Gideon Rachman Makes the Case Against Trump

Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman has made his own case against President Trump. Since he does not belong to the unhinged left and should not be compared to the New York Times’s idiot savant Paul Krugman, Rachman's words should be taken with some seriousness. At the least, they will show us why the liberal left opposes Trump, how the same liberal left will attack Trump in the future… and why it might mean that Trump is doing something right.

Rachman opens with a cavalier dismissal of Trump’s diplomacy. Trade deals are mostly smoke and mirrors. Negotiating with North Korea, a fruitless exercise. It’s all for nothing. One does not recall what Rachman was saying about Obama’s do-nothing policy toward North Korea and his submission to Russia and China… but you can guess.

Rachman writes:

In a few weeks time, the US president will declare a great victory. His loyal aides will play along. But the underlying reality will be that not much has actually changed in the economic relationship between the US and China — in the same way that not much changed in the trade relationship between the US, Canada and Mexico after Mr Trump’s team renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Just as North Korea has not actually scrapped its nuclear weapons, so China will not actually scrap its system of state subsidies for industry, the most fundamental way in which Beijing disadvantages foreign competitors.

Instead, the Chinese are likely to buy off Mr Trump with pledges to purchase lots more American goods. They will also open up more sectors of their economy to US investment and tighten laws on intellectual property. This will probably not affect America’s trade deficit with China. And it will certainly not impair China’s drive for dominance in the technologies of the future.

If Trump is a blowhard, what does that make Rachman? In truth, and to shed a little light into the darker corners of his mind, we can easily remark that we do not yet know the outcome of the diplomatic initiatives toward North Korea and the trade negotiations with China. Similarly, we do not yet know the outcome of the revised NAFTA agreement.

Anyway, Rachman does understand that America is currently competing with China for economic and political influence in the world. And yet, he, a weak-kneed idealist, imagines that we can win it all with ideas. That is, we can counter Chinese anti-carrier missiles by flinging our ideas about freedom and democracy at them.

In that, he shows himself to be hopelessly naïve. Were it not for the fact that this premise undergirded the Obama foreign policy, we would dismiss it out of hand. And were it not for the fact that Western European leaders are still on board with the Obama policies, we would ignore it.

That matters because America’s most potent weapon in its emerging contest for supremacy with China is not its economy, nor its aircraft carriers, but its ideas. The notion that abstract principles like “freedom” and “democracy” are powerful American assets is sometimes dismissed as liberal wishful-thinking. But Chinese actions suggest otherwise. The government of Mr Xi does its utmost to suppress the circulation of liberal and western ideas, censoring the internet and cracking down on dissidents, students and human rights lawyers.

If you give it more than a cursory thought, and if you ask yourself why President Xi has been cracking down on human rights lawyers, dissidents, activists and radicals, you might come to the obvious conclusion. Too obvious for Rachman, as it happens.

That is, the Chinese are watching with these groups have done to America and they do not want them to do it to them. They see tolerance toward radical Islam in the West and do not want it. They see an America divided against itself, an America whose social fabric is shredding, and they do not want it for themselves. China and many other countries in the world see Western ideas as a contagion, a toxin, and they are simply not buying.

If we cannot make America into a thriving democracy, where people get along with each other, and are not consumed by a will to destroy each other, then no one is going to buy whatever we are selling.

Rachman does not live in America and does not understand what is going on over here. He looks at America through rose colored glasses, and misses the truth, entirely:

Compared to China, America still provides an inspiring example of a free society in action. But the fact that the US president regularly trashes the “fake news” media, and that his administration has separated thousands of illegal migrants from their children at the US border, blurs what should be a bright line between the practices of a democracy and those of an authoritarian state.

The greatness of America, like the greatness of Western Europe, lies in opening its arms to unassimilable migrants. Once-Great Britain has descended into political dysfunction. Its streets are plagued by knife attacks. It allows high school girls to be groomed by Muslim ganga. It is falling to pieces under the weight of an influx of migrants… and Rachman thinks that everything is great.

Yes indeed, we have more freedoms than China. After all, they have a communist government. And yet, we also have more bureaucrats per capita, more regulations, more trial lawyers, more social justice warriors, more activists, more environmentalists, more diversity mongers and more labor unions. Don’t these forces constrain economic growth? One might even say that President Trump has been trying to release the shackles that these groups have imposed on the American economy. And that the entrenched interests have fought him tooth and nail to hold on to their jobs.

But, then Rachman waxes lyrical about the Tienanmen demonstrations in 1989. He sees in the goddess of democracy, not a pagan idol, but a flicker of hope for a more democratic China. But seriously, his blinkered Western outlook and his boundless capacity for empathy has made it impossible for him to see the obvious. While we Westerners saw the Tienanmen demonstrations as a reprise of Woodstock, the leaders of China, led by Deng Xiaoping, saw them as a return of the Red Guards and of the Cultural Revolution.

If you don’t see that you will never understand what happened in China in 1989.

Predictably, Rachman does not see it:

The fact that previous US presidents spoke up for human rights was more than an irritant to the Chinese one-party state — it was a threat. There was no better symbol of this than the “Goddess of Democracy”, built by pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which bore an uncanny resemblance to America’s Statue of Liberty. The Tiananmen uprising was bloodily repressed and the “Goddess” was torn down. But Chinese liberals have continued to look to America for inspiration and support. Human rights were only one item on the US agenda when dealing with China. But they were a crucial part of what America stood for in the world.

Rachman might have recalled that the Bush administration went easy on China after the crackdown. One does not understand why Rachman does not pay more attention to that diplomatic restraint. And, you might ask yourself, if you want to be mildly objective, how China has been doing post-Tiananmen.

Keep in mind, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof prophesized at the time that the Chinese regime would surely fall. That the masses of Chinese workers would soon rise up to smite their oppressors. Kristof was not the only fool who missed the point entirely, but in truth, after the square was liberated  the Chinese nation went back to work. The regime did not fall. Deng Xiaoping has been written into history as an enormously successful economic reformer. And a rising China now competes against America on the world stage. None of us liked what happened in Tiananmen Square, but a minimal knowledge of history would have drawn a different lesson. We would have seen that the Chinese people did not want to return to the days of the Cultural Revolution and did not want to allow students to dictate policy.

One is shocked to see a Financial Times columnist blind himself so completely to reality. Could it be that Donald Trump understands this, while Gideon Rachman does not? Stranger things have happened.

As a footnote consider this column by Tom Holland. (via Maggie’s Farm) His point is that Europe is caving in to Chinese influence, through what President Xi calls the One Belt; One Road Initiative.

If you imagine that Western European nations, for all their sanctimonious mewling about freedom and democracy, can stand up against China, you are dreaming.

Holland makes the point:

The truth is that Europe is too exposed, has too much to lose, and is too fragmented to present an effectively assertive front to China over bilateral economic affairs.

With the EU’s largest economies prevented by the strictures of euro zone membership from juicing up their domestic demand with tax cuts or additional government spending, in recent years the EU has been heavily reliant on exports to Asia, and China in particular, to prop up its growth.

As a result, China’s slowdown has hit Europe hard, with Italy in recession, Germany on the brink, and euro zone growth forecast barely to exceed 1 per cent this year.

And Europe is not doing very well:

In Italy, for example, net investment in infrastructure has turned negative since 2012, to the tune of around 10 billion a year. In other words, Italy is now investing 10 billion euros less a year than it needs simply to offset the depreciation of its existing infrastructure

It is no wonder the country’s bridges are crumbling, and no surprise that Rome was so keen to  sign up for investment from China under the Belt and Road Initiative.

And also:

With Spain, Portugal and Greece in similar, if less extreme positions, and much of eastern Europe also eager for inward investment, China has found little difficulty recruiting allies at the EU decision-making table – allies who will ensure that Brussels will never walk the walk when it comes to confronting China over its naked economic nationalism.

So, on closer examination, the EU’s more assertive stance towards China largely evaporates. Yes, China will face greater difficulty in future acquiring high technology companies in some European countries, principally Germany. But then, in the past it faced no restrictions at all, much to the amazement of Chinese officials.

So, Western Europe, drunk on its ideals, cannot compete. Do you really believe that China is dying to adopt Western European and American ways?