¿Las políticas de Trump perjudican o benefician a la Unión Europea? (Parte II) (página 11)

Finally, Slawomir Sierakowski, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw, notes that there is one group that has long since come to terms with, and prepared a plan of action against, the dangers posed by Trump and his populist cronies: women. "[O]f all the sources of opposition to Trump, only women have been able to organize quickly and efficiently," Sierakowski observes. "Last month"s Women"s March on Washington boasted a turnout some three times larger than Trump"s own inauguration the previous day." Sierakowski expects women -who far outnumber populists overall- to serve as the vanguard against populism in the US, Poland, and other countries turning toward illiberalism. They are "fighting fire with fire," he observes. "Can the populists take the heat?"

Acclaimed British historian Michael Burleigh reviews four new books on international affairs by Bill Emmott, James Kirchick, Michael Mandelbaum, and Richard Haass.

The World That Made Trump

A quarter-century ago, the West was riding high: Communism was passé, Europe was uniting, and US global leadership faced no serious challenge. Four new books examine how it all came apart – and what comes next.

New offerings by Bill Emmott, James Kirchick, Michael Mandelbaum, and Richard Haass

Bill Emmott, The Fate Of The West: The Decline and Revival of the World"s Most Valuable Political Idea (Economist Books)

James Kirchick, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age (Yale University Press)

Michael Mandelbaum, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford University Press)

Richard Haass, A World In Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (Penguin Press)

For nearly a generation, the West has been experiencing something like progress in reverse. With the fallout from the US-led Iraq War spreading instability from the Middle East to Europe, the 2008 financial crisis undermining voters" faith in liberal capitalism, and nationalist populism resurgent almost everywhere, anyone pondering the fate of the West in 2017 could be forgiven for seeking some cheer or consolation.

These four new books will not provide it. On the contrary, a cultural historian might one day argue that these offerings, among many others in the publishing pipeline, reflected a morbid state of introspection in the West, sustained by the mounting political and economic challenges of their time.

Bill Emmott, a former editor of the Economist, uses a stream of D-words to describe the West"s current predicament: "demoralized, decadent, deflating, demographically challenged, divided, disintegrating, dysfunctional, declining." Superficially viewed, Emmott"s book amounts to a seemingly aimless tour of randomly selected countries: one minute we are in Italy or Sweden, and then it"s off to Japan via California. And while Emmott never really explains why Japan is "Western," China, by contrast, is grouped among the "barbarians at the gates," along with the Islamic State (ISIS) and Russia. But surely Chinese unilateralism is no match for the "exemptionalism" that has characterized the United States" approach to international bodies such as the International Criminal Court and the Law of the Sea treaty.

The Fate of the West We further learn much about, for example, the social impact of population aging, or how we can live alongside robots, including those that will chat to granny when, aged 90 or so, she is no longer working. His book has many fascinating asides, for example, that professional licensing requirements in many US states mean that "cosmetologists" must spend more hours in school than lawyers.

But to focus on this sort of detail would be to miss the serious message that Emmott seeks to convey. While he does not retreat from a classical defense of "open society" in the manner of Karl Popper or George Soros, he acknowledges that much has gone wrong since the 2008 crisis, and he is rightly scathing about the role played by investment bankers and their confected financial products.

Specifically, Emmott investigates the decline of social trust (albeit without connecting it to immigration from countries where social trust is non-existent) and a worryingly widespread sense of unfairness -including the loss of effective political voice or even access to the law- that is undermining democracy in its heartlands. Emmott shows how privilege is replicated across generations through educational advantages and "assortative mating," not to mention erosion of access to careers -for example, acting, tabloid journalism, and pop music- that in living memory were open to talented working-class people. How else does one explain the "social dyspepsia" that is turning millions of ordinary voters toward charlatans, fanatics, and hucksters?

There is also a huge gulf between permanent workers with legal protections and job security, and the precari on temporary or zero-hour contracts, whose rights cunning corporate human resources departments limit to the phone call summoning them to a day"s lucky labor. Fear of falling into that trap presumably affects those who have crawled their way up to semi-respectability, but who now find life as random as a game of snakes and ladders.

At the same time, big money is talking louder than ever -whether through direct access to politicians or by deploying well-connected lobbyists- and democratic political systems are being corrupted by vested interests every bit as powerful as the over-mighty British trade unions of the 1970s. Donald Trump"s biggest selling point, as he incessantly reminded everyone, was that he didn"t need others" money, whereas Hillary Clinton seemed only too eager to accept support from any obnoxious source, whether a Russian oligarch, a Gulf Arab, or a Wall Street fat cat. Likewise, the Dutch populist Geert Wilders ostentatiously refuses the public funding to which political parties in the Netherlands are entitled – though his alleged reliance on anti-Islamist US donors is almost as worrying as the soft loans French National Front leader Marine Le Pen solicits from Kremlin-connected Russian banks.

Europe"s Ever-Crumbling Union

Le Pen"s rise is but one reason the young American neoconservative journalist James Kirchick is apocalyptic about Europe"s fate. He speaks of a "Europe unmoored from the Enlightenment values it brought to the world, ignorant of and unwilling to protect its civilizational achievements, captive to chauvinist demagogues, indisposed to defend itself, [and] cowed before Russia." Reversion to a "traditional state of nature, with nations pursuing mercenary self-interest at the expense of unity, would not only spell the end of Europe, as we know it." Kirchick writes. "Such a collapse would usher in nothing less than a new dark age."

Judging by Kirchick"s tone, we are already entering that dark age. The elegiac late Roman bishop Sidonius Apollinaris comes to mind, watching barbarian Burgundians smearing rancid butter in their hair. But Kirchick is more interested in mapping the surface of the present, rather than listening for the echoes of deep history.

The End of EuropeHis book moves smoothly across Europe"s main, current fault lines, north and south, west and east. He notes the worrying increase in conservatives" enthusiasm for that decisive slayer of Islamist dragons, Russian President Vladimir Putin, without noting that this sentiment has entered US Republican circles as well – and not because of Russian information warfare.

Kirchick"s best chapters are on Greece and Hungary, where he manages a seamless blend of contemporary history, politics, and reporting. The chapter on Greece strikingly exonerates the European Union of any blame for that country"s much-publicized status as the helpless victim of the supposedly all-powerful "Troika" institutions (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund). Instead, Kirchick (rightly) blames a long record of extreme political polarization and clientelism in Greece, which Syriza (and their Anel partners) have perpetuated while playing juvenile games with the Troika.

Turning to Hungary, Kirchick is especially enlightening on sinister historical revisionism regarding Admiral Miklos Horthy"s Nazi-era regime. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán"s ruling Fidesz party has managed to adopt eight of the ten policy planks of the neo-fascist Jobbik party"s platform, while still belonging to the main European People"s Party bloc of centrist conservative parties in the EU parliament.

Kirchick"s least successful chapters are those on France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine. The French chapter is warmed-over Bat Y"eor-style alarmism about Islamists establishing "Eurabia" in plain sight and precipitating an exodus of Europe"s largest Jewish population. As with other ideological writers, we learn far less about the cooler stuff of constitutional and electoral mechanisms. There is nothing here about how the electoral system frustrates the National Front, particularly elections to the National Assembly, so that even were Le Pen to become president in May, a paralyzing bout of "cohabitation" would most likely ensue.

It seems oddly disproportionate to devote most of the chapter on Germany to defending the US National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency from charges of spying on German politicians, until one realizes that Kirchick worked for Radio Free Europe. It is as if understanding Europe"s largest country and most successful economy depended on refuting Der Spiegel"s predictably lurid enthusiasm for the issue. He also falls into the trap of treating Germany"s leaders as if they were so much benignly inert pudding, rather than powerful people coldly calculating the merged interests of their country and Europe.

The chapter on Britain is really an extended attack on current Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn -evidently the Man Who Would Be Hugo Chávez– and the anti-Semitism in Labour"s ranks. Kirchick, whose contacts and range of reference seem very limited, might have benefited from reading more astringent critics of British society like George Walden. Brexit enthusiasts will not like this American view of a country going over a cliff -or, rather, straight to China, in Kirchick"s account- especially as so many Americans seem to regard Brexit as their St. John the Baptist moment before Trump.

A "golden age" with China -endorsed by both former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and Prime Minister Theresa May- seems to worry Kirchick. "London is straying from its once firmly Atlanticist, Western orientation and careening toward a heretofore unexplored and unpredictable strategic gray zone," he writes, offering little substantive evidence.

Kirchick"s book obviously appeared too late to consider how Trump may derange the world, or how his diffuse provocations might incline many in Europe toward a China that, despite its authoritarianism, endorses free markets and international institutions. But nor does Kirchick bring fresh insight to pre-Trump Europe. The chapter on Ukraine adds little to standard accounts; it does not explore, for example, popular Dutch rejection of the EU"s gambits with Kyiv, which surely reflected the widespread feeling in core Benelux members of being marginalized by the Union"s indefinite eastward expansion. Indeed, though Kirchick grinds many axes, his perception of what ails Europe is dulled by the lack of any systematic analysis of EU policymaking.

Orphans of the Cold War

Given Kirchick"s kneejerk glibness, one turns with something like relief to Michael Mandelbaum"s closely argued, lively, and deeply researched monograph on US foreign policy following the end of the Cold War. Mandelbaum, the author of such classics as The Frugal Superpower, is the expert"s expert on foreign affairs, with a steady eye for the process of policymaking.

This book is hard to pigeonhole politically – and is all the better for it. Mandelbaum addresses the missed opportunities that accompanied the Cold War"s end in 1989-1991. Most notable was the chance to craft a new European security architecture with Russia, though some might object that not enlarging NATO was never a serious option, given the influence of Polish-American voters and political leaders.

Mission Failure With superpower confrontation in abeyance, US force was put to new purposes. Mandelbaum examines the overseas interventions of the 1990s – in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as the decade-long air interdiction of northern and southern Iraq by successive administrations. NATO, it was decided, was too big a sledgehammer to crack drug traffickers and the like. Militaries were to be reconfigured as armed social workers. In the event, as counterinsurgency warfare became the default tactical paradigm, they would become self-styled armed anthropologists, too.

Eventually, under President George W. Bush, this messianic stream completely overran US foreign policy. The assumption was that everyone wanted to be like Americans, a tenable conceit so long as small countries lacked a great power to protect them. But in an age when elites and voters alike are easily distracted, nation- and state-building (they are not identical) were beyond American capacities – one of the few themes Mandelbaum does not explore. It might have been useful, too, to address how foreign countries big and small, employing armies of lobbyists in Washington, attempt to capture Americans" attention and shape their perceptions of the world.

Following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, arrogant fools (mostly neocons, but more than a few liberals as well) would rush into Afghanistan and then Iraq to remodel societies of which they were largely ignorant. And the US was just getting warmed up for wars of transformation in another half-dozen countries. Mandelbaum"s account is all the more damning because of his scrupulous fairness to those involved, though, apropos of Colin Powell"s Pottery Barn Rule ("You break it, you bought it"), he acidly observes that "the prospect of owning Iraq apparently did not faze President George W Bush."

Mandelbaum is surely right about the long-term consequences of these wars of choice. In the course of a grueling decade of war, the US was first too distracted and then too exhausted to sustain a benign international order. And now the long term has arrived, with the malign breakdown of that order. We have reached a new point, it is safe to say, when China"s president, speaking at Davos, sounds more like a US president than the actual US president who, in his Inaugural Address, made Milwaukee sound like Mogadishu. By the time Trump has finished, Mandelbaum will have much more to ponder, as will we all, and he will be just the right person to sort out the ideological and practical forces that powered Trump"s foreign policy.

Wreckage or Interregnum?

Richard Haass"s timely and lucid intervention suggests the scope of what we will be pondering. Haass, a senior adviser on the Middle East to George H.W. Bush, was also a distinguished envoy to Northern Ireland under Bush Junior, reminding Sinn Fein/IRA at a critical juncture (while stuck in the country after 9/11) that the US had run out of sympathy for terrorists.

Haass has been an excellent president of the Council on Foreign Relations, too. His previous book Foreign Policy Begins at Home might have served as the new administration"s vade mecum, had Trump picked Haass for Secretary of State (as some had vainly hoped). As it is, a condensed version appears here as Chapter 12.

The first half of the new book, which originated as a trio of lectures given at Cambridge University, deals with the familiar history of world orders, usually established after catastrophic wars: 1648, 1815, 1918 (perhaps wisely neglected by Haass), and 1945. An international order, Haass shows, is something between formal institutions and rules of the game that the major players more or less accept. By way of example, he gives clear and concise accounts of the post-1945 evolution of nuclear non-proliferation and the World Trade Organization.

Viewed in these terms, the more recent "Responsibility to Protect," or R2P, so beloved of crusading human-rights lawyers, must be deemed a failure. For one thing, China, Russia, and many other countries have come to regard R2P as synonymous with a Western right to intervene; for another, it could be reverse engineered by, say, Putin, to justify "protecting" the Russophone minority in Ukraine.

The "unipolar moment" of US hegemony after 1989-1991 proved evanescent and ultimately illusory. It collapsed after US neoconservatives, seeking to lock in American supremacy, returned the world to pre-Westphalian anarchy by violently intervening in the internal affairs of sovereign states – though President Barack Obama"s support for Anglo-French regime change masquerading as humanitarian intervention in Libya was of a piece.

This is all a preamble to what Haass calls a "world in disarray," a slightly consoling choice of words, if only because he eschewed stronger stuff like "anarchy" and "chaos."" Then again, "disarray" is potent enough, reflecting as it does a widely shared concern about an undefined, transitional era, in which an already large number of regional crises and transnational threats are likely to be overlain by revived great power competition and conflict.

The more prescriptive parts of Haass"s book are less successful, in my view, because I find it difficult to fathom what Haass means by the concept of "sovereign obligation," the key to what he calls World Order 2.0. While he is certainly right to say that the US will remain the world"s most powerful country for decades to come, I think he may be wrong about the role of others in shaping the new order.

A World in Disarray Sadly, A World in Disarray appears too late to take Trump into account. But perhaps Haass has offered a veiled warning. "There is much to be said for a foreign policy equivalent of stare decisis," he writes, because "wholesale, frequent reversals run the risk of unnerving friends and emboldening adversaries. Disarray at home is thus inextricably linked to disarray in the world. The two together are nothing short of toxic."

As I read that, Trump was rejecting the need for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict – a staple of US foreign policy for the past quarter-century. A few days later, he claimed to "like the two-state solution." Likewise, having welcomed the prospect of the EU imploding (and forcing European Council President Donald Tusk to convene an emergency summit a fortnight later), Trump soon switched course: "I"m totally in favor of [the EU]. I think it"s wonderful, if they"re happy. If they"re happy – I"m in favor of it."

One can almost see American soft power -a subject Haass ignores- evaporating. Trump"s threats, policy reversals, "alternative facts," and capricious, often peevish behavior have provided abundant fodder for social media. But, in the real world, the US will be unable to bolster global order if it continues to lose followers.

(Michael Burleigh"s books include Small Wars, Faraway Places: The Genesis of the Modern World, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, and The Third Reich: A New History, and The Best and the Worst of Times: The World As It Is (forthcoming in early November from Pan Macmillan))

As the US administration"s economic agenda takes shape, Keyu Jin, Jim O"Neill, Robert Shiller, and other Project Syndicate commentators ask why it remains impossible to decipher.

Editors" Insight: a fortnightly review of the best thinking on current events and key trends.

– Trump"s Economic Labyrinth (Project Syndicate – 10/3/17)

US President Donald Trump is finally getting down to the hard work of trying to please his blue-collar supporters and his administration"s resident plutocrats. The results so far are as incoherent as the electoral coalition that brought him to power.

Donald Trump"s economic-policy agenda during the 2016 US presidential election campaign was a political Rorschach test: where his supporters saw a bold new design for robust growth and greater prosperity, many others in the United States and around the world saw only a cynical blob of dodgy proposals and crossed lines.

Now that Trump must deliver to Congress an outline of his 2018 fiscal-year budget priorities, he and his advisers have no choice but to trade in the campaign inkblot for a governing blueprint. And yet, in his first address to Congress, Trump offered few policy details, even as he called on the assembled representatives and senators to help him "restart the engine of the American economy."

Trump may finally be coming to grips with the headaches that await him as he tries to articulate and enact his economic-policy agenda. An early preview came when Republicans in the US House of Representatives released their plan to fulfill their longstanding vow to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obama"s signature 2010 health-care reform. No sooner had the House Republicans unveiled their hastily drafted bill than it came under withering attack from all sides – including from members of their own party. Repealing Obamacare, it is now clear, was less a plan than a rallying cry for an increasingly fractious Republican Party.

A key question, therefore, is whether, and for how long, Trump"s legislative agenda will be hamstrung by the health-care debate. More broadly, on the generous assumption that the Republicans can find a quick and relatively painless way out of the corner into which they"ve painted themselves, what would realizing that agenda imply for the US and the global economy? Project Syndicate commentators" perspectives on the Trump administration"s main proposals -in areas including taxes, trade, and regulation- provide an indispensable guide to what is possible- if not likely to appear on the policy horizon in the coming months.

Billionaires to the Barricades

Trump offered an initial glimpse of his economic-policy agenda when he assembled his cabinet. And, according to Elizabeth Drew, whose experience as a Washington correspondent during the Nixon administration becomes more relevant by the day, this latest presidential transition was "the strangest – even craziest" the US has experienced. By December, Trump had already loaded his administration with billionaires and former generals, which, Drew observes, placed him "firmly in the camp of plutocrats with little concern for workers and the middle class." His strategy seems to be to provide "enough bread and circuses" to "distract his supporters from the real direction his administration is taking."

So far, Trump has certainly played the ringmaster, unleashing a barrage of executive orders, even as doubt about his administration"s legislative effectiveness continues to grow. To Princeton University historian Harold James, Trump"s tumultuous first weeks in office are following the same pattern as that of past outsider movements that suddenly came to power, such as the Bolsheviks a century ago this year. Once they are in government, James writes, "revolutionaries must try to strike a balance between betraying their supporters" radical wishes" and undermining their own capacity to govern.

Trump"s address to Congress seemed intended to strike such a balance. But if he escalates his ongoing feud with the intelligence services over his and his appointees" suspicious ties to Russia, or embraces the mission of White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon (a self-declared "Leninist") to carry out the "deconstruction of the administrative state," he could encounter a new problem. As James puts it, "members of the old establishment are the only people who know enough about specific government programs to get anything done."

Beyond the executive branch bureaucracy, Trump will also have to rely heavily on Congress. "Many of Trump"s policy priorities -including tax reform, some deregulation, a military build-up, infrastructure spending, and the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act- will require legislation," notes Michael J. Boskin, the chairman of President George H.W. Bush"s Council of Economic Advisers. Building the necessary congressional coalitions will not be easy, particularly given the challenge Trump poses to core components of Republican ideological orthodoxy. As Boskin rightly points out, "Many who support, say, tax cuts and deregulation will oppose [Trump"s] spending increases and demand entitlement reform."

So, will Republican orthodoxy hold, or will it come to reflect the vision, promoted by Bannon and others, of a nationalist party of the white working class? Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, predicts that much will depend "on whether House Speaker Paul Ryan is a true fiscal conservative." Ryan will "rubberstamp" Trump"s agenda, Stiglitz believes, only if he is "not as concerned about the deficit as he says he is." Still, in many policy areas, Trump and Ryan already agree. Stiglitz notes that the White House and congressional Republicans are now "relatively free to weaken workers" bargaining power, deregulate Wall Street and other industries, and turn a blind eye to existing antitrust laws."

Deregulation Déjà vu

In fact, Trump has already signed an executive order to unshackle Wall Street, by repealing an Obama-era fiduciary rule to protect investors, and rolling back the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. He could also soon fill vacancies on the Federal Reserve Board, including a vice-chair position to oversee financial regulation, which was created under Dodd-Frank but never filled. As Royal Bank of Scotland Chairman Howard Davies describes it, "financial regulation has entered a period of high uncertainty – and high anxiety for policymakers as they await an announcement from Mar-a-Lago."

According to Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president who is now chairing Trump"s Council of Economic Advisers, canceling the fiduciary rule was meant to be a "table setter for a bunch of stuff that is coming." For Harvard University"s Jeffrey Frankel, himself a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, this does not bode well. Given that the fiduciary rule would merely "ensure that professional financial advisers and brokers act in the best interests of their clients," Frankel concludes that scrapping it can serve "no purpose other than to maximize financial institutions" profits, at the expense of the average American family."

Indeed, if Cohn is the one setting the table for Wall Street, former International Monetary Fund Chief Economist Simon Johnson warns, banks" capital requirements will likely be loosened. This is "exactly what happened in the early 2000s," Johnson recalls, and "the consequences will be similar: disaster." Because the Dodd-Frank reforms "can be rolled back without much difficulty," the Trump administration, which includes some half-dozen Goldman Sachs alumni in senior posts, is "poised to do exactly that." As a result, Johnson argues, "big banks will get bigger. Capital levels will fall. And reasonable risk-management practices will again become unfashionable."

Worse still, the Trump administration could begin to undermine financial-system safeguards precisely at the moment when they need to be strengthened. Back in 2015, Harvard Law School"s Mark Roe observed that "the big banks are back," owing to the repeal of a key Dodd-Frank provision barring banks from trading derivatives. And in January of this year, Roe reported that "disturbing evidence has emerged suggesting that, overall, the global financial system is no safer today than it was in 2007." According to Roe, the system lacks adequate protections "to guarantee against a rout if several banks failed simultaneously – or, worse, if the entire housing market" experienced "another of its once-in-a-generation crises."

Trump"s Tax Shell Game

Trump and congressional Republicans are also finding common ground on taxation. Martin Feldstein, who chaired President Ronald Reagan"s Council of Economic Advisers, describes the various proposals currently under consideration, including "a territorial system for taxing US firms" foreign subsidiaries" and "a cash-flow corporate tax." But chief among them is a proposal, offered by both the Trump administration and House Republicans, to halve the corporate-income-tax rate (now at 35%). Feldstein estimates that "the proposed rate cut would reduce revenue by about 1% of GDP, or $190 billion a year in today"s economy," which would be partly offset by increased investment and economic growth.

Still, this policy will pose a challenge for those Republicans who continue to "favor a revenue-neutral tax reform." And, as Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley, reminds us, "there are still a few" deficit hawks in Congress.

Eichengreen points out that corporate-tax revenues are far less consequential to the budget balance than individual income taxes, which Trump also wants to reform, "by cutting the top marginal tax rate on ordinary income from 39.5% to 33%." But while tax cuts for the rich are in line with "mainstream Republican ideology," they will be palatable to voters only if accompanied by tax cuts for the middle class. And yet as Eichengreen notes, "[b]road-based spending cuts to match broad-based income-tax reductions" -necessary to mollify the deficit hawks- "are not politically feasible."

Whether or not Trump can convince Republicans to abandon budget discipline entirely, Harvard University"s Kenneth Rogoff suspects that his administration will succeed in making "aggressive use of budget deficits to fund its priorities for taxes and spending." The simple reason, Rogoff explains, is that "whenever one party has firm control of government, it has a powerful incentive to borrow to finance its priorities, knowing that it won"t necessarily be the one to foot the bill." Anatole Kaletsky of Gavekal Dragonomics seconds that view: "The Republicans" hegemony will enable easy agreement on tax cuts financed mainly by higher public borrowing."

But as Trump pursues a traditional deficit-financed supply-side agenda, he will continue to encounter resistance from the majority of US voters who did not support him in the election – and possibly from some of his own supporters, if Republicans cut Obamacare subsidies to help pay for their tax policies. In fact, as former Fed Vice-Chairman Alan S. Blinder notes, "One of the most consistent findings in American public opinion polling for decades is that people want higher taxes, not lower, on the rich and corporations."

But Trump may intuit a psychological tendency among his supporters that Nobel laureate economist Robert J. Shiller describes. "Those on the downside of rising economic inequality," Shiller argues, "typically do not want the government to make the tax system more progressive, to impose punishing taxes on the rich, in order to give the money to them." Rather, they simply "want to be in control of their economic lives." However powerful or durable this sentiment may be, Trump"s "America first" economic nationalism certainly seems to have tapped it.

Fiscal Protectionism

The nationalist approach implies another affront to Republican orthodoxy – this time on trade, where Trump is seeking to give domestic producers an advantage over foreign competitors. But congressional Republicans, eagerly seeking ways to offset the income-tax cuts their corporate backers and wealthy patrons are demanding, have warmed to a border adjustment tax (BAT), which, as Feldstein puts it, "would give the US the international advantage of a value-added tax without levying that tax on domestic transactions."

Like Feldstein, Allianz Chief Economist Michael Heise, believes that the US would gain a "competitive tax advantage" from the proposed BAT, under which "imported goods and services would be taxed at a rate of 20%, while exports would be subtracted from the tax base, and thus not taxed at all." But, Heise adds, this assumes that "other countries do not follow suit and eliminate their own corporate-income taxes on export production."

Heise thinks that the costs of such a "radical reform" would outweigh the potential benefits, and he is not alone in identifying serious flaws in its advocates" arguments. New York University"s Nouriel Roubini, for example, argues that BAT proponents are simply "wrong" in claiming that the measure "would improve the US trade balance, while boosting domestic production, investment, and employment." On the contrary, "[s]ome sectors or firms -especially those that rely heavily on imports, such as US retailers- would face sharp increases in their tax liabilities"; and as they pass these costs on to consumers, those at the bottom of the income scale would suffer the most.

More fundamentally, however, a BAT might not even achieve its intended purpose of protecting US producers, owing to the effect that it would have on the value of the US dollar. According to the economists Emmanual Farhi, Gita Gopinath, and Oleg Itskhoki, who have studied what they call "fiscal devaluations," a BAT would not "improve US competitiveness for the simple reason that the US authorities maintain a flexible exchange rate." Because "the dollar will appreciate along with demand for US goods," the policy"s intended benefits would be nullified. Moreover, they note that, "an appreciating dollar would erode America"s net foreign-asset position, because an overwhelming 85% of its foreign liabilities are denominated in dollars, while around 70% of its foreign assets are denominated in a foreign currency."

Roubini shares this concern, and estimates that, "the value of [US foreign] assets could be reduced by several trillion dollars, in total." In addition, he expects that "highly indebted emerging economies would face ballooning dollar liabilities, which could cause financial distress and even crises." It is for this reason that former Asian Development Bank Chief Economist Shang-Jin Wei calls the mere proposal of a BAT a major source of "US-fueled economic uncertainty" that "will rattle emerging markets in 2017."

Heise, for his part, sees additional global threats associated with a BAT in the US. For starters, "America"s trading partners would rightly view it as a protectionist measure," and if they were "unwilling to wait through lengthy dispute-resolution proceedings at the [World Trade Organization], they could pursue a policy of tit-for-tat retaliation." A new trade war is, as he puts it, "the last thing the world economy needs right now." If Trump and the Republicans want a safer -but no less radical- measure to ""rebalance" the tax system," Heise argues, they should target America"s anomalously high proportion of direct taxation. In this scenario, reforms would "reduce the rate of corporate-income tax, and simultaneously introduce or increase sales taxes on imported and domestically produced goods and services."

Trumping Trade

Of course, the BAT is hardly the only proposed policy that now threatens to launch a new trade war. Eichengreen lists multiple laws on the books that already authorize Trump to pursue his trade-policy goals unilaterally: the 1962 Trade Expansion Act allows him to restrict "imports on the grounds that they threaten US "material interests""; the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act could allow him to disrupt trade "on the grounds that the loss of jobs to Mexico and China constitutes an economic emergency"; and so forth.

Similarly, according to Joakim Reiter and Guillermo Valles of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, even if Congress prevents Trump from abandoning trade agreements or imposing tariffs, he has a variety of means at his disposal to bend global trade patterns in America"s favor – at least temporarily. For example, the US president has "extensive leeway" to impose anti-dumping duties on foreign goods, and to file possibly frivolous claims against other countries at the WTO. He can also follow his predecessors in using the "home market as leverage to demand concessions from other countries" – particularly "countries that are seen as piggybacking on American openness." And he can negotiate "deals directly with foreign companies in order to reduce exports to the US, or to cap their market share," as the US did with "car, microchip, steel, lumber, and machine-tool manufacturers" in the 1980s.

But, as Yale University"s Stephen S. Roach points out, the US trade deficit is a "multilateral problem" that cannot be solved "one country at a time," even by a self-proclaimed great "dealmaker." Unless America addresses its savings shortfall, Roach argues, its "current-account and trade deficits will only widen."

Unfortunately, Trump has never shown any interest in crafting comprehensive solutions to complex problems. He could have "moderated his anti-trade tone" after winning the election last November, Roach observes. "Instead, he has upped the ante." Like other Project Syndicate contributors, Roach worries that Trump is issuing "a series of early warning shots in what could turn into a full-blown global trade war."

That certainly is true of China, Trump"s trade bête noire. Keyu Jin of the London School of Economics believes that Trump "is unlikely to back away from" his many campaign promises to take action against Chinese imports. But he would be wise to reconsider. While "a trade war would undoubtedly hurt both sides," Jin argues, "there is reason to believe that the US has more to lose." She lists a raft of measures China could take if Trump were to start a trade war. "If China switched from Boeing to Airbus," she notes by way of one striking example, "the US would lose some 179.000 jobs."

And yet it could happen, if, as Jim O"Neill, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and former Commercial Secretary to the UK Treasury, suggests, the Trump administration"s approach to China is utterly detached from reality. "As Chinese household income continues to rise," O"Neill points out, "demand for some of the US"s most competitive goods and services will only increase." The irony in Trump"s blustering approach is that his own goals would be better served were he to do nothing. "Rather than spewing nonsense about China manipulating its currency," O"Neill argues, or threatening to disrupt relations with America"s biggest trade partners, Trump "should be encouraging market forces to rebalance bilateral trade."

The Fog of Trump

Trade is hardly the only feature of Trumponomics that remains baffling to Project Syndicate commentators. Blinder notes that, "judging by Trump"s own statements and his cabinet picks, he"s on the wrong side of almost every" economic issue, according to public-opinion polls. One explanation for this, offered by former Polish Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski, is that "Bannon is calling the political shots, and is more interested in building a permanent populist "movement" than he is in getting Trump reelected." In this scenario, Rostowski notes darkly, "[i]f Bannon wants to transform the American political landscape, an impeached or defeated Trump could become an ideal martyr."

Columbia University"s Jeffrey D. Sachs has another explanation. "[T]here are three versions of Trump," Sachs argues: "friend of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, wealth maximizer, and demagogue." And he is probably right that all three Trumps "are really one."

But Trump"s inability to consolidate his administration"s economic-policy agenda reflects not only his own conflicted interests. More important, he and the Republican Party are caught in the grip of James"s "revolutionary dilemma." And there is no guarantee that his administration"s efforts to strike a balance between delivering on implausible campaign promises and actually governing will end well, as the mounting chaos surrounding the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare suggests. On the contrary, as Sachs warns, Trump can be expected to paper over his administration"s policy contradictions and political dysfunction with "appeals to greed, nationalism, patriotism, racism, and fear."

In that case, a trade war could be the least of the world"s worries.

P.D.: (17/3/17) Bochorno diplomático: como en dos universos políticos diferentes

Una foto para el recuerdo: el lenguaje corporal del "patán" y "Sor welcome refugees"

Durante la tradicional sesión de fotos, Trump y Merkel no se dieron la mano pese a la insistencia de los reporteros y a que la canciller pareció preguntarle al presidente estadounidense si quería hacerlo.

El "hombre más poderoso del mundo" se reunió el 17 de marzo (2017) con una de las mujeres más influyentes del plantea, o tal vez la más influyente.

El presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, y la canciller de Alemania, Angela Merkel, se encontraron por primera vez cara a cara en la Casa Blanca.

Se trata de dos personalidades de lo más diferentes. Como apunta Jenny Hill, corresponsal de la BBC en Berlín, "él es extravagante, impulsivo y con una tendencia a una retórica que dispara las alertas en Berlín". "Ella es reservada, pragmática y medita cada decisión".

Aunque según Trump, ambos "al menos" tienen "algo en común": que sus comunicaciones fueron intervenidas por el gobierno de Barack Obama.

Si bien este viernes los líderes de EEUU y Alemania estaban parados en el mismo estrado, "parecía que habitaban universos políticos diferentes", dice Anthony Zurcher, corresponsal de la BBC en Washington.

Jenny Hill, corresponsal de la BBC en Berlín, explica que el desafío para la canciller es "construir una relación de trabajo con Trump sin parecer que sacrifica sus propios valores o decepcionar a los que quieren convertirla en el último defensor de Occidente de esos ideales democráticos".

"La bella y la bestia": que cada uno se imagine el (nuevo) final de la peli (lo que parece, es: un "reality show" de carne y hueso)…

¿Son Ángela Merkel y Alemania la "última esperanza" del Occidente liberal?

De acuerdo con una reciente encuesta realizada en Alemania, la confianza en EEUU bajo la administración Trump cayó a tal punto que está a la par de la Rusia de Vladimir Putin.

A menos de dos meses del "estreno" (aún no se han cumplido 60 días desde que Donald Trump asumió la presidencia de los Estados Unidos), hay "peli" para rato.

Por el momento, solo puedo corroborar, que Trump pone a Europa frente a sus miedos.

Solo puedo desear (ansiar, rezar) que la estulticia europea no pueda durar eternamente.

¿Qué tiene reservado el futuro para Europa? ¿Hay alguien dispuesto a "hacer todo lo necesario" para salvar la UE y el euro? Depende de hacia dónde se dirija la mirada.

¿Sería mucho pedir (o desear) que la UE aplique estrategias realistas y ambiciosas para reducir su dependencia, dedicándose a hacer historia en vez de consumir historia?

Para evitar el avance del "progre populismo", a la gente se la ayuda, creando las condiciones para que pueda trabajar y vivir de su salario. No con limosnas clientelares.

Entre tanta "miseria moral", solo me animo a aseverar, que si esta vez hacemos los deberes los europeos podremos al menos decir dentro de cuatro años: "Gracias Donald".

Autor:

Ricardo Lomoro