The editors of Bloomberg clearly can’t get their heads around a transactional approach to foreign policy:
To have any chance of altering Chinese behavior, Trump needs a stronger and more coherent message. That means, first, identifying and prioritizing a set of clear, reasonable demands — and then pushing them consistently across a broad front.
Trump doesn’t have a plan. He won’t have a plan. Like it or not he just has a utility function.
I think we need a lot less Cold War nostalgia and a lot more attention to American wants and needs. The containment doctrine laid out in the Kennan letter worked. What we’ve been doing for the last 30 years hasn’t been working. It’s resulted in our spending trillions of dollars on foreign wars that have brought us little but dead people and the prospect of many, many more. It has resulted in stagnant real incomes for most Americans, a growing underclass, and a struggling middle class.
China, barely on the map 30 years ago, is now making noises like a geopolitical rival to the United States. It isn’t but it’s making noises like one but that’a subject for another post. Russia has its own nostalgia, it’s different than ours, and it too is making noises like a geopolitical rival.
But I’m game. I challenge the Bloomberg editors to articulate a “coherent message” that results in something other than increasing incomes for the top .1% of income earners and global American hegemony at the point of a gun.
