, and I still expect it will not be able to exit the 2030s as an autocracy such as it is today. I just don’t see it adjusting enough elsewhere to obviate that necessary political evolution. For now, China’s substantial middle class is sitting on its hands — and its cash, waiting to see how and when a post-Xi universe could possibly come into being. By so constipating China’s political and economic evolution, keeping the nation trapped in its never-ending rising phase, Xi’s eventual departure will unleash the floodgates, much as Putin’s departure will do in Russia.

The record of all-powerful dictators being successfully succeeded by equally powerful dictators is pretty sparse in those modern situations involving significant economic advance. People just end up feeling empowered by all that accomplishment and become intolerant of being treated by the government in a paternalistic fashion. As noted just previously, the modern world favors hyperindividualism — not so much because of culture or civilization being changed but because technology is rewiring our brains and behaviors.

So, no, I reject the self-flagellating bits about how we lost it all in one big gamble with China, just like I reject the blame-America-first stuff on NATO enlargement “forcing” Putin’s aggression. Total bullshit.

In both instances, that’s mostly our self-loathing talking, and democracies love to self-loath, as it is our relief valve (unlike in “eat bitterness” China today).

Of course, it’d be better if we weren’t so heavily armed here in America with all that self-loathing, but that’s another post.