In Trade, as in Foreign Policy, America Goes for ‘Broke’

ALASTAIR CROOKE

In Trade, as in Foreign Policy, America Goes for ‘Broke’

Trump’s Administration is putting its ‘all’ on red on the roulette wheel of a radically leveraged US trade and foreign policy.  It is a bet that a ruthless ‘no prisoners taken’ pursuit of naked US commercial interest can restore American economic hegemony.  But, as Vali Nasr has pointed out in The Atlantic, the radical, scorched-earth leverage now being pursued in Trump’s companion foreign policy lunge is aimed, not just at returning the US to its status quo ante, but is aimed rather at forcing the capitulation of all resistance to US hegemony (whether it is coming from friends, such as Canada, or from the so-called ‘revisionist’ powers and the nuclear states):

“It’s increasingly clear that what Trump hopes to achieve through a maximum-pressure campaign does not align with the vision of his national-security team: Judging by his behavior with Kim Jong Un and his statement on Iran, [Trump’s] goal is to bring North Korea and Iran into diplomatic talks. Members of his team speak as if they’d rather force the countries’ surrender. Pyongyang and Tehran understand this very well.” (emphasis added)

But the crux of it is that when you put ‘all’ on one colour or the other in roulette, you either win big, or lose all.

In trade policy, the earlier US claim to be correcting for ‘unfairness’ in international trade policy is now a sham: The policy is now simply the pursuit of US economic advantage à outrance. The US Department of Commerce, for example, recently  imposed restrictions on 12 Russian corporations that are “acting contrary to the national security, or foreign policy interests of the US.”  None of these twelve, however, have anything to do with Russia’s military sphere, or threaten US ‘security’.  They are simply building a new passenger airliner.

As Arkady Savitsky demonstrates, the real US target is Russian civil aviation: “A closer look at the blacklist, shows the US has sanctioned those who are involved in the production of the Russian civilian airliner Irkut MC-21”.  The MC-21 is a next-generation passenger jet, geared towards the use of composite materials and advanced metal alloys. In short, these sanctions are all about protecting the mercantile advantage of Boeing (rather than US national security) – and undermining the plans to apply the MC-21 technology to the wide-body commercial jet CR929, being co-developed by China and Russia.

Of course, Russia has been determined by the US to be a ‘revisionist power’, but Canada is not. Yet, in the recently announced United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the Canadian government (in the words of the Canadian Globe and Mail) was bullied into signing away a vital part of Canadian sovereignty to the United States:……more here

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