Well, Trump has chosen Mattis for
SECDEF which is very good. How well they’ll play together is something else entirely - Mattis is
known for being blunt with his opinions and his foreign policy ideas are at
odds with some things espoused by Trump during the campaign - but how real were
those espoused things if he’s
willing to take on Mattis? And if Mattis is the tough straight shooter he’s certainly shown himself to be
how likely is it he takes the job without some comfort regarding Trump’s general thinking on
foreign policy? But if it works out this is a great pick - sends clear message
to China et al that Obama’s
weak kneed blame America first foreign policy is toast - and good riddance to
it.
On the other hand, with his Carrier ‘deal’ Trump has engaged in some classic left wing top down demand
style crony capitalism, the very thing market based conservative economic
policy is supposed to strongly oppose. If this is a one off PR move that has
the added advantage of confusing the hell out of democrats by co-opting a big
government tactic of theirs but in service of the white working class that has
abandoned them rather than something like ‘green tech’ that
so delights the progressive elite, then it’s not a problem. If this is the first instance of something
that’s about to become
policy, then it’s a
problem. This is not an effective or efficient way to incentivize businesses to
invest in American jobs - and it sends out the misleading notion that all those
manufacturing jobs that have vanished are about to magically return - a notion
like that takes hold and Trump will have backed himself into a nasty little
corner. What happens when a bunch of workers about to lose their jobs to
Mexico or wherever step in front of the TV cameras and demand a similar rescue
from Trump? Trump may have just made the first big mistake of his presidency.
And then there’s that phone call with the president of Taiwan. Only two ways
to look at it - he took the call because neither he nor anyone around to advise
him understood the import of taking that call - or it was a deliberate effort
to send a message. If it’s
the former, not a big deal I think. If it’s the latter, then it begs the question: where do you see
this going? You can’t piss
off China just for the sake of pissing off China - you have to have a strategy,
which I’m doubting there
is one given Trump’s
foreign policy team isn’t
a team yet. I’m guessing
it’s the former - although
you could see a guy like Bannon thinking it ‘clever’ to
piss off China just for the sake of unsettling them a wee bit - and possibly
Trump does see value in it too as some have argued it’s the opening move in an upcoming ‘negotiation’ -
possible I guess.
The call also begs another question -
does the one China policy still make sense? Thirty years ago China didn’t have a booming economy to
protect - and we still hoped that the country could be ‘liberalized’,
something which at this point seems unlikely - so why still try to appease them
by pretending that we don’t
actually view Taiwan as an independent
country? They will be pissed off, sure - but don’t they have too much to lose by going beyond that? The
Taiwanese people clearly see themselves as citizens of an independent country -
where’s the value for us
in continuing to pretend that isn’t
true? China is already trying to incrementally gain hegemonic control over Asia
Pacific, so they can’t
threaten us with that - they don’t
seem to be doing much to stop North Korea’s nuke program, so can’t threaten us with that - it would certainly be counter
productive for them to attempt some ‘economic’ payback - the one thing I
think that they could do that would definitely hurt and be highly destabilizing
is cozy up to Cuba, become Cuba’s
new patron. That would be a serious escalation - indeed, the fact that China
hasn’t already done
something along those lines is probably due to us continuing the look but don’t touch Taiwan policy. Gotta believe Cuba comes into play should we
dump the one China nonsense [good reason, now that Fidel’s gone bye bye, for us to invade the bloody country - make
Marco Rubio caretaker president while the million people who fled Castro’s evil regime return to build
the country anew. I’m only
half joking - seems a certainty that Cuba fits into Beijing’s thinking somehow somewhere
down the road - Trump has expressed admiration for Putin, and don’t think there’s much doubt what ol’ Vlad would do if he
were president of the United States - so why not start off the Trump
administration with an invasion of Cuba - time seems right, and gotta admit it
would send a very unObama like message to all the countries out there that wish
us ill].
