Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at our regular time: Friday at Noon EDT.
Our guest will be Terrell Starr, one of America’s most talented foreign correspondents.
Since Russia invaded, Terrell has spent a lot of time in Ukraine, and argued that progressives – and Black Americans— should support the Ukrainian cause. This spring he travelled to Israel-Palestine and wrote, “You can’t comprehend what Palestinians are experiencing until you come here and see it for yourself.” I want to ask him how reporting in Ukraine compares to reporting in Israel-Palestine and about how his support for the Ukrainian and Palestinian cause are received differently. He also host of the Black Diplomats podcast and I’ll ask him about the myriad ways in which race shapes discussions of US foreign policy.
As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Joe Biden’s comments calling China’s economy a “ticking time bomb.”
Biden’s denunciation of Trump’s tariffs during the 2020 campaign.
A US International Trade Commission report showing that US tariffs against China mostly hurt Americans.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Elisheva Goldberg analyzes Israel’s frightening new anti-miscegenation law.
On August 29 on Zoom, I’ll be talking about Palestinian refugee return and the Jewish concept of Teshuvah.
Last week’s conversation (for paid subscribers) with Benny Morris was quite something. For folks interested in further exploring Morris’ political views, I found this conversation he did in 2002 with the Palestinian historian Joseph Massad quite revealing.
See you on Friday at Noon,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our guest this Friday at noon ET, our normal time for paid subscribers, will be Terrell Star. Terrell is one of the most interesting foreign correspondents in the United States right now. He’s been spending a lot of time in Ukraine and has written pretty extensively about why he thinks progressives, and also Black Americans, should support the Ukrainian cause. But he’s also spent some time this year in Israel-Palestine and wrote quite movingly about the terrible things he saw there. So, I’m interested in asking him about the kind of comparisons of reporting in Ukraine versus Israel-Palestine, and the comparisons in how he’s been received as a kind of defender of both the Ukrainian and Palestinian cause. And we’ll also talk a little bit about how race shapes discourse about US foreign policy. That’s Friday at noon for paid subscribers. And of course, they also get access to all of our previous calls with people like most recently Benny Morris last Friday, but also Noam Chomsky, Ilhan Omar, Thomas Friedman, Brett Stephens, and others.
Joe Biden said something at a press conference the other day that I wanted to just take note of. He said that China’s economy is ‘a ticking time bomb.’ He said China’s in trouble. He said China was growing at 8% to maintain growth. It’s now close to 2% a year. The statistics are not true actually. I think that China grew 4.5% in the first quarter and 6.3% in the second quarter. It’s just a kind of reminder that Donald Trump has kind of created such a low bar that people forget that Joe Biden is not actually necessarily always such a reliable narrator of the truth. He’s not nearly as precise in his words as say Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Biden has actually a kind of long record of kind of shooting from the hip rhetorically, you know, and it doesn’t have to do with his age. Back in 1988, he left the presidential race because he basically had appropriated a series of statements that he claimed about his own life that were taken from the British labor leader Neil Kinnock.
But that’s not my real concern. The real concern is that although Biden claims that he’s not happy that China is facing these economic problems, in fact, I think that the entire thrust of American kind of foreign policy discourse in recent years has been actually to delight in the economic difficulties of America’s adversaries. So, you know, one reason—not the only or even the main reason, but one reason—China is facing more economic difficulties is that the Trump administration imposed $300 billion in tariffs on China, which the Biden administration has maintained, even though Biden said correctly during the campaign that the tariffs are not benefiting the United States. They may be hurting China, but mostly what the tariffs are doing is just increasing the prices paid by US importers and hurting the US.
And yet we’re in a political environment in which—even though I think most Democratic economists and maybe even most Republican economists believe that—that Biden can’t do that. Because anything that would be seen as benefiting China’s economy is politically impossible in the United States. And I think one of the biggest kind of shifts in US foreign policy discourse that’s taken place over the last 10 years or so has been this radical shift from an environment, especially I think before the financial crisis and certainly in the 1990s, in which it was considered good for the United States if other countries around the world grew economically. There was this idea that if other countries around the world grew economically, they would be more peaceful. They would be more democratic. Their people would just have a better standard of living. That the US should encourage that. And now we’re in a much kind of more zero-sum political discourse, in which basically if it’s a country that’s perceived as a US adversary—China, Russia, Iran—there’s a barely disguised glee and delight among American politicians and foreign policy commentators if those countries are having economic difficulty.
And I’m not saying that it’s never a good idea to have certain kinds of targeted sanctions to try to change other countries behavior, but I think this general zero-sum mentality is really, really problematic and kind of stems from a misreading of what was wrong with the kind of pro-globalization sentiment in the 1990s. So I think what happened is there was a growing awareness, which in some ways was highlighted by Donald Trump’s victory because it made people more aware of kind of how discontented so many working class—particularly working class white Americans were—the growing realization that globalization hadn’t really helped ordinary Americans very much. It had mostly helped Americans at the top. And I think that was a reasonable and fair analysis. But instead of the response being primarily, that’s because the United States doesn’t have a strong enough welfare state, doesn’t have strong enough redistributive systems to basically help funnel the economic growth that America is getting from globalization to working class and poor people and not just really, really wealthy people, the idea became, essentially, I think what Trump focused on was tariffs. And then the Democrats, basically because of labor unions and also because they didn’t want to lose more of the white working class, basically followed along with that. And so now basically they support these massive tariffs as well, even though there’s no evidence that these tariffs are actually helping ordinary Americans or working-class Americans economically. So essentially, the way of responding to this recognition that globalization didn’t lift all boats in the United States has been to basically put tariffs on China even though that doesn’t actually address the problem at all when the real focus should be changing the nature of the American domestic economy and welfare state so that the benefits we get from globalization are more equitably distributed rather than actually trying to reduce the amount of kind of growth that we get from trade in general.
But beyond that, I think, particularly on China, there’s been this notion that the openness that China had economically to the world was bad for China, or that it failed because China didn’t become a democracy because it didn’t become more peaceful in its foreign policy. And therefore, that strategy was a failure. I think that’s also wrong. In fact, I think if you look at where China’s foreign policy before it opened to the world, starting under Deng Xiaoping starting say in the 1980s, China was much, much more aggressive in the 1960s and 70s in trying to overturn the world order, supporting all kinds of kind of rebel movements all around the world than it has been in recent decades. And also, this globalization contributed to a massive movement of people in China outside of poverty. You know, the Chinese regime is brutal and horrific in many, many ways, but seems to me it’s become almost impossible in a mainstream American political discourse to acknowledge that China’s economic policies combined with the openness of the United States and other countries to receiving its imports helped to contribute to one of the greatest poverty reductions in human history, in terms of hundreds of millions of people leaving poverty in China.
And now the idea seems to be, well the more we can hurt the Chinese economy—even if that means moving people back into poverty—well that’s a good thing because the wealthier China grows the more dangerous it is. So, I think there’s been a kind of an inhumanity that’s entered under the cusp of this kind of zero-sum discourse, which leads Americans to be kind of downright lethal when ordinary people suffer in countries that are our adversaries. And this really seems to me a really disturbing tendency, and I think that one that Biden has kind of—whether he recognizes it or not—given voice to. It’s just one additional feature of the return of Cold War thinking that I think is going to be tremendously costly to America and the world in many ways that folks are not talking about, not thinking about enough at least. So, again, on Friday, we’ll be talking to Terrell Star at noon. I hope many of you will join us.
The Return of Zero-Sum Foreign Policy