President Joe Biden’s immigration problem isn’t just about policy. It’s that he’s not talking about the issue enough, voters say in a new survey from a Democratic polling firm.

Fifty-eight percent of voters in seven key Electoral College battleground states disapprove of how the president is handling immigration, compared with 32 percent who approve, according to a new swing-state poll from Global Strategy Group first shared with POLITICO. And a majority of voters surveyed, at 52 percent, believe Biden is ignoring problems at the border, while 50 percent said the president is ignoring the situation around undocumented immigrants.

Republicans talk more about immigration than Democrats, and they are trusted more to handle the issue, according to the poll. Both parties get low marks for how they are handling immigration, but Democrats face greater criticism because voters don’t know where the party falls on the issue. Thirty-nine percent of voters trust Biden and Democrats in Congress more on the immigration issue, while 47 percent said they trust Republican lawmakers more.

The new poll — conducted on behalf of immigrant advocacy group Immigration Hub and Voto Latino, a political organization focused on Latino voter turnout — comes three weeks before the administration plans to end Title 42, the Trump-era policy that has allowed border agents to immediately expel millions of migrants on public health grounds for the past three years. Biden administration officials fear a surge at the border upon the policy’s expiration next month and have turned to more restrictive measures to tamp down a record number of migrants fleeing political and economic turmoil.

The White House should seize on the opportunity to get ahead of Republicans’ growing chatter leading up to the May 11 end date, said Beatriz Lopez, Immigration Hub’s chief political and communications officer.

“It’s comms 101. Get ahead of the narrative. Talk about what you’re doing. Talk about what you plan to do,” Lopez said. “But it’s talking about both — not just the border but also what they’re planning to do to protect Dreamers and others who are every bit a part of the American community. That balanced approach is what works with voters.”

The shift in border policy is expected to be a major political test for the Biden White House, which has rolled out a patchwork of solutions to combat a growing humanitarian crisis at the southern border. The Biden administration is also dealing with a gridlocked Congress, although lawmakers have long been unable to compromise on how to fix an outdated immigration system.

“The fact is that in the 820 days since he sent Congress a comprehensive immigration reform bill, President Biden has taken unprecedented action to expand lawful immigration pathways, limit unlawful immigration, protect Dreamers and farmworkers, and increase border security. Because of this administration’s work, unlawful immigration is down, legal immigration is up, we’ve got record funds for border security, and thousands of smugglers are now off the streets,” White House spokesperson Abdullah Hasan said in a statement.

“Meanwhile, all that House Republicans have managed to ‘accomplish’ since taking their (slim) majority is voting to abruptly lift Title 42 overnight with no plan in place for what comes next, proposing draconian funding cuts to border security, and playing partisan political games that do nothing to actually fix our long-broken immigration system.”

House Republicans unveiled immigration legislation this week, with plans to further restrict asylum, expand family detention and crack down on the employment of undocumented workers. The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to mark up the bill Wednesday, though the measure has little chance of making it through the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) also unveiled a plan on Tuesday that relies on the White House taking executive action to address immigration. He shared his plan with the White House and other federal agencies, with ideas for creating new pathways to citizenship, increasing humanitarian aid for certain countries, increasing border security funding and expanding efforts to target human traffickers.

Menendez’s suggestions come as the Biden administration prepares for a spike in border crossings come May, already the busiest time of year for migration. In addition to relying on more stringent immigration proposals to restrict entry to asylum-seeking migrants, the administration has discussed reinstating the detention of migrant families — drawing great backlash from immigration advocates, lawyers and Democrats.

More than eight-in-10 voters in the poll — 82 percent — believe the immigration system is broken, and they want to see both enhanced border security and policies that provide a pathway to citizenship, such as work permits for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, and Temporary Protected Status for other migrants.

Sixty-five percent of respondents have a positive view of “modernizing and improving the physical infrastructure at high-volume ports of entry to enhance screening and processing,” while 76 percent want Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S. to gain legal status if certain requirements are met, including background checks. Sixty-four percent of voters back the Biden administration using its TPS authority.

“Voters disapprove of the job both parties are doing on immigration because they see the system as deeply broken and in desperate need of a fix,” said Nick Gourevitch, partner and managing director at Global Strategy Group. “Recent polling shows voters clearly want Washington to act with solutions that are balanced — that include both border security and pathways to citizenship and legal status for Dreamers and other immigrants.”

The Biden administration announced plans last week to expand health care coverage to recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but great concern remains about the fate of the popular Obama-era program, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children to receive work permits and deportation relief. After a flurry of court challenges, advocates and legal experts warn the program is headed to the Supreme Court, where the conservative bench seems likely to rule it illegal.

The online poll surveyed 1,201 likely 2024 general election voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin between April 4-11. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.8 points.

Source: Politico

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Growth in Latin America is projected to slow to 1.6 percent this year after a remarkable 4 percent in 2022. Price pressures that accompanied last year’s brisk economic activity appear to have peaked, but underlying inflation remains stubbornly high, disproportionally hurting low-income households who spend most of their earnings on food. To mitigate the risk that inflation becomes entrenched, fiscal policy can help monetary policy in reducing demand pressures.

After peaking at 10 percent in mid-2022, headline inflation in the largest Latin American economies has slowed to 7 percent in March. However, this drop mostly reflects the fall of commodity prices from their peaks. Progress in bringing down core inflation, which excludes food and energy, appears to have stalled. Labor markets are tight, with employment firmly above its pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, output is at or above potential, and short-term inflation expectations exceed central banks’ target ranges. Strong domestic demand, rapid wage increases, and broad-based price pressures all point to a risk that inflation in the region could remain unacceptably high.

Tempering demand to tame price pressures

While most countries in the region have made important strides in price stability in the last two decades, the region’s history is full of examples of how high inflation can destabilize the economy and fuel inequality by hurting vulnerable groups most.

Restoring price stability is paramount to a healthy economy and protecting the most vulnerable. In the current juncture, this requires slowing domestic demand. With inflation—and especially core inflation—running considerably above target and economies operating above potential, policymakers no longer face the macroeconomic trade-off of 2021 and early 2022, when fighting inflation was at odds with the need to support the recovery from the pandemic. Policies should be aimed at restraining demand to bring it back into line with potential output. This will inevitably require cooling the labor market.

Decisive central bank rate increases have already done the heavy lifting. Furthermore, the recent financial stresses in some advanced economies could lead to tighter global financial conditions, which will further help cool demand. Given the usual lags between interest rate increases and their effect on economic activity, the full impact of the tightening that has already been undertaken should be seen most clearly during the course of this year, contributing to slower growth this year.

However, with inflationary pressures proving persistent, central banks will need to remain resolute in their fight until there is an unambiguous downward path for prices. Interest rates will likely need to remain high for much of this year and, in some cases, even into next year. This will guide inflation back to target by late 2024 or early 2025.

A more balanced policy mix

To assist central banks in their battle against inflation, fiscal policy could play a bigger role through a more countercyclical stance this year. As recent IMF research shows, fiscal tightening makes it possible for central banks to increase rates by less to bring down inflation.

The fiscal stimulus of 2020, which was essential to support economies during the pandemic, has been mostly withdrawn, but fiscal policy this year is expected to be broadly neutral in most countries. A more contractionary fiscal stance would help slow domestic demand, allowing interest rates to start coming down sooner. This would reduce potential financial stability risks from keeping interest rates higher for longer and help to bring down public debt levels, creating more policy space to respond to the next economic shock. That is, a more balanced policy mix would improve the prospects of taming inflation and reducing the risks of a recession.

Rebalancing policy will not be easy. Demands for social spending in the region are high. There are serious distributional and social equity issues to contend with. Enacting tax policies that require the wealthy to pay their fair share should be part of the solution.

But policymakers will also need to find savings without cutting into key social programs or spending on health, education, and public infrastructure. There is important scope to reduce inefficiencies in public spending, and people are more likely to embrace more prudent public finances if services are provided with greater efficiency. Being good stewards of taxpayer resources could also help reverse the erosion of trust in government that many countries have suffered over the last several years.

This agenda is challenging, but restoring price stability is paramount to protecting the poor and durably addressing social demands. Relying more on fiscal policy in taming inflation makes sense from a macroeconomic perspective and, if policies are well-designed, can be achieved in a socially equitably way.

Source: International Monetary Fund

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In this Nov. 30, 2005 file photo, an anti-abortion supporter stands next to a pro-choice demonstrator outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Yesterday, Australian Outlook (a publication of the Australian Institute for International Affairs), published my article on “Abortion and Foot Voting in a Post-Dobbs America.” It’s the first in a series of two pieces on the question of whether people are likely to “vote with their feet” based on state variations in abortion policy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade last year. Here is an excerpt:

In June 2022, the US Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision holding that abortion is a protected constitutional right. In the aftermath of Dobbs, numerous conservative “red states” with Republican Party-controlled state governments enacted legislation severely restricting abortion or restored old abortion restrictions that had been blocked by Roe. By contrast, multiple Democratic-controlled “blue” states strengthened abortion rights.

More than at any other time in American history, we now have massive variation in abortion rights between states. That situation raises many issues, one of which is to what extent people will “vote with their feet” for the abortion regime they prefer. If they do, it’s possible that pro-life states will experience a “brain drain,” as high-skilled workers decamp for greener pastures. The answer to this question will only become clear over a period of several years.

For now, I tentatively predict that Dobbs will result in only modestly expanded foot voting in the sense of people permanently moving from one state to another. That is largely because many women seeking abortions can still get them through less costly forms of foot voting, such as getting an abortion in another state or getting a “medication” abortion using drugs ordered by mail. But the situation could potentially change, for reasons I will cover in part two of this series….

In some ways, severe abortion restrictions resemble the kinds of oppression and economic privation that have historically led to large-scale foot voting. An unwanted pregnancy can be a severe burden, and sometimes even a serious threat to a woman’s health. But many women have alternative, lower-cost options for avoiding that burden. I take “my body, my choice” further than most, and therefore believe most abortion restrictions are unjust. But that does not tell us how many people will vote with their feet to avoid them….

The combination of contraception, mail-order abortion pills, and travelling to get abortions out of state seems likely to keep abortion-drive migration low. This is particularly true in the case of more affluent, higher-educated women, who are especially well-positioned to take advantage of these options. For that reason, abortion-driven “brain drain” scenarios seem unlikely to occur on a large scale.

In a sense, these alternatives are actually lower-cost forms of foot voting than interstate migration. In my book Free to Move, I describe how private-sector alternatives to public services and government policies often function as a cheaper form of foot voting, with lower moving costs. Private-sector foot voting can help reduce the impact of state abortion restrictions, too.

I also briefly consider the little-discussed possibility that pro-lifers might leave “blue” states out of opposition to the pro-choice policies of the latter; I conclude this is unlikely to happen on any significant scale.

In the second article in this series, I will consider some factors that might lead to more abortion-drive migration than I currently expect.

This article is my first-ever in an Australian publication. I am a little surprised that they would ask me to write about this particular issue. But the US debate over abortion has attracted widespread attention around the world.

I have previously written about abortion and foot voting here and here.

Source: Reason

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President Joe Biden and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday announced a new migration deal as part of Biden’s first visit to America’s northern neighbor.

The new agreement will allow Canada to send migrants who cross at unofficial ports of entry at America’s northern border back to the U.S., a change to the Safe Third Country Agreement long-sought by Canada.

The U.S. will also be able to turn back asylum seekers who travel across the border from Canada.

In return, Canada has agreed to allow 15,000 more people from the Western Hemisphere to migrate to Canada legally.

Biden officially announced the new policy agreement as he delivered remarks to the Canadian Parliament, saying he applauded Canada for “stepping up with similar programs opening new legal pathways” to migrants.

“At the same time, the United States and Canada will work together to discourage unlawful border crossing and fully implement the updated Safe Third Country Agreement,” Biden said.

During a joint news conference with Biden, the Canadian prime minister emphasized working with the U.S. to “keep our people safe.”

“Keeping people safe also includes keeping asylum seekers safe, keeping our borders secure and keeping our immigration strong,” Trudeau said. “Both of our countries believe in safe, fair and orderly migration, refugee protection and border security.”

Trudeau said authorities will enforce the agreement beginning at midnight Friday.

The Bidens arrived in Canada on Thursday, and were welcomed by Trudeau and his wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau at their residence in Ottawa.

The U.S.-Canada relationship was strained during the previous administration as Trudeau and former President Donald Trump clashed on a number of issues, including trade and immigration. But the alliance has since mended under Biden.

Trudeau touched on the “challenging times” the two nations faced, noting the last time Biden appeared in the room for a joint press conference he was the outgoing vice president.

“I have to say through our conversations back then, through the work we have been able to do over these past two years, it has truly been an honor to be able to work with you for the benefit of Canadians and Americans, but also to continue to have a positive impact on the world in a very uncertain time,” Trudeau said.

Biden, too, praised the U.S.-Canada alliance, saying the two countries will “always will have each other’s backs.”

Biden began the day on Parliament Hill for an official welcome and meetings with Trudeau, Canada’s Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and others.

In the evening, Biden and first lady Jill Biden will attend a gala dinner hosted by the Trudeaus at the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa before departing for Wilmington, Delaware.

Source: ABC News

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In a conversation Tuesday with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts on “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast, Kara Frederick discussed what TikTok’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party mean for the everyday American ahead of the TikTok CEO’s appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday.  

“It’s extremely problematic, because that parent company, ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing, is subject to the People’s Republic of China laws and policies,” Frederick said.  

Almost 70% of American teenagers use TikTok. Though the content teenagers scroll through masquerades as harmless short videos, many of the videos contain content fueling self-harm, suicidal ideation, eating disorders, and more, Frederick said.  

“It’d be bad enough if China weren’t involved,” Roberts said. “The fact that China is involved makes it that much worse.”  

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will be asked to answer some tough questions in the House hearing on Thursday, Frederick said, noting that TikTok’s PR strategies have attempted to downplay the platform’s relationship with China.  

“We can talk all day about the noxious content on these platforms,” Frederick said. “But when China can actually have a mapping of the patterns of life and a network of Americans, especially these young children, then you have a hard security problem, as well as the cognitive ones.” 

Frederick hopes the hearing shows everyday Americans that TikTok is a perfidious enemy.  

“If Americans, in watching this, can emerge with the knowledge that this platform is essentially under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party, ByteDance, I think that’s a win,” she said. “If they can communicate to their children that this is not just harmful to us, this is not just something that you do for fun, this is an adversary competitor, an actual enemy trying to get your information and preventing you from doing what you want to do with a child in the future anyway, because of the blackmail potential, the espionage potential.”  

As a new mother, Frederick said she worries about how TikTok is changing the social fabric of our nation and hurting children, especially young girls. She said parents need to be on board with opposing TikTok.  

“We are going to lose the next generation of citizens if they are captured by these platforms,” she said.  

Source: The Daily Signal

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On Thursday, a drone attack on a U.S. base in northeastern Syria served as the latest reminder that the United States remains at war in Syria and U.S. personnel are at risk. The drone attack, which U.S. intelligence swiftly concluded was of “Iranian origin,” killed one U.S. contractor and wounded six others, including five U.S. service members. In response, President Joe Biden ordered the U.S. military to carry out precision airstrikes against facilities belonging to groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing eight fighters. The tit-for-tat escalation continued into Friday morning, when “lots of rockets” were fired at a different U.S. base in Syria, this time in the southeast of the country, though no casualties were reported.

This is not the first time that U.S. personnel have been targeted in Syria—and it is unlikely to be the last. American soldiers have no shortage of enemies in the country and have faced regular attacks since they arrived more than seven years ago. What began as a U.S. regime change effort against the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has since morphed into an open-ended confrontation—where the official mission of suppressing the Islamic State has obscured U.S. efforts to counter Russia and Iran. These ambiguous objectives have ensured that the United States is no closer to leaving Syria than it was when it first put boots on the ground.

Americans in Syria are confronting real dangers. According to the Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s Iran Projectile Tracker, Iran-backed militias have targeted U.S. service members with at least seventy-two munitions since 2017 (not including this week’s attacks), with more than 90 percent of those occurring in the last two years. Notably, this data does not include attacks by the Syrian government or Russia-backed forces, including the infamous Wagner Group, which launched a daring, massive assault on about forty American commandos in 2018 that left 200 to 300 of the attackers dead. Nor does it account for the Russian military’s harassment of Americans in Syria. Just last week, the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Michael Kurilla, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Russian Air Force has increasingly been flying over the positions of U.S. troops in a “provocative” manner. This behavior has also occurred on the ground: Russian troops have rammed U.S. convoys and, as an inspector general report to Congress recently found, “increased their violations” of agreed-upon deconfliction arrangements.

The Biden administration has vowed to continue defending the 900 U.S. service members in Syria for as long as they remain in the country—an apparently indefinite timeframe. Despite Biden moving to end or drawdown the United States’ other “endless wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, this policy has not been extended to Syria. Rather, Washington is ostensibly committed to fighting ISIS and pressuring the Assad regime, which continues to be squeezed by a robust, U.S.-directed sanctions regime.

Yet Washington is certainly aware that Damascus is not as isolated as it once was. Regional rapprochement with Syria is already in full swing; not only have the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Oman opened their doors to the Syrian government, but even Turkey and Saudi Arabia, once Assad’s fiercest enemies, are looking to reconcile.

Coming on the heels of a Chinese-brokered agreement that codified Saudi Arabia’s détente with Iran, the emerging Saudi-Syrian peace deal stands to further shift Middle Eastern geopolitics. If successful, Moscow’s assistance in restoring Riyadh and Damascus’ diplomatic ties after a decade of war will be a remarkable victory for another U.S. adversary—as well as for the entire region. In this regard, it will further impress upon regional elites that they have options beyond America to advance their political and security objectives.

Indeed, it is China and Russia—America’s so-called “great power competitors”—whose regional policies are now helping to stabilize the Middle East and support U.S. interests. China portrays itself as a friend to all and an enemy to none, allowing Beijing to position itself as an honest intermediary that can address the region’s problems in ways Washington cannot. Russia, too, is seen as a dependable partner—one that has stood by its Syrian ally through thick and thin—and an interlocutor that has proven its sensitivity to the needs of capitals as different as Damascus, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Tehran.

In contrast, the U.S. record is more troubled. It was the United States that invaded Iraq twenty years ago this week, unleashing chaos and violence across the region. It was also Washington that unilaterally blew up the international nuclear agreement with Iran—after the Obama administration had dragged its regional allies kicking and screaming to support the accord—setting Tehran on a glide path toward a nuclear weapons capability and increasing tensions in the Persian Gulf. The United States subsequently declined to defend Saudi Arabia and its Arab partners from Iran’s escalation in 2019 (ironically prompting Riyadh to later reconcile with Tehran), to say nothing of the fact that Washington has vacillated between pulling out of and leaning into the region across the last three presidential administrations.

Yet despite these doubts about U.S. reliability, and Washington’s concerns about perceived challenges from Russia and China, the United States must check its knee-jerk tendency to interpret all Russian and Chinese actions as coming at its expense. The Middle East is big enough for the United States, Russia, and China, especially since Beijing has a significant stake in regional stability so it can continue importing the region’s energy resources. The U.S. role in the region, as the UAE and Saudi Arabia continue to make clear, is not going away, but it is changing. Washington, therefore, needs to recognize that it should not and cannot try to do it all in the Middle East. Instead, it must reassess where its efforts can make the most positive difference, and where its most vital national interests truly lie.

Source: National Interest

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As Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed an agreement to strengthen their alliance, U.S. Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) – a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence – spoke on the Senate Floor to warn against China’s threat to American democracy, peace and prosperity.

“The Chinese Communist Party led by Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader of the CCP since Chairman Mao, is on a determined, calculated mission to overtake the United States in fields that will shape the 21st century,” said Sen. Moran. “Beijing is intent that, rather than the United States of America influencing world events in a way that favors and bends towards our principles of a free and open world, they bend towards China’s authoritarian model.”

Sen. Moran outlined key areas the U.S. must prioritize and strengthen to protect national security:

• Ensure our military has the resources it needs to deter China and its partners
• Vigilance in protecting the southern border
• Prioritize U.S. manufacturing
• Educate a technically skilled workforce
• Produce critical food, tech,  energy and medicine in the U.S.
• Maintain a strong U.S. economy through trade
• Increase support for allies and partners in the INDO-PACIFIC

Remarks as prepared:

“This month, during this year’s first open hearing for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, national security and military leaders gave a worldwide threat assessment of our country and our way of life.

“They described threats to our homeland, to our key allies, to trading routes, to data privacy, and to our infrastructure, including crucial space assets.

“There was a common theme in the concerns we heard from our military and national security leaders, but also from what I have heard across Kansas and the country.

“The People’s Republic of China is our greatest foreign threat to democracy, peace and prosperity.

“At no time in my life have I been more concerned about the enormity of the challenges facing this country.

“The Chinese Communist Party led by Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader of the CCP since Chairman Mao, is on a determined, calculated mission to overtake the United States in fields that will shape the 21st century. Beijing is intent that, rather than the United States of America influencing world events in a way that favors and bends towards our principles of a free and open world, they bend towards China’s authoritarian model.

“China, and its supporters, would move away from the principles that have advanced global prosperity– and towards the basic principle that underwrites autocratic authority where the weaker are destined to be ruled by the stronger.

“We have seen this play out with China’s political, economic, and direct provision of non-lethal support to Russia as Russia wages an unprovoked war on Ukraine.

“China operates the world’s most advanced techno-surveillance state that consolidates power by monitoring, controlling, and subjugating their people. And they are engaged in an ambitious plan to export this model and the means of accomplishing it beyond their border.

“They want media, big Tech, sports teams, and business to toe the CCP line, to be ignorant of – or at least be silent – on the gross violations of basic human decency that occurred and occur in Xinjiang province, Hong Kong, and elsewhere in their response to COVID.

“The CCP pursues a world, including America, under the thumb of their power. 

“In a speech in April 2020, Xi noted his intentions to increase global supply chain dependencies on China, with an aim of controlling key supply chains and being able to then use those supply chain dependencies to threaten and cut off foreign countries during a crisis.

“As of the latest Worldwide Threat Assessment, China produces 40% of the world’s key vaccines and medicinal ingredients, and by 2025 is on track to control 65% of the important lithium-ion battery market – used in phones and cars – and fabrication of almost 1 in 5 semiconductors in the world.

“They don’t want the twenty-first century to be another American-led century. They want it to be a century that witnesses the replacement of America leadership with leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

“Two-thirds of global trade flows by ocean through the region around the South Pacific –what the Department of Defense calls the INDO-PACIFIC. The goods that Americans export, and the imports that they depend on require safe and reliable trade.

“For decades the United States Military have kept the oceans and airways safe and secure. By those means Americans have kept the global commons safe to the benefit of our own peace and prosperity.

“When America is militarily strong and our sovereignty secure, we can shape and influence the terms of international commerce. The way we do business is the standard, and that reflects our principles and leaves our fingerprints on the world.

“Maintaining a strong U.S. economy requires trade agreements with partners who adhere to agreed-upon rules ranging from market access to the protection of intellectual property. Our failure to participate in such agreements or update them to meet the realities of the 21st century opens the door to Chinese influence.

“It is to our benefit and that of our trading partners to tie more of the world to the US and its economy and reap the benefits of vibrant international trade.

“A stable Europe in which we coordinate closely with our partners on military and economic challenges is necessary to thwart China’s rising influence.

“America remains a coalescing force in Europe, and our contributions have been essential to supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s aggression.

“With our continued assistance and increasing European leadership and resources Ukraine will be able to push back Russian forces and preserve its sovereignty.

“Our commitment to NATO remains resolute and any threat to its territory will be met decisively.

“Our intelligence community assesses it will take years for Russia to rebuild its conventional military capabilities. NATO allies must use this window to strengthen their defenses and assume more responsibility for their security as we necessarily increase support for allies and partners in the INDO-PACIFIC.

“Yet we cannot ignore the Russian threat that remains. Russia possesses a massive nuclear arsenal and Moscow has significant cyber, antisatellite, and underwater capabilities.

“Strikingly, China views Russia as an essential partner in the struggle against democratic values.

“As I speak now, President Xi is in Moscow meeting with President Putin, strengthening the relationship in pursuit of offering an alternative to American leadership.

“The threats to American freedom, security and prosperity are not all from foreign militaries.

“We also require vigilance at our border, all states are border states when we fail to enforce this nation’s geographic sovereignty. There is no nation without borders. And perhaps there is no greater tragic effect of our current open border policy than the fentanyl and other drugs – sent from China to Mexico – coming across the borders.

“We also must produce and manufacture goods in the United States. The United States cannot be reliant on our adversaries for critical supplies, medicine, food, technology or energy.

“We have to learn from our earlier mistakes discovered during the COVID pandemic. This includes prioritizing American manufacturing, and educating a technically skilled workforce – and that is why we must fully implement the CHIPS and Science Act that was signed into law last year.

“A democratically and economically stronger America will be a more appealing America. It is not enough to enlist and maintain the support of wealthy democracies in our vision of a free and open world. Our diplomats must compete to convince countries that have grown skeptical of American leadership that we have not lost our way. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has written… “we must better communicate the good that we do.” This includes our generosity to countries after natural disasters and our support in fighting global hunger.

“We have many challenges in our nation, but if we can have the eyes to see the thread that runs through many of them, we will recognize that we have a determined adversary in the Chinese Communist Party who has been waging this new Cold War.

“Our domestic disagreements run deep. But the myriad challenges that we face from abroad should help us see that we need to work together to urgently address the threats we face.

“We have a great inheritance. We live in a nation founded on the principles of human equality. We understand basic rights come from God and not government but that the government is instituted by the people to secure and preserve those rights.

“When America is strong and secure, we ensure Americans are free and prosperous.

“I will remain committed to this effort and have a renewed determination to work with any and all of my colleagues to steward this privilege and responsibility we have been given by the people of our states, so that this century remains an American century with liberty and human well-being secured around the globe.”

Source: Moran Senate

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Is Ron DeSantis a traditional or MAGA-style Republican on foreign policy? The answer, increasingly, is “yes.”

He’s dropped hints about how he sees the world in books, speeches, interviews and written statements. China is the main threat facing the United States. Prioritizing Ukraine’s defense against Russia distracts from domestic problems. And Washington elites are often disastrous on foreign policy, preaching a globalism that ignores the will of the voter.

But in stating these views, DeSantis uses language ripped from both Republican tradition and the Donald Trump hymnal. It has confused observers who wonder how the former lawmaker and current Florida governor would conduct U.S. foreign policy from the Oval Office.

DeSantis’ team didn’t return requests for comment about his worldview. But Christina Pushaw, a DeSantis ally, noted that as the leader of Florida, the world’s 13th largest economy, “he meets with world leaders and policy experts all the time. He consumes a lot of information and is very much hands-on in terms of policy.”

Those around DeSantis say the former Navy lawyer who deployed to Guantanamo Bay and Iraq is still soaking in information, reading as much as he can on national security issues. DeSantis doesn’t yet have a coterie of formal foreign policy advisers, but that’s expected to come after he officially declares his candidacy for president.

What can be gleaned so far is this: DeSantis promotes U.S. strength in the world, but with limits on when to engage and with a prioritization to fixing problems at home. The result is this: Go big and stay home.

In foreign-policy-speak, he’s not a “Wilsonian” seeking to remake the world in America’s image, but he’s not fully a populist “Jacksonian,” either. And by walking that middle line, he could gain the advantage in 2024 over other Republican candidates who fit more firmly into one category or the other.

As a House Foreign Affairs Committee member from 2017 to 2019, DeSantis took vintage Republican positions that made defense hawks and traditionalists rejoice. He supported sending lethal aid to Ukraine and labeled himself part of the “Reagan school that’s tough on Russia.” He voted to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. He praised Trump’s diplomatic outreach to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He told then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs that Barack Obama’s push for an Iran nuclear deal persuaded Sunni Arabs to join the Islamic State.

But in the House, he occasionally flicked at a belief that America should refrain from delving into global matters of war and peace until a clear plan was in place to secure U.S. interests. His thoughts are with service members, not the elites who want to send them into battle.

“I constantly hear people say Americans are war weary, and I disagree with that. I think Americans are willing to do what it takes to defend our people and our nation,” he said during a 2014 floor debate about how the U.S. could defeat the Islamic State. “They are weary of missions launched without a coherent strategy and are sick of seeing engagements that produce inconclusive results rather than clear-cut victory.”

DeSantis argued against arming Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar Assad for that reason. “They cannot be counted on to vindicate our interests,” he said in that address, adding “there are no shortcuts when it comes to our national defense.”

Plenty in the Republican old-guard argue DeSantis is playing politics. Whether he firmly holds these views or is angling for votes, his approach could be a winning one in 2024. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Americans don’t vote on foreign policy, but with the war in Ukraine unlikely to end soon and the increasing threats from China, this could be one cycle where the electorate is thinking more about the world.

The average Republican voter wants a leader who focuses on the physical defense of the United States and extracts the nation from unnecessary or counterproductive foreign entanglements. They are less interested in solving others’ issues or values promotion. DeSantis’ statements and positions broaden his appeal within the party and segments of the trans-partisan anti-war movement.

DeSantis has often cited the work of Angelo Codevilla, a conservative, Jacksonian-minded scholar who argued that the U.S. government was dangerously run by an unelected liberal ruling class that spurned popular sentiment. These officials hampered America’s policies at home and abroad, Codevilla argued, and his disdain for bureaucrats remains alive and well with DeSantis.

“The United States has been increasingly captive to an arrogant, stale, and failed ruling class,” DeSantis wrote in his book, “The Courage to be Free.” The elites, he continued, helped China rise by giving the country “most favored nation” trade status; “supported military adventurism around the world without clear objectives or prospect for victory” and “weaponized the national security apparatus by manufacturing the Russian collusion conspiracy theory.”

It sounds like Trump’s “deep state” complaint. But where Trump says that bureaucracy thwarts his designs — though he would often listen to them — DeSantis says this ruling class ignores what everyday Americans want. The Florida governor effectively vows not to listen to the professionals who have championed the Iraq war, opened trade with China and launched ill-fated democracy promotion projects.

When DeSantis’ skepticism of D.C. elites aligns with Trump, there’s an air of “We told you so.”

The governor told conservative host Glenn Beck last week about a trip he took to Tel Aviv as Trump considered moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. DeSantis said he asked State Department and CIA officials there what would happen if the then-president went through with it. “World War III, World War III, World War III,” he heard back.

Deadly violence did erupt after Trump moved the mission, but the apocalyptic predictions didn’t come true. DeSantis subsequently expressed deep skepticism at the experts running U.S. foreign policy. “They’re just entrenched and they have groupthink,” he told Beck.

DeSantis has made support for Israel central to his foreign policy, traveling there four times as a member of Congress and governor. He moved to stop companies from boycotting Israel and suggested working on a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians isn’t worth the effort.

“[Americans] are weary of missions launched without a coherent strategy and are sick of seeing engagements that produce inconclusive results rather than clear-cut victory.”

 Then-Rep. Ron DeSantis in a 2014 floor debate

DeSantis further criticized opponents of Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in that interview. Without ending U.S. involvement in the pact, he said, the Abraham Accords — the normalization agreements between Israel and Arab-majority states — would never have happened.

But the governor, by virtue of the state he leads, has sounded like a pre-Trump Republican on Latin American politics. He’s a critic of the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes, boosting dissidents’ calls for weakening their autocratic left-wing governments. Last July, he accused President Joe Biden of failing “to assist the Cuban people in their fight for freedom.”

DeSantis did, however, send Venezuelan asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard last year, an effort aligned with Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott to place the burdens of immigration on Democratic states that critics derided as a political stunt.

The foreign policy position that has received the most attention is how the governor thinks about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At first glance, it seems like he’s siding with Trump, but he comes at it differently, aligning himself with Kyiv’s plight while mindful of the toll U.S. commitment to the conflict could take at home and on global security.

DeSantis wrote in his statement to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that “without question, peace should be the objective.” It was an argument that the danger was delving deeper into the “territorial dispute” between Ukraine and Russia. Sending F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles, “would risk explicitly drawing the United States into the conflict and drawing us closer to a hot war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. That risk is unacceptable.”

But DeSantis expanded on his answer in an interview a week later with Piers Morgan in which he struck more traditional Republican notes: Ukraine has “the right to that territory … If I could snap my fingers, I’d give it back to Ukraine 100 percent.” Putin, he continued, “is a war criminal” and “he should be held accountable.”

Just last year, DeSantis boasted about helping to get funding while in Congress for “a lot of weapons for Ukraine to be able to defend themselves.”

But DeSantis’ thinking has certainly been shifting in a more populist direction.

“It’s been a slow reorientation of foreign policy on the right,” said David Reaboi, a fellow at the Claremont Institute who has spoken informally with DeSantis about national security issues. “We ended up walking away from what should be our basic concern: the immediate security and needs of the American people.”

Likely future opponents are hammering the argument that it’s all for show. “President Trump is right when he says Governor DeSantis is copying him — first in his style, then on entitlement reform, and now on Ukraine,” Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador who has officially entered the presidential race, said following DeSantis’ Ukraine statement.

Allies note DeSantis is focused on the same issues as other leading Republicans: curbing China’s aggression in the military, economic and technological arenas, securing the U.S.-Mexico border and ending the scourge of fentanyl.

Where he distinguishes himself from some other 2024 hopefuls is he’d rather restrict the nation’s resources to tackling those challenges — because they most immediately reflect the needs of everyday Americans — instead of policing the world or opening the political space in other nations for small-d democrats to flourish.

As DeSantis put it in his book: “Does the survival of American liberty depend on whether liberty succeeds in Djibouti?”

Source: Politico

The post What the World looks like to Ron DeSantis appeared first on Policy Print.

US imperialism in Latin America has had a devastating impact on the region over the past two centuries. It has also profoundly shaped US domestic politics during the same period. Historian Greg Grandin discusses this squalid history in his book Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic.

According to Grandin, Latin America has consistently been the place where the United States has developed its strategies for dominance on the world stage while enabling specific power blocs to cohere within the domestic political system. Washington either orchestrated or provided key support for dozens of successful regime-change efforts in Latin American states. US intervention has been so frequent that it has become normalized and almost invisible.

Grandin sat down with Daniel Denvir, host of Jacobin podcast The Dig, in June 2021 to discuss the arguments of Empire’s Workshop. You can listen to the conversation here. The following excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.

How has the long history of US intervention in Latin America shaped the development of American empire?

Over the course of two centuries, Latin America has been a workshop for the United States in a number of ways. First of all, it was able to try out different things in the region — not just new military tactics but also legal precedents to justify military intervention. It was the place where the United States first projected its power.

When we think about Latin America today, we see it as starting on the US-Mexico border that was drawn on the map after the war in the 1840s. But Latin America had previously extended much further north, covering the space between the Mississippi River and the Pacific. Before Mexico gained its independence, that territory had been part of the Spanish Empire.

The region also served as a workshop for the United States in terms of forging coalitions during moments of political realignment, from Andrew Jackson to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Latin America was the unacknowledged linchpin for those coalitions. It was the place where different constituencies came together and developed a sense of themselves as a class or as a bloc of classes.Latin America was the place where the United States first projected its power.

Some political scientists argue that the United States has largely managed to contain social conflict within its party system — apart from the Civil War, of course. That system has evolved over time, with major realignments that bring to power new political coalitions made up of various constituencies through one of the two parties that are governing at the time. I find that argument interesting, and it explains a lot, but its advocates don’t look at the role of foreign policy.

We have to remember that the United States is an exceptional nation. No other country in the world has had the same opportunities for almost limitless expansion, beginning with the territorial drive toward the west and south. This gave rise to the idea that domestic social problems could be resolved by continuous outward growth. Latin America was indispensable for that.

What kind of ugly legal precedents did the United States set in Latin America?

In 1854, for example, a US gunboat destroyed Greytown in Nicaragua — leveled it to the ground. That was part of a competitive struggle with Britain over an international trade route. The US courts upheld the legitimacy of the bombardment as a presidential prerogative. There was an accumulation of precedents like that, often worked out quietly in low-level courts, that are still being cited in our own time.

During the war in Mexico, the United States had a small standing army, so it relied on volunteers. Any state could raise a volunteer force and it would be under the army’s nominal command. Those volunteers committed terrible atrocities: rape, destruction of churches, desecration of cemeteries. Things got to be so bad that General Winfield Scott asked Congress for the authority to set up military courts to judge the perpetrators.

This meant that Scott had extraordinary power to set up those tribunals in another country that was being administered by the US army. The US government then cited that precedent after 9/11 as a justification for holding enemy combatants in Guantanamo. The accretion of precedents like that gave the executive a freer hand when it came to foreign policy.

What made FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy such a radical departure from the prior history of US intervention in Latin America?

It was a radical revision of international law in general, which was based on the idea of conquest and the right of great powers to send troops in to protect their interests against any perceived threats.

From the nineteenth century, a cohort of jurists, statesman, and political theorists in Latin America argued that you could remake international law in the Americas so that it was based on a presumption of solidarity and mutual interests. From that perspective, the immediate priority was to induce the United States to abandon its claimed right to intervene in the affairs of Latin American countries whenever it wanted to. US officials resisted this agenda for a long time.

However, by the 1930s, the US had the experience of being bogged down in unwinnable counterinsurgencies in countries like Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It was governing Cuba as a neo-colony via the Platt Amendment, which Washington had inserted into the Cuban Constitution.The US government cited a precedent from the nineteenth-century war in Mexico as a justification for holding enemy combatants in Guantanamo.

That amendment gave the United States the right to intervene whenever it wanted, which it did several times. By 1939, it was clear that this approach was doing nothing to consolidate US power in Latin America and was in fact radicalizing the hemisphere and generating antagonism toward the United States.

When Roosevelt gave his inaugural address as president, in 1933, it was overwhelmingly focused on domestic policy, with just one paragraph on foreign affairs. He introduced the idea of a “good neighbor” approach in that paragraph, not specifically in relation to Latin America but as a general approach toward the rest of the world.

There weren’t many places where FDR could put that vision into effect. Militarists were on the march in Asia and fascists were gathering strength in Europe. Even US allies in Europe were tightening their grip over their colonies. The Roosevelt administration turned to Latin America, and Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, went to Montevideo for the seventh Pan-American Conference in November 1933.

Hull was a Jacksonian Democrat from Tennessee who had fought in the Spanish-American War in 1898. He was accompanied by Ernest Gruening, an editor at the Nation who was a staunch anti-imperialist. Gruening urged Hull to accept the principle of nonintervention. At the conference, Hull conceded to the Latin Americans on a host of issues. Most importantly, he said that the United States would recognize the absolute sovereignty of Latin American states in their domestic and foreign affairs.

Roosevelt withdrew all US forces from the region and abrogated the Platt Amendment in Cuba. He began to tolerate a significant degree of economic nationalism in countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Bolivia. All of this created enormous goodwill and allowed Hull to sign a series of bilateral free-trade agreements.

That in turn helped the United States to climb out of the Great Depression and get ready for World War II. This process of opening up Latin American markets also enabled Roosevelt to build ties with a modernizing corporate bloc around pharmaceuticals, energy, and electronics that became the business ballast of the New Deal coalition.

What role did the Mexican Revolution and its legacies play in the development of the Good Neighbor policy?

The Mexican Revolution was the first revolt against US capital in what became known as the Third World. It resulted in the passage of the first social democratic constitution in the world, which established rights to education, social security, pensions, and so on. The role of the state in the Mexican economy greatly expanded, with more control over natural resources.The Mexican Revolution was the first revolt against US capital in what became known as the Third World.

For a long time, US governments were completely opposed to the Mexican Constitution’s definition of social property and its very robust understanding of eminent domain that gave the state authority to nationalize resources. But Roosevelt went along with it because he had no choice. He needed Mexico during the Depression and as an ally in WWII, so he didn’t oppose the nationalization of Standard Oil’s Mexican holdings and other US economic assets.

Mexico also became an inspiration for some of the more radical elements within the New Deal coalition. Rexford Tugwell and the Sharecroppers’ Union went to Mexico because they wanted to see what real agrarian reform looked like. They began suggesting that Roosevelt might follow a similar approach in the United States, although that was never going to happen.

FDR’s Good Neighbor policy didn’t last very long after his death, did it?

Immediately after the victory of the Allies in WWII, there was a lot of hope for the expansion of social democracy. There was also a widespread belief that you could promote development by breaking the power of the landed class, which extracted wealth through monopoly control of land and labor. If that monopoly was broken, you would increase the purchasing power of peasants who could then buy locally made products, strengthening the progressive industrial bourgeoisie.

However, the wider geopolitical shifts in the late 1940s, with the beginning of the Cold War, broke that link between democracy and development in the eyes of US planners. They established a new equation between development and order. The US was no longer encouraging democratization or the unionization of workers.

Latin America never had its own version of the Marshall Plan. In Europe, industrializing elites had access to massive amounts of public capital and didn’t feel it was necessary to suppress the trade unions or the noncommunist left in order to develop. In Latin America, on the other hand, they were told to obtain the money from private capital and loans. In that context, the priority was to repress organized labor and all the demands for social reform. There was no structural space for social democratic parties or even Christian democratic reformers.

Guatemala’s revolution in 1944 was a perfect example of the continent-wide democratic spring that I’ve been talking about. Jacobo Árbenz was elected in 1950 with a mandate to extend the ideals of political democracy into the social realm. That meant trying to assert the role of the state sector in the countryside, where the United Fruit Company ran its plantations like feudal estates. Árbenz passed an agrarian reform law that expropriated United Fruit land on the basis of the company’s own valuation for tax purposes.

The CIA put an operation to overthrow Árbenz into play. It drew on all the advances in psychological warfare and techniques to disseminate misinformation. The main goal was to promote the idea that there was an internal opposition to Árbenz when there wasn’t. They created a mercenary force of disgruntled military people in Honduras and let the Guatemalan national army know that if the mercenaries failed, the United States would intervene directly.

In seeking to isolate Guatemala, the United States didn’t formally break with multilateralism. It got the Organization of American States to sanction Guatemala on the pretext that it was threatened by external communist aggression. Árbenz was enormously popular, and so was the land reform, but the coup was successful, and it was followed by decades of brutal repression.

How did the events in Guatemala influence the revolution in Cuba later in the decade?

When Guatemala’s democratic revolution began, left-wingers — including those of the Communist Party — still looked toward the United States as a potential model for development and still thought they could work with the progressive bourgeoisie. The land reform policies were designed to strengthen the progressive bourgeoisie. They still thought they could create national class coalitions to bring about social democratic reforms.The idea of the United States as a liberalizing and revolutionary agent in the world is deeply ingrained within the country’s self-conception.

By 1959, five years after the coup against Árbenz, the Cuban revolutionary leaders had a much more radical vision of economic justice. Fidel Castro was also much better prepared for what the United States was going to do in response. They beat back the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which led to a wave of radicalization throughout the hemisphere and gave Castro legendary status as someone who could beat the US Goliath, unlike Árbenz.

The Kennedy administration supported counterinsurgencies in Latin America but also launched the Alliance for Progress, which promised billions of dollars in development aid to assist with reform and break up extreme concentrations of power. Were there contradictory forces or power blocs at work within the US government that gave rise to these policies?

The idea of the United States as a liberalizing and revolutionary agent in the world is deeply ingrained within the country’s self-conception. John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign was predicated on restoring a sense of purpose, part of which involved embracing that revolutionary rhetoric.

It was also specifically in response to Castro and the inspiration that his revolution offered to the rest of the hemisphere. Kennedy famously said that we were going to complete the revolution of the Americas. At the same time, however, the United States was committed to strengthening the internal security capacities of states like those in Latin America.

The Alliance for Progress did promote attempts at land reform in Chile and even, to some extent, in Guatemala and El Salvador. But it also strengthened the security services in Latin American countries by professionalizing them and getting them to work in a coordinated manner by sharing and acting on information.

As political polarization grew during the 1960s and ’70s, with many on the Left deciding to follow the Cuban path of insurgency, you saw a radicalization of the Right and the rise of death squads. There was a first round of coups in the 1960s in countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil, followed by a second round in the 1970s. The second round was concentrated especially in the Southern Cone and the Andes: Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina.

The coups of the first round were designed to counter the influence of Cuba or any potential sympathy for Cuba and begin strengthening the repressive capacities of those states under the rubric of a national security doctrine. But they set off a cycle of radicalization and repression, with insurgencies in a number of countries. The second round was the culmination of that cycle, with full-fledged death-squad states coming to power.

The second round of coups took the strengthening of national security agencies to an international level through Operation Condor. That was the period when we saw the worst forms of violence, with disappearances and massacres. By the end of the 1970s, South America was locked down, with one country after another ruled by US-backed right-wing dictatorships. The axis of conflict then shifted to the Central American region.

Going back a little from that point, why did Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger find the Chilean government of Salvador Allende so threatening?

This was taking place in the wider context of détente with the Soviet Union. The United States was trying to extricate itself from Vietnam. That partly involved recognizing the idea of the world being divided into spheres of influence for the two superpowers. Chile was firmly within the US sphere of influence, so Allende’s government was a challenge to that.The idea of a country like Chile voting a self-described Marxist into power was threatening because it was harder to discredit.

The idea of a country like Chile voting a self-described Marxist into power was also threatening because it was harder to discredit. Castro had used authoritarian methods to save the Cuban Revolution because he wanted to avoid the fate of Árbenz. But it was harder to discredit someone who was democratically elected, like Allende.

In addition, this was a model that might not be confined to Chile or Latin America. The United States was worried about what was happening in Western Europe, with the increase in support for the Italian Communist Party, and the revolution in Portugal. The overthrow of Allende was a warning to the European communists that while the United States might accept them as junior partners in a center-left alliance, they would never be accepted as the major party in a European government.

Chile was an interesting case because its appeal went in different directions. On the one hand, it was a key player in the Third World, with discussions around the idea of a new international economic order. On the other hand, it had a deep resonance for the Eurocommunists who were distancing themselves from the Soviet Union and wanted to work within the established political structures of Western Europe.

The advocates of a new international economic order wanted to establish a basic price floor for fourteen commodities. They also wanted to socialize intellectual property rights and technology in order to help the Third World develop and create value-added industry. Neoliberalism, of course, did precisely the opposite, promoting a race to the bottom in commodity prices while entrenching intellectual property rights and rolling back nationalization.

What role did a reinvigorated form of imperialism in Central America play in the rise of Ronald Reagan and the New Right during the last years of the Cold War?

Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, famously said that Central America was the most important place in the world at that time. Commentators had a hard time understanding what she meant by that. Was it really more important than Europe or the Middle East, for example?

But in a way, Central America was so important for the Reagan administration precisely because of its insignificance. It did not have any resources that the United States could not do without and there were no nuclear weapons there. It was squarely within the US backyard. Reagan could give movement conservatives a free hand with little fear of the consequences.

Neoconservatives like Kirkpatrick argued that the United States had to retake the Third World. Central America was the first place for them to do that, with a rhetoric of moralized militarism. There was a bloc of secular neoconservatives like Kirkpatrick and Elliott Abrams with the “theocons” of the religious right who were mobilized to support anti-communism in Central America.

The Reaganite alliance came together around the wars in Central America. There were mercenaries working with the Contras in Nicaragua and evangelicals supplying them with humanitarian aid who saw it as a military crusade. It led to a thickening of the relations between different parts of the alliance.

Once the Republicans returned to power under Reagan, the militarists and counterinsurgency theorists who had failed in Vietnam saw El Salvador as a chance to get it right. They spent money on civic action and land reform, but none of that worked. At the end of the day, the United States and its Salvadoran allies fought the FMLN [Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front] guerrillas to a standstill through the massive use of violence — torture, killings, and disappearances on a grand scale.Central America was so important for the Reagan administration precisely because of its insignificance.

The idea of “winning hearts and minds” is a form of self-delusion on the part of counterinsurgency theorists. Pure repression is what ultimately wins the day. The language of state-building and winning hearts and minds just allows them to convince themselves that what they’re doing is noble.

How did the Reagan administration target domestic opponents and critical journalists who were challenging its dirty war in Central America?

In 1983, the Reagan administration set up the Office of Public Diplomacy. This was in direct violation of the National Security Act, which prohibited the use of propaganda and disinformation on the US public. It was staffed by psyops operatives from the Department of Defense and used Republican-aligned advertising firms from Madison Avenue to run polls and focus groups so they could find out what language would play well with public opinion.

If anyone reported a negative story about the US-backed regime in El Salvador, the response wasn’t necessarily to try and disprove it but rather to throw enough mud in the water so that nobody could form a clear opinion about what had happened. At the same time, they wanted to raise the cost for journalists of reporting on stories like that.

One reporter noted that if she wanted to do a story about the Salvadoran Army or the Contras, she would have to spend so much time fact-checking that it wasn’t worth it. She would be attacked straight away, and if she got any details of the story wrong, it would be a career killer.

We tend to think about the US religious right in terms of domestic cultural issues like abortion and gay rights. But you argue that foreign policy was a key strand in its history.

Evangelical conservatives were deeply hostile to the emergence of liberation theology, which criticized the social system upheld by US militarism on religious grounds, arguing that the profit motive was an amoral mechanism that destroyed human solidarity. The religious right insisted that the free market wasn’t amoral — it reflected God’s grace.

This overlapped with the effort of secular conservatives to present the market as a place of creativity and fulfillment. A focus on opposing liberation theology brought these two forms of conservativism together. The projection of Reaganism was to rehabilitate the capitalist market and US power in moral terms.

The Reagan-backed Contra force in Nicaragua is best remembered today because of the Iran-Contra scandal. The Democrats treated Iran-Contra as a question of domestic process: the Reagan administration had broken the law by sending aid to the Contras after Congress barred it from doing so, using money generated from secret missile sales to Iran. Why did they refuse to confront Reagan’s militarism on more fundamental terms?

The idea of ‘winning hearts and minds’ is a form of self-delusion on the part of counterinsurgency theorists.

Although there was still a substantial peace caucus within the Democratic Party, the Democratic establishment essentially went along with the assumption that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were a problem that had to be contained and it was the right of the United States to do that.

There’s a great video that you can watch on YouTube of Senator George Mitchell lecturing Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. It’s seven minutes long and North doesn’t say a word. He’s sitting there with his chest full of medals, his rock-hard jaw, and his short haircut. But right off the bat, Mitchell basically concedes that the Sandinistas were a problem and ways had to be found to deal with them. It’s an example of how you can win an argument without saying a word.

If you watch that video, you will see a New Deal establishment that is so exhausted, it can talk and talk without actually saying anything, while the ascendant Reagan coalition is so confident, it doesn’t have to speak at all. Because they largely shared the assumptions of Cold War anti-communism when it came to Nicaragua, the Democrats never went after Reagan on the substance of his policy rather than the procedural aspects.

Iran-Contra wasn’t a scandal; it was the coming-out party of the New Right. If you want to understand the New Right, there’s no better place to look than Iran-Contra in all its different aspects. When Dick Cheney wrote the House minority report, he put forward a theory of executive power that was considered outrageous in 1987 but would later be rehabilitated after 9/11 under George W. Bush as common sense.

Source: Jacobin

The post The United States Has Used Latin America as Its Imperial Laboratory appeared first on Policy Print.

The failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank are significant market events. But, given an overheated labour market and 1970s-like inflation, if the Fed cannot see the whites of the eyes of a systemic banking crisis, then it must move aggressively on the inflation front.

In fact, US competitiveness in chipmaking might deteriorate further because of the legislation. After all, governments do not have a good history of “picking winners”. All too often, such interventions help to prop up losers and inefficient producers, leading to monopolization and concentrations of market power as new (unsubsidized) firms are deterred from entry. Moreover, in the case of chips, the industry has been retrenching with layoffs, cancelled or postponed expansion plans, and other signs of a slowdown.

In response to the new US subsidies, South Korea recently announced plans to support a US$228 billion investment by Samsung to build the world’s largest advanced semiconductor complex; the European Union has taken up a proposal for a €43 billion (US$46 billion) European Chips Act; and other countries have begun to roll out similar forms of support for their own industries. As a result, taxpayers in the US and these other jurisdictions may end up financing a wasteful chip glut.

Nor is a subsidy race the only source of waste. Today’s semiconductor industry is so globally interdependent that almost no chips can be produced without machines and materials from multiple international sources. Achieving self-sufficiency thus would be prohibitively costly even if it was feasible, which it probably is not.

The United States has long been a global leader in chip research and development. It makes many of the machines needed to manufacture advanced chips, and for many years, it accounted for the world’s largest share of chip production. But, over time, it has lost market share to companies in Europe and especially Asia, where production costs are estimated to be 40% lower. Intel, the early pioneer in semiconductors, has publicly acknowledged that it cannot compete without subsidization.

As if inefficient subsidization was not bad enough, US regulators have also announced excessive eligibility criteria for companies applying for the subsidies. Among other things, companies are expected or encouraged to provide childcare for their workers, refrain from stock buybacks, and give forecasts of future profits so that the government can siphon off any excess margins.

All these measures are ill-advised. Requiring companies to pay for childcare cannot fail to make chip production costlier, which defeats the purpose of the subsidy. It makes no sense to single out an industry whose competitiveness is already challenged. Insofar as childcare benefits are attractive to workers, businesses can provide them in lieu of higher pay, or Congress can mandate that all working families have access to it (as it already does with health care).

The stock-buyback provision is also flawed. According to US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Chips Act subsidy applicants will receive preferential treatment if they commit not to engage in buybacks for five years. But this will become yet another source of inefficiency.

Until modern times, businesses were mostly family owned, and there were few mechanisms by which a family with a low-return business could invest in another, more profitable one. But a great societal benefit of the modern corporate structure is that it enables investors to shift funds from weak enterprises to those with better prospects.

Once the corporate form was established, some governments taxed both corporate profits and dividend payouts to shareholders. Share buybacks thus became a mechanism by which investors could take their gains and invest in other businesses without incurring double taxation. To discourage buybacks will induce companies to reinvest their profits even if their profit outlook is unpromising. Again, this is not just inefficient but self-defeating. If the goal is to boost American competitiveness, there should not be extra hurdles to allocating investments toward their most promising uses.

Taxing “excess” profits is also likely to have detrimental effects. In tech-centred industries, companies often maintain a diversified portfolio of risky investments in the expectation that while some will be wildly successful, others will fail or struggle. Faced with a penalty for success, chip companies may decide either to locate their risky research overseas or to reduce the risk profile of their research and development.

Companies that avail themselves of the subsidies will surely have to report extensively on their operations to the US government, which in turn will need to monitor recipients and decide whom to offer loans or grants in the first place. Both activities will further increase the costs to taxpayers.

All these unnecessary regulatory provisions should be rescinded. Introducing a chip-production and trading regime among allies would be a far better way to ensure a reliable supply, as would funding programs to train workers in the chip sector. If the point is to secure the supply of a critical input, the last thing the industry needs is the added burden of childcare costs, restraints on payments to shareholders, and excessive taxation.

Source: The Asset

The post America’s Flawed, Counter Productive Chip Policy appeared first on Policy Print.