Chris Hedges's Blog, page 244

The Irony Behind Trump’s Latest Mideast Deployment

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

The Trump administration made a grand and empty show Friday of announcing the dispatch to the Middle East of 1,500 US military personnel, allegedly to signal Iran not to attack US troops in the region.

Update: Actually, it is 900 new troops and 600 having their deployment extended; i.e., nothing.

Except as bad theater, the announcement is meaningless. U.S. bases in the region are not in danger of any significant attack by Iran, whatever the Man with the Angry Mustache says. Could Iran deploy mines or small unmanned undersea drones, or flying drones? Sure, but they’d be crazy to do anything more and they’d be careful not to have such incidents traced back to them. The Trump War Party seems to be counting on cult-like Shiite militias in Iraq to do some small Katyusha attack so they can blame Iran for it (not all Shiites are on the same team, folks).

The U.S. has retrenched its basing since the end of the occupation of Iraq. There is a base at al-Udeid in Qatar with some 10,000 troops. Iran has good relations with Qatar, which it saved from the Saudi boycott that began in 2017. The HQ of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet is in Bahrain. Both of them are ‘way across the Gulf from Iran and are in no danger whatsoever of being hit directly or in a big way by Iran. Iran does not have a navy, just some small boats and skiffs. Although Bahrain is majority Shiite, they mostly do not adhere to the same school of jurisprudence as Iran and don’t have ayatollahs, and can’t be read off as pro-Iran fanatics. They are patriotic Arabs and many Bahrainis depend on the U.S. for their livelihoods.

There are another 10,000 or so troops in Kuwait. Again, they face no danger from Iran.

There are 2,000 U.S. troops embedded with the Kurds of the YPG in northeast Syria. These U.. troops and the allied Kurds are fighting the remnants of the hyper-Sunni ISIL cult, which Shiite Iran also wants to see destroyed. U.S. troops in Syria are not in danger from Iran. There is the Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey, distant from Iran (and plus Iran has good relations with Turkey).

There are also U.S. troops in al-Ain in the Sunni Arab area of Iraq, where there is no Iranian presence. And some troops in Baghdad, which is really the only place in the region where they are in danger from Iran-allied forces, since there are some small Iraqi Shiite groups who do not want U.S. troops in their country. Iran supports the Iraqi Shiite militias, but does not exercise control over them.

One of the lies national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will tell you if you let them is that some little mortar attack on a U.S. installation in Iraq by a cell of radical Iraqi Shiites was somehow orchestrated by the Iranian government.

So when you look at the geographical spread of U.S. bases in the region, it is impossible to see any point where their security is enhanced by 1,500 troops. It is even hard to imagine how they could be practically deployed for force protection.

In fact, their stationing in the region may be routine. U.S. troops are continually cycled in and out of Iraq. Qatar has offered to expand the U.S. Air Force base at al-Udeid and is building dependent housing for the base so that U.S. troops don’t have to live lonely outside Doha. For all we know the extra troops are just going there in the natural course of things.

Trump also seems to be using his manufactured crisis as a cover to sell more weapons to Saudi Arabia, which is using them to bomb Yemen back to the stone age. The 32 million Yemenis are Arabs, and although 1/3 are Zaydi Shiites, they aren’t Iran’s cat’s paws. Iran may have sent small amounts of aid or weaponry to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, but it is a minor affair.

And, of course, the real irony is that the U.S. warmongers are depicting Iran as having an unfair advantage deriving from its geographical proximity to the Gulf and the Fertile Crescent. Iran has been in that area of the Middle East (and often ruled much of the Middle East) since the “Parsumash” people showed up in the 800s BC.

Quite unfairly, they put their country right next to where U.S. bases are.

The Trouble With America’s Only Memorial to Its Forever Wars

Earlier this month, I spent a day visiting Marseilles to videotape a documentary about recent American military history, specifically the ongoing wars that most of us prefer not to think about.

Lest there be any confusion, let me be more specific. I am not referring to Marseilles (mar-SAY), France, that nation’s largest port and second largest city with a population approaching 900,000. No, my destination was Marseilles (mar-SAYLZ), Illinois, a small prairie town with a population hovering around 5,000.

Our own lesser Marseilles nestles alongside the Illinois River, more or less equidistant between Chicago and Peoria, smack dab in the middle of flyover country. I have some personal familiarity with this part of America. More than half a century ago, the school I attended in nearby Peru used to play the Panthers of Marseilles High. Unfortunately, their school closed three decades ago.

Back then, the town had achieved minor distinction for manufacturing corrugated boxes for Nabisco. But that factory was shuttered in 2002 and only the abandoned building remains, its eight-story hulk still looming above Main Street.

Today, downtown Marseilles, running a few short blocks toward the river, consists of tired-looking commercial structures dating from early in the previous century. Many of the storefronts are empty. By all appearances, the rest may suffer a similar fate in the not-too-distant future. Although the U.S. economy has bounced back from the Great Recession, recovery bypassed Marseilles. Here, the good times ended long ago and never came back. The feel of the place is weary and forlorn. Hedge-fund managers keen to turn a quick profit should look elsewhere.

Perhaps not too surprisingly, this is Trump country. Marseilles is located in LaSalle County, which in 2016 voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a hefty 14% margin. It’s easy to imagine residents of Marseilles, which is more than 96% white, taking umbrage at Clinton’s disparaging reference to The Donald’s supporters as so many “deplorables.” They had reason to do so.

A Midwestern Memorial to America’s Wars in the Greater Middle East

Today, Marseilles retains one modest claim to fame. It’s the site of the Middle East Conflicts Wall Memorial, dedicated in June 2004 and situated on an open plot of ground between the river and the old Nabisco plant. The memorial, created and supported by a conglomeration of civic-minded Illinois bikers, many of them Vietnam veterans, is the only one in the nation that commemorates those who have died during the course of the various campaigns, skirmishes, protracted wars, and nasty mishaps that have involved U.S. forces in various quarters of the Greater Middle East over the past several decades.

Think about it: Any American wanting to pay personal tribute to those who fought and died for our country in World War II or Korea or Vietnam knows where to go — to the Mall in Washington D.C., that long stretch of lawn and reflecting pools connecting the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Any American wanting to honor the sacrifice of those who fought and died in a series of more recent conflicts that have lasted longer than World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined must travel to a place where the nearest public transportation is a Greyhound bus station down the road in Ottawa and the top restaurant is Bobaluk’s Beef and Pizza. Nowhere else in this vast nation of ours has anyone invested the money and the effort to remember more than a generation’s worth of less-than-triumphant American war making. Marseilles has a lock on the franchise.

Critics might quibble with the aesthetics of the memorial, dismissing it as an unpretentious knock-off of the far more famous Vietnam Wall. Yet if the design doesn’t qualify as cutting edge, it is palpably honest and heartfelt. It consists chiefly of a series of polished granite panels listing the names of those killed during the various phases of this country’s “forever wars” going all the way back to the sailors gunned down in the June 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty.

Those panels now contain more than 8,000 names. Each June, in conjunction with the annual “Illinois Motorcycle Freedom Run,” which ends at the memorial, more are added. Along with flags and plaques, there is also text affirming that all those commemorated there are heroes who died for freedom and will never be forgotten.

On that point, allow me to register my own quibble. Although my son’s name is halfway down near the left margin of Panel 5B, I find myself uneasy with any reference to American soldiers having died for freedom in the Greater Middle East. Our pronounced penchant for using that term in connection with virtually any American military action strikes me as a dodge. It serves as an excuse for not thinking too deeply about the commitments, policies, and decisions that led to all those names being etched in stone, with more to come next month and probably for many years thereafter.

In Ernest Hemingway’s famed novel about World War I, A Farewell to Arms, his protagonist is “embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.” I feel something similar when it comes to the use of freedom in this context. Well, not embarrassed exactly, but deeply uncomfortable. Freedom, used in this fashion, conceals truth behind a veil of patriotic sentiment.

Those whose names are engraved on the wall in Marseilles died in service to their country. Of that there is no doubt. Whether they died to advance the cause of freedom or even the wellbeing of the United States is another matter entirely. Terms that might more accurately convey why these wars began and why they have persisted for so long include oil, dominion, hubris, a continuing and stubborn refusal among policymakers to own up to their own stupendous folly, and the collective negligence of citizens who have become oblivious to where American troops happen to be fighting at any given moment and why. Some might add to the above list an inability to distinguish between our own interests and those of putative allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Candidates at the Wall

During the several hours I spent there, virtually no one else visited the Middle East Conflicts Wall Memorial. A single elderly couple stopped by briefly and that was that. If this was understandable, it was also telling. After all, Marseilles, Illinois, is an out-of-the-way, isolated little burg. Touristy it’s not. There’s no buzz and no vibe and it’s a long way from the places that set the tone in present-day America. To compare Marseilles with New York, Washington, Hollywood, Las Vegas, or Silicon Valley is like comparing a Dollar General with Saks Fifth Avenue. Marseilles has the former. The closest Saks outlet is about a two-hour drive to Chicago’s Loop.

On the other hand, when you think about it, Marseilles is exactly the right place to situate the nation’s only existing memorial to its Middle Eastern wars. Where better, after all, to commemorate conflicts that Americans would like to ignore or forget than in a hollowing-out Midwestern town they never knew existed in the first place?

So, with the campaign for the 2020 presidential election now heating up, allow me to offer a modest proposal of my own — one that might, briefly at least, make Marseilles a destination of sorts.

Just as there are all-but-mandatory venues in Iowa and New Hampshire where candidates are expected to appear, why not make Marseilles, Illinois, one as well. Let all of the candidates competing to oust Donald Trump from the White House (their ranks now approaching two dozen) schedule at least one campaign stop at the Middle East Conflicts Wall, press entourage suitably in tow.

Let them take a page from presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall and use the site as a backdrop to reflect on the historical significance of this particular place. They should explain in concrete terms what the conflicts memorialized there signify; describe their relationship to the post-Cold War narrative of America as the planet’s “indispensable nation” or “sole superpower”; assess the disastrous costs and consequences of those never-ending wars; fix accountability; lay out to the American people how to avoid repeating the mistakes made by previous administrations, including the present one that seems to be itching for yet another conflict in the Middle East; and help us understand how, under the guise of promoting liberty and democracy, Washington has sown chaos through much of the region.

And, just to make it interesting, bonus points for anyone who can get through their remarks without referring to “freedom” or “supreme sacrifice,” citing the Gospel of John, chapter 15, verse 13 (“Greater love hath no man than this…”), or offering some fatuous reference to GIs as agents of the Lord called upon to smite evildoers. On the other hand, apt comparisons to Vietnam are not just permitted but encouraged.

I’m betting that the good bikers of Illinois who long ago served in Vietnam will happily provide a mic and a podium. If they won’t, I will.

Judge Blocks Some Border Wall Funding; Trump Plans Appeal

SAN FRANCISCO—A federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump from building key sections of his border wall with money secured under his declaration of a national emergency, delivering what may prove a temporary setback on one of his highest priorities.

U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr.’s order, issued Friday, prevents work from beginning on two of the highest-priority, Pentagon-funded wall projects — one spanning 46 miles (74 kilometers) in New Mexico and another covering 5 miles (8 kilometers) in Yuma, Arizona.

On Saturday, Trump pledged to file an expedited appeal of the ruling.

Trump, who is visiting Japan, tweeted: “Another activist Obama appointed judge has just ruled against us on a section of the Southern Wall that is already under construction. This is a ruling against Border Security and in favor of crime, drugs and human trafficking. We are asking for an expedited appeal!”

While Gilliam’s order applied only to those first-in-line projects, the judge made clear that he felt the challengers were likely to prevail at trial on their argument that the president was wrongly ignoring Congress’ wishes by diverting Defense Department money.

“Congress’s ‘absolute’ control over federal expenditures—even when that control may frustrate the desires of the Executive Branch regarding initiatives it views as important—is not a bug in our constitutional system. It is a feature of that system, and an essential one,” he wrote in his 56-page opinion.

It wasn’t a total defeat for the administration. Gilliam, an Oakland-based appointee of President Barack Obama, rejected a request by California and 19 other states to prevent the diversion of hundreds of millions of dollars in Treasury asset forfeiture funds to wall construction, in part because he felt they were unlikely to prevail on arguments that the administration skirted environmental impact reviews.

The delay may be temporary. The question for Gilliam was whether to allow construction with Defense and Treasury funds while the lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the state attorneys general were being considered. The cases still must be heard on their merits.

“This order is a win for our system of checks and balances, the rule of law, and border communities,” said Dror Ladin, an attorney for the ACLU, which represented the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday.

The administration faces several lawsuits over the emergency declaration but only one other seeks to block construction during the legal challenge. A judge in Washington, D.C., on Thursday heard arguments on a challenge brought by the U.S. House of Representatives that says the money shifting violates the constitution. The judge was weighing whether the lawmakers even had the ability to sue the president instead of working through political routes to resolve the bitter dispute.

At stake are billions of dollars that would allow Trump to make progress in a signature campaign promise heading into his campaign for a second term.

Trump declared a national emergency in February after losing a fight with the Democratic-led House that led to a 35-day government shutdown. As a compromise on border and immigration enforcement, Congress set aside $1.375 billion to extend or replace existing barriers in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings.

Trump grudgingly accepted the money, but then declared the national emergency to siphon money from other government accounts, identifying up to $8.1 billion for wall construction. The funds include $3.6 billion from military construction funds, $2.5 billion from Defense Department counterdrug activities and $600 million from the Treasury Department’s asset forfeiture fund.

The Defense Department has already transferred the counterdrug money. Patrick Shanahan, the acting defense secretary, is expected to decide any day whether to transfer the military construction funds.

The president’s adversaries say the emergency declaration was an illegal attempt to ignore Congress, which authorized far less wall spending than Trump wanted. The administration said Trump was protecting national security as unprecedented numbers of Central American asylum-seeking families arrive at the U.S. border.

The administration has awarded 11 wall contracts for a combined $2.76 billion — including three in the last two months that draw on Defense Department counterdrug money — and is preparing for a flurry of construction that the president is already celebrating at campaign-style rallies.

The Army Corps of Engineers recently announced several large contacts with Pentagon funding. Last month, SLSCO Ltd. of Galveston, Texas, won a $789 million award to replace 46 miles (74 kilometers) of barrier in New Mexico — the one that Gilliam blocked on Friday.

Last week, Southwest Valley Constructors of Albuquerque, New Mexico, won a $646 million award to replace 63 miles (101 kilometers) in the Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona, sector, which Gilliam did not stop. Barnard Construction Co. of Bozeman, Montana, won a $141.8 million contract to replace 5 miles (8 kilometers) in Yuma that Gilliam blocked and 15 miles (24 kilometers) in El Centro, California, which he did not address.

Gilliam’s ruling gives a green light — at least for now — for the administration to tap the Treasury funds, which it has said it plans to use to extend barriers in Rio Grande Valley.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat and frequent Trump adversary, didn’t comment directly on his defeat but congratulated the ACLU and its clients “in securing this critical victory for our states and communities.”

Trump inherited barriers covering 654 miles (1,046 kilometers), or about one-third of the border with Mexico. Of the 244 miles (390 kilometers) in awarded contracts, more than half is with Pentagon money. All but 14 miles (22 kilometers) awarded so far are to replace existing barriers, not extend coverage.

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Spagat reported from San Diego.

Pence to West Point Graduates: ‘A Virtual Certainty’ They’ll See Combat

WEST POINT, N.Y.—Vice President Mike Pence told the most diverse graduating class in the history of the U.S. Military Academy on Saturday that the world is “a dangerous place” and they should expect to see combat.

“Some of you will join the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said.

Pence congratulated the West Point graduates on behalf of President Donald Trump, and told them, “As you accept the mantle of leadership I promise you, your commander in chief will always have your back. President Donald Trump is the best friend the men and women of our armed forces will ever have.”

More than 980 cadets became U.S. Army second lieutenants in the ceremony at West Point’s football stadium.

Pence noted that Trump has proposed a $750 billion defense budget for 2020 and said the United States “is once again embracing our role as the leader of the free world.”

“It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life,” Pence said. “You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen. Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.”

Pence spoke as the U.S. plans to send another 1,500 troops to the Middle East to counter what the Trump administration describes as threats from Iran; as the longest war in U.S. history churns on in Afghanistan; and as Washington considers its options amid political upheaval in Venezuela. The administration is also depending more heavily on the military to deter migrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The class was the most diverse in West Point’s history, and Pence said he wanted to acknowledge “the historic milestones that we’re marking today.”

The 2019 cadets included 34 black women and 223 women, both all-time highs since the first female cadets graduated in 1980. The academy graduated its 5,000th woman Saturday.

The 110 African Americans who graduated were double the number from 2013.

Pence said the graduates also included the academy’s 1,000th Jewish cadet.

Pence did not serve in the military but noted that his late father served with the Army in the Korean War.

“And as I stand before you today here at West Point I can’t help but think that First Lt. Edward J. Pence, looking down from glory, is finally impressed with his third son,” Pence said. “So thank you for the honor.”

The ceremony was Pence’s second visit to West Point and his first as commencement speaker.

Trump Opens State Visit, Needles Japan Over Trade Issues

TOKYO—President Donald Trump opened a state visit to Japan on Saturday by needling the country over its trade imbalance with the United States. “Maybe that’s why you like me so much,” he joshed.

Trump also promoted the U.S. under his leadership, saying “there’s never been a better time” to invest or do business in America, and he urged corporate leaders to come.

The president’s first event after arriving in Tokyo was a reception with several dozen Japanese and American business leaders at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. He said the two countries “are hard at work” negotiating a trade agreement.

“I would say that Japan has had a substantial edge for many, many years, but that’s OK,” Trump said, joking that “maybe that’s why you like me so much.”

His comments underscored the competing dynamics of a state visit designed to show off the long U.S.-Japan alliance and the close friendship between Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe even as trade tensions run high.

Trump landed from his overnight flight shortly after a magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck just south of Tokyo and rattled the city.

Abe has planned a largely ceremonial, four-day visit to suit Trump’s whims and ego. It’s part of Abe’s charm strategy that some analysts say has spared Japan from the full weight of Trump’s trade wrath.

Abe and Trump planned to play golf Sunday before Abe gives Trump the chance to present his “President’s Cup” trophy to the winner of a sumo wrestling championship match. The White House said the trophy is nearly 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall and weighs between 60 pounds and 70 pounds (27 kilograms and 32 kilograms).

On Monday, Trump will become the first head of state to meet Emperor Naruhito since he ascended to the throne this month.

“With all the countries of the world, I’m the guest of honor at the biggest event that they’ve had in over 200 years,” Trump said before the trip.

The president is threatening Japan with potentially devastating U.S. tariffs on foreign autos and auto parts. He has suggested he will go ahead with the trade penalties if U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer fails to win concessions from Japan and the European Union.

Trump had predicted that a U.S.-Japan trade deal could be finalized during his trip. But that’s unlikely given that the two sides are still figuring out the parameters of what they will negotiate.

He nonetheless portrayed the negotiations in a positive light in his remarks to the business group.

“With this deal we hope to address the trade imbalance, remove barriers to United States exports and ensure fairness and reciprocity in our relationship. And we’re getting closer,” Trump said. He also urged the business leaders to invest more in the U.S.

He praised the “very special” U.S.-Japan alliance that he said “has never been stronger, it’s never been more powerful, never been closer.”

Abe made a strategic decision before Trump was elected in November 2016 to focus on Japan’s relationship with the U.S.

Abe rushed to New York two weeks after that election to meet the president-elect at Trump Tower. Last month, Abe and his wife, Akie, celebrated first lady Melania Trump’s birthday during a White House dinner.

Abe and Trump are likely to meet for the third time in three months when Trump returns to Japan in late June for a summit of leading rich and developing nations.

Behind the smiles and personal friendship, however, there is deep uneasiness over Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Japanese autos and auto parts on national security grounds. Such a move would be more devastating to the Japanese economy than earlier tariffs on steel and aluminum.

Trump recently agreed to a six-month delay, enough time to carry Abe past July’s Japanese parliamentary elections.

Also at issue is the lingering threat of North Korea, which has resumed missile testing and recently fired a series of short-range missiles that U.S. officials, including Trump, have tried to play down despite an agreement by the North to hold off on further testing.

Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, told reporters Saturday before Trump arrived that the short-range missile tests were a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and that sanctions must stay in place.

Bolton said Trump and Abe would “talk about making sure the integrity of the Security Council resolutions are maintained.”

It marked a change in tone from the view expressed by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a recent television interview. He said that “the moratorium was focused, very focused, on intercontinental missile systems, the ones that threaten the United States.” That raised alarm bells in Japan, where short-range missiles pose a serious threat.

Bolton commented a day after North Korea’s official media said nuclear negotiations with Washington would not resume unless the U.S. abandoned what the North described as demands for unilateral disarmament.

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Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report.

 

Real Estate Title Firm’s Lapse Exposes 885 Million Files

SANTA ANA, Calif.—A security lapse at a major real estate title company exposed the bank account numbers and other sensitive information contained in 885 million files.

First American Financial confirmed the problem Friday after it was reported by the blog Krebs On Security . A flaw in an internet application allowed anyone with a web browser to see the confidential data until First American blocked all outside access Friday. It’s unclear if any of the exposed information was scooped up by outsiders with criminal intentions.

“We have hired an outside forensic firm to assure us that there has not been any meaningful unauthorized access to our customer data,” First American said in a statement.

If the 885 million records were harvested, it would rank among the biggest leaks of data on the internet.

First American, based in Santa Ana, California, generates $5.7 billion in revenue from 800 offices in nine countries. The company’s stock slipped 2% in Friday’s extended trading.

Lawmakers Question Surfacing of New Sandra Bland Video

AUSTIN, Texas—Texas authorities on Friday denied withholding a cellphone video of Sandra Bland’s confrontational traffic stop, responding to a Democratic legislator’s heated questions about why the 39-second clip never publicly surfaced until now.

Bland, a 28-year-old black woman from outside Chicago, had used her phone in 2015 to briefly film a white state trooper as he drew a stun gun and yelled “I will light you up!” while ordering her out of the car. She was dead three days later, hanging in her jail cell outside Houston. Her death was ruled a suicide.

“The Department of Public Safety has not illegally withheld evidence from Sandra Bland’s family or her legal team,” said Phillip Adkins, general counsel of the department.

The video had not been publicly seen until it was aired this month by a Dallas television station, and both lawmakers and Bland’s family say they had also never seen the clip. They say the video proves that Trooper Brian Encinia had no reason to fear for his life and questioned whether he should have faced charges beyond perjury.

Democratic presidential contenders in the crowded 2020 field have also reacted to the video with calls for accountability and criminal justice reforms.

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Explanations by state officials were challenged, often sharply, by Democratic state Rep. Garnet Coleman, who said he never received the video despite asking for all evidence as chairman of the House Committee on County Affairs. He told Adkins he was handed a jumbled “data dump” of four discs and said the description of Bland’s cellphone video in the state’s investigative report wasn’t an honest account.

“I disagree with you. I think it’s a fair and accurate description of the video,” Adkins said.

Coleman interrupted, talking over him.

“You can disagree all day long, because I don’t have lying eyes, sir,” he said. “I’ve looked into this more than anyone.”

Bland’s mother, Geneva Reed-Veal of Chicago, attended the hearing at the Texas Capitol but did not testify. She told reporters afterward she heard “a lot of discrepancies” at the hearing but declined further comment.

Encinia, the trooper, was fired after being indicted for perjury and said he came to fear for his safety after stopping Bland for failing to signal a lane change. The perjury charge was later dropped in exchange for Encinia agreeing to never work in law enforcement again.

Coleman said Encinia “got off light” and accused state officials of not being ethically forthcoming with their handling of the video. Hours after the hearing, Texas DPS released a copy of a letter sent in October 2015 to the Bland’s family attorney, Cannon Lambert, notifying him that a “cell phone download” of Bland’s phone was enclosed on a thumb drive. Lambert said he never saw the video in the evidence that was turned over to him.

The hearing had been quickly arranged before the Texas Legislature adjourns Monday until 2021. One proposal that could still reach Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk would make it more difficult to jail people for low-level misdemeanors, which some lawmakers have sought in the wake of Bland’s death. Law enforcement groups, however, are fighting the measure.

In 2017, Coleman passed a “Sandra Bland Act” that included de-escalation training, independent investigations of county jail deaths and more racial profiling data. Advocates for criminal justice reforms have praised the changes, but the end product disappointed Bland’s family, who felt it didn’t address the circumstances leading up to her death.

The 500-Year-Long Battle to Save the Planet

“As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice From Colonization to Standing Rock”

A book by Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Land, culture, and history are inextricably intertwined, and for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, environmental justice also preserves cultures. This philosophy was vividly on display during the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016–’17. But what followed was nothing less than a series of human rights abuses by heavy-handed law enforcement and private security personnel. Hundreds of people were arrested, and many were roughed up.

Standing Rock is only the latest episode of more than 500 years of European incursions and occupation of the Americas, says scholar Dina Gilio-Whitaker in her new book, “As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice From Colonization to Standing Rock.” Gilio-Whitaker, a citizen of the Colville Confederated Tribes, is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and a consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. This book — her second — is a primer on the Native environmental movement, and a long chronicle of fighting back against government and corporate power with varying degrees of success.

Click here to read long excerpts from “As Long as Grass Grows” at Google Books.

“To be a person of direct Indigenous descent in the US today is to have survived a genocide of cataclysmic proportions,” writes Gilio-Whitaker. “Some Native people have described the experience of living in today’s world as postapocalyptic.” Indeed, between 1492 and 1890, about 99 percent of all Native peoples disappeared from what is today’s United States, victims of disease, war, and starvation. And it wasn’t just people who were disappearing — it was the deliberate degradation of ancestral ecologies in the name of “Manifest Destiny.” This forced Native peoples to adhere to a Western view of land use, leading to even more cultural and environmental destruction.

Extractive industries, commercial agriculture, grazing, dam-building, track-laying, and road construction — what most Americans would consider progress — all contributed to what historian Raphaël Lemkin accurately labeled genocide. Gilio-Whitaker takes the reader on a historical journey that, had it been penned about the Jewish Holocaust or the “ethnic cleansing” conducted at the behest of any number of 20th-century despots, would be well known. Yet when it comes to the United States’s continuing campaign to wipe tribal communities from the map, most Americans are in a state of denial that such a thing could happen.

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But it happens today. Indigenous peoples now must contend with a colonial-based legal system that hampers Indigenous governments from functioning along traditional lines or building uncolonized economies and social justice systems, and environmental movements based on tropes that seek to exclude human interaction with nature and deny the millennia-long impact of Indigenous ecosystem stewardship. In this postapocalyptic scenario, Native peoples are working to replace that system by means of restorative environmental justice to help rebuild their cultures, mitigate damage to their lands, reinstate the proper roles of women in tribal leadership, and strengthen families and communities.

The modern environmental movement didn’t help matters. Based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau, who promulgated the myth of the mystical, noble savage, and of John Muir, who viewed Native peoples as dirty, lazy, ugly and generally inferior, coupled with what historian Carolyn Merchant argues were “values that equated wilderness with whiteness,” the American environmental movement evolved its stance of the wilderness as a place where Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and other people of color were barred from entry. This, Gilio-Whitaker writes, also led to the unfettered dumping of toxic wastes within communities of color, since Merchant wrote that the white settlers who dominated the environmental movement considered cities to be dark, depraved places, as opposed to the “unpeopled […] pristine, pure and unspoiled” wild lands.

Muir and his contemporaries, as well as many current environmentally minded people, never considered why places like Yosemite Valley, the Central Coast, and the oak forests in California were so beautiful — so biodiverse, so productive, welcoming, and “untouched.” They were the result of anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 years of human stewardship. The idea that these pristine areas were carefully sculpted and maintained by human hands was anathema to these late 19th- and early 20th-century Brahmins. So, the establishment of national parks, monuments, and forests were invariably accompanied by the removal of the people who had shaped the ecologies of those areas.

Along with the exclusion of Native peoples from the lands is the appropriation of Native religious and spiritual beliefs by hippies, New Agers, and other counterculturalists who felt entitled to lift practices for themselves, not understanding that these practices are based on a people’s relationship to their land and wasn’t meant just for enlightenment. By the 1980s, clashes between environmentalists and tribes had grown. Environmental organizations attempted to prevent tribes from engaging in traditional practices such as whaling, fishing, or cultural species management.

The environmental movement is also slowly changing and evolving to reflect a more collaborative stance, although there are still fault lines between Indigenous peoples and environmentalists. And then there are the gender issues. The modern feminist movement has forgotten its debt to tribal cultures and governance. Many Native societies are matrilineal or matriarchal in nature, recognize the existence of more than two genders, and ensure a balance of power between genders. Those cultural foundations also resulted in strong, nurturing extended family ties, with protections for pregnant and lactating women, small children, and elders.

Traditional governance also meant that ancestral ecological protocols would be honored as well. Those social and political constructs, which had served Indigenous peoples well for centuries, were smashed to near-extinction by the introduction of Christianity, which emphasizes a patriarchal structure and demonizes non-heterosexual relationships. Women had few if any rights, and were denied the right to vote, own property, or control their own bodies. However, early feminists learned of and admired the Haudenosaunee cultures, which had maintained its Clan Mother system and matrilineal and matriarchal ways.

Native women have also had a history of mobilizing in contemporary times to protect their lands and their communities from environmental degradation and outright destruction. From the early 20th century’s Indigenous intellectuals such as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, or Zitkala-Sa, and Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin to Women of All Red Nations, the Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, and the Idle No More movement, Native women are front and center in the environmental protection movement.

Back at the Sacred Stone Camp, the center of the Standing Rock protest, women managed the myriad tasks of keeping a huge instant community functioning and healthy. But even here, non-Native feminism collided with Native views in a clash of values. As one journalist who visited Standing Stone Camp frequently noted to Gilio-Whitaker, the topic of skirts symbolized this clash. To Lakota women, long skirts expressed cultural pride and honors tradition, while European-American women’s worldview didn’t encompass, or in many cases, respect, that protocol.

So what’s the answer to pursuing and sustaining environmental justice in Indian Country? Gilio-Whitaker offers some suggestions. Coalitions can be used to protect sites such as Panhe, the most culturally significant site to the Acjachemen people of Orange County, California. Indeed, California leads the way in developing approaches at the state and local level to partner with tribes to protect cultural and ecological sites using concepts developed in the United Nations’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. She argues that federal law, such as the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, should be amended to provide for protection of sacred places in addition to simply providing access. Tribes themselves should be building more intergovernmental relationships and entering more formal partnerships dealing with a variety of cross-jurisdictional issues.

But Gilio-Whitaker emphasizes that Indigenous peoples are under no illusions; there’s no savior on the horizon that can institute protections over lands, waters, and species, not to mention freeing tribes from the dominion of the federal government. The Earth’s entire ecosystem is at risk.

This review originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books .

 

Development With Dignity

Asad Ali, a young man in his 20s, has a passion for teaching. He is a high school graduate and has no teacher’s training degree, but he has compassion and inborn pedagogic skills that endear him to his students. His father wanted him to join the army, but Ali preferred his classroom to the battlefield. If Pakistan had more teachers with his commitment, the country would be a different place altogether.

Ali would be a failure in the postmodern education system the Pakistan government is making futile attempts to create for a people still stuck in the medieval ages. Had Ali managed to adjust to the prescribed system, his students in Khairo Dero—the village in Sindh where he lives and works—would be unable to relate to him as they do now.

The key to Ali’s success lies in Khairo Dero’s adoption of a holistic approach to community development—both social and economic.

The development process has two main participants: the beneficiary, i.e., the people, and the provider, which can be the government or a nongovernmental organization. Because providers are the stronger ones in this power relationship, they tend to decide what needs to be done. And if there happens to be a foreign aid component, donors may have the final say, even if their choices may not be appropriate for local conditions.

This basic fact has not been generally understood by those involved in Pakistan’s development process. Their training and goals have been set in foreign academia or in a system determined in Pakistan in a Western framework. That is why the country remains mired in poverty.

There are some exceptions. Some of Pakistan’s social scientists have benefited from the knowledge of the West, using it to understand indigenous conditions and the culture of the East. The best known was Akhter Hameed Khan, founder of the Orangi Pilot Project, which began in 1980. Orangi was a huge squatters’ settlement on the outskirts of Karachi. Based on his research on the ground and his studies abroad, Khan strongly believed that the community knows exactly what it wants and creates its own leadership. It knows how the needs of the people can be met. His credo was to let the community develop itself on a self-help basis by providing it with technical guidance and financial support to facilitate its work.

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Khan’s philosophy has found international acceptance from theorists of community development. But his own country has failed to officially observe this basic principle in its policies, instead tending to join hands with people who upscale the development process without community input, creating a disconnect between the authorities and the community. As a result, the government appears unsympathetic to the needs of the people, and demands compliance with its own agenda.

Against this backdrop, I was eager to visit Khairo Dero, a small village of 3,600 situated 280 miles northeast of the port city of Karachi in Sindh. Khairo Dero also happens to be the home of the ancestors of my friend, Naween Mangi. Having lived in Karachi, Mangi discovered her roots when her travels in Sindh took her back to the home of her forebears a decade or so ago. Mangi is a trained journalist with a high-class Western education; at a young age, she was appointed the Karachi bureau chief of the American TV channel Bloomberg. She did well there, until she felt that she couldn’t juggle her job as well as her duties at the Ali Hasan Mangi Memorial Trust, which she had founded in her grandfather’s memory. That work often required her to be away from Karachi. She had to make a choice, and she chose her people.

Zubeida Mustafa (at center, wearing purple) and Naween Mangi (to her right, from the viewer’s perspective) pose for a photo with the staff of AHMMT in April 2019. (Courtesy of Zubeida Mustafa)

She invited me recently to revisit  Khairo Dero, where I had accompanied her five years ago. It is a seven-hour drive from Karachi. Because road-building has been on the agenda of all recent governments in Pakistan, the country is blessed with a fine network of roads connecting all major towns and cities. As we drove, village after village loomed before us, each sleepy, dusty settlement no different from the one that had receded. Sindh’s countryside shows few signs of development. No electricity pylons or telecom towers break the monotony of the horizon; they only line the roads. We drove past fields of wheat waiting to be harvested in an environment soaked in bright sunshine.

As we turned into Khairo Dero and drove down the main street of the village, a lush green patch of land appeared. This park has a lawn lined with trees and bushes, a fountain, a variety of terra cotta animals and fowls strategically arranged, and swings and slides to provide children hours of entertainment.

It was hot—the day temperature was 114 degrees Fahrenheit the day of our early April visit. It would soar to 125 degrees in a few weeks, I was told. But once indoors, I noticed that the flow of air from the fans was uninterrupted. That didn’t signify any improvement in Pakistan’s energy situation, which leaves many rural areas without electricity for 18 hours a day. Rather, it signaled the debut of solar power in Khairo Dero. Every household now has a solar panel all its own.

Next to the modest but clean rest-house where I stayed is the community school, which is Ali’s kingdom. When I visited Khairo Dero five years ago, the sewage system was being laid and some concrete houses had been constructed. But that was just the beginning. Today, every house in the village boasts a concrete roof, a kitchen with a gas stove, a toilet connected to the sewer lines and a hand pump for water.

“Now this,” I thought, “is development in the true sense of the word.” How had Mangi performed this miracle? She said it had not been easy sailing. There had been failures, and she had learned as she went along. Her main strategy was to take a cue from the people and be flexible. She had studied Khan’s philosophy and work, and she had interacted with his successor, Perween Rehman, director of the Orangi Pilot Project Research and Training Institute, who influenced her significantly (Rehman was shot dead in 2013, possibly as a result of her activism).

Mangi explained how Khan and Rehman had influenced her work in Khairo Dero. For example, she said, “When the people rejected the house plan I proposed, saying the rooms were too small for their large families, I dropped the plan and adopted another.”

Her original plan had been to provide the village’s children with a school and library. “But then, as I went into the community and noticed children running around barefoot in the streets all day with nowhere to play, I started asking them what they would like to do. They all wanted something ‘fun to do,’ ” Mangi said. “So we built a playground and an activity hall with all manner of games and art stuff.” Later, the community decided it needed a school, because the government schools were dysfunctional. It developed a plan for the school and approached The Citizens Foundation; the Mangi family donated land for the school. Mangi said she tried entering into a partnership with the government by adopting four of its schools, but gave up the idea because she found it difficult to work with officials. Now, all Khairo Dero’s children in are enrolled in school, in a country where more than 20 million children are estimated to be out of school.

Children play in AHMMT’s playground in Khairo Dero, Pakistan. (Courtesy of Zubeida Mustafa)

Education promises to bring about a change in mindset. Khairo Dero girls who will graduate from school next year are already discussing their college plans.

The story of Khairo Dero’s health clinic is similar. There is a government dispensary a stone’s throw from the village, but it barely functioned. When the village decided it wanted its own facility and doctor, Mangi helped the community arrange it.

That doesn’t mean Khairo Dero villagers just have to ask to get what they want. All propositions must be feasible, and the community has to share the cost. Income generation has always been the biggest challenge. Men I spoke with during my 2014 visit and again in April expressed anxiety about unemployment and their economic problems. Those who till the land are landless and heavily in debt. They didn’t get a fair deal from the large landowners who rule Pakistan. Cattle farming has limited scope. No entrepreneur is willing to set up industries in the area, where electricity is not assured and it is too remote from city centers where skilled labor is available. The Mangi family trust has made 150 microloans and reports success stories and 100% loan recovery. But not every product has found a market. Mangi’s attempt at introduce candle-making, jewelry-crafting and block printing in the village has come to naught, as no outlets for the finished products could be found. She is now exploring new economic activities.

Numerous challenges have to be considered. The housing and solar panel projects started so well that the demand grew by leaps and bounds. Mangi responded instinctively, and within no time she had spread her work to 40 neighboring villages. Then came the crunch. There were arguments over who had entitlement to facilities. It became difficult to assess real poverty. Mangi realized that the project’s development dimension was being lost as it started leaning toward becoming a charitable activity. The confidence she had so assiduously built up began to erode, and donors began to demand special priority for their favored projects. Procedures for applications, need assessment and surveys worked out by Mangi’s staff were in danger of being compromised. The only solution was to roll back her program to the confines of her own village until it was consolidated. She learned by experience that charity is not—and should not be—confused with development. She is careful now about preserving villagers’ dignity and mitigating their sense of dependence and helplessness by involving them in their own development projects.

The secret of Khairo Dero’s success is the confidence the people and the donors have in Mangi’s trust. Little things matter, as does every person, which was Mangi’s motto when she launched the project in 2008. In Khairo Dero, she dresses conservatively, as the women do in rural societies. Her staff are local people who have been trained in the community to meet its needs, not the demands of the globalized world. Above all, people have a sense of ownership, because they have contributed their labor and helped pay the total cost of projects they have undertaken. As a result, they take responsibility for the maintenance of their projects. There is no crime in the village, and when Mangi faced some resistance from encroachers, the community rallied round her in support.

Who are Mangi’s donors? No foreign agencies. Mainly they are friends and family, and friends of friends. When she needs to, Mangi emails those on her donors’ list; within a day or so, the requisite pledges are made, and then donors receive another email saying, “No more funds needed.” Mangi says her biggest difficulty is collecting funds for administrative costs, which are roughly $1,500 per month—15% of the total budget.

I ask Mangi whether she hopes for support from the government in her scheme for community development. “I would be naïve if I say no,” she says. To make her work more effective and enhance achievement, she initially planned to partner with the government, which has more resources; that is why she adopted government schools and the clinic.

“But cooperation from the government was not forthcoming. We had to undertake the work the government could have easily done,” she explains. “We have built four bridges in the areas around Khairo Dero because the government didn’t do so, and farmers/villagers were in severe distress, unable to access their lands or homes through water courses. In all these cases, the community provided labor and we provided material. We built culverts at a fraction of the cost the government would have. Had the government done the bridges—it’s their job and they are given funds for this very work—we could have used our limited resources elsewhere.”

She concedes that rural and urban development are different ball games; she cannot replicate the models that have been designed for urban areas. After our visit, Mangi forwarded an email she had just received from the Sindh Association of North America, announcing that SANA is launching a social movement designed to get people to take ownership of their villages in Sindh. “What a lovely idea,” I remarked.

“Agreed,” she said.

Trump’s Trade Policy Is Accelerating America’s Decline

The United States has increased tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese products to 25 percent, and Beijing has responded in kind on $60 billion worth of American goods. More tit for tat appears to be on the way: the Trump administration is now openly deliberating whether to impose additional tariffs on a further $325 billion of Chinese goods exported to the United States. National security concerns are also being increasingly invoked: Not only is Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications group, already largely shut out of selling its products in the U.S. domestic market, but Trump is also now taking steps to ban the sale of U.S.-made components to Huawei as well. What was once a mere trade skirmish, therefore, appears to be metastasizing into Cold War 2.0.

This creates a conundrum for the Trump administration: Beijing is increasingly viewed by many countries as an economic rival or a security threat to be contained, rather than a collaborative trade partner to be accommodated. But the president’s “America First” trade policy is undermining broader multilateral efforts to contain China because Trump’s incessant focus on reducing his country’s bilateral trade deficit with Beijing means diverting Chinese purchases away from other trade counterparties.

That means, for example, China buying more U.S. cars made on American soil than, say, German ones, more U.S. soybeans than Brazilian, or more U.S. semiconductors than Japanese or South Korean ones, all designed to help reduce the bilateral deficit. This sort of a trade deal, however, is clearly not in the interests of the EU, Brazil, Japan, or Southeast Asia, and is making them averse to collaborating with the United States with regard to any Chinese security concerns they might share (which they do), especially when one considers that the basis for the West’s successful containment strategy against the former Soviet Union was that it was both collaborative and multilateral in scope.

Semiconductors are a perfect case in point to highlight the new contradiction. If Trump bans the export of U.S.-made semis to Huawei (he has now offered a temporary 90-day waiver), then the latter will naturally gravitate toward buying them from other countries. In fact, the Sino-U.S. trade dispute is just one of many growing points of friction between the U.S. and its traditional allies. Many are increasingly ignoring Trump, and competing for Chinese markets or investment (as the Italians have recently done in response to Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative”).

The Sino-U.S. dispute throws up other challenges for the administration: Tariffs are certainly effective as an attention-getting mechanism. But if the goal is ultimately to encourage more jobs at home, they will be ineffective if unaccompanied by a national industrial policy that focuses on American re-industrialization in order to create skilled, high-paying private sector jobs capable of profitably supporting workers with solid middle-class incomes. A corollary is that a national development policy must be geared toward jobs that reflect the needs of the 21st-century economy, rather than nostalgically working to sustain industries that may be headed toward obsolescence, like steel or even fossil fuels.

Many share the president’s belief that a harder line on Chinese trade is necessary. This reflects a growing loss of faith (even among those formerly well-disposed to Beijing) that the country’s market reforms will inevitably lead to multi-party liberal democracy, along with mounting skepticism that free trade and commercial co-dependence can displace military rivalry (a similar historic miscalculation was made before World War I).

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U.S.-China Talks Are About Much More Than Trade



by

But support for the president’s current stance, particularly from Democrats, is conditionally tied to the embrace of a more activist form of state industrial policy to ensure that American workers derive maximum benefit from the reverse engineering of existing “Chimerica” supply chains. And that, argues Professor Michael Lind, “means adequate and permanent production on U.S. soil, not just innovation in America and production elsewhere.” This means some combination of managed trade, along with national industrial policy.

Managed trade, which prioritizes concrete purchases of U.S. goods (as opposed to increased market access or structural changes to China’s economy), is not really new. Ronald Reagan pursued a similar policy against Japan during the 1980s. Nor is the idea of a national economic development strategy particularly contrary to American historical traditions. Since the days of Alexander Hamilton, industrialization and the concomitant role of the state have long been viewed as the joint basis of modern military power and prosperity by both major parties, whether the president was a Republican like Lincoln or Eisenhower, or a Democrat such as FDR or JFK.

It is only with the rise of multinational industry in the past few decades where the notion has taken hold that the state should limit its role in economic development. Borders have come second to measures of growth and corporate profitability. When there has been greater growth potential with policies that go across borders, the policies generally got the green light, even at a cost of eroding America’s homegrown manufacturing base. As industry became even more profitable when it went offshore, the focus for staying on top of the world’s economic food chain shifted—principally in the fields of advanced research in the fields of computing, biology and of course, military and space.

But Americans themselves often did not experience the benefits of these shifts as more and more industry moved offshore. International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank loans ensured that the developing world would increasingly depend on Western agriculture to feed itself, Western engineering expertise to supply energy infrastructure, and Western finance centers to manage—and leverage—their economies. The muscle memory of state involvement in industry at this point is a matter of bailouts and buyouts. What remains of the old state-level involvement in national economic affairs has evolved into a “Washington Consensus” that engages in a more limited government role: Modest incentives and subsidies to avoid sudden and sharp economic convulsions. A 25-year decline in manufacturing, rather than all at once.

Until the latest disruption on trade, Wall Street and the markets had come to believe Trump would get a trade deal with China that promised increased access to Beijing’s domestic market (e.g., the credit card companies and the U.S. rating agencies), but not much in the way of a changed status quo. One of the reasons why the president may have pulled back from this kind of an agreement is that expanding U.S. corporate access to China’s domestic markets actually deepens “Chimerica” integration, rather than disrupting it and bringing much industry back to the United States. American blue-collar workers (a growing Trump constituency) will neither benefit from a “status quo plus” arrangement, nor is that kind of a deal consistent with the growing belief among Trump’s advisers that Beijing constitutes a growing national security threat.

Which leads to one of the new dimensions of this trade war: it is occurring against a backdrop in which long-standing contradictions with regard to trade and national security concerns have finally collided. These tensions are not new, as Michael Lind has observed:

“Under presidents of both parties, the Pentagon drew up war plans against China while the Commerce Department blessed the offshoring by U.S.-based multinationals of much of America’s industrial base to Chinese soil. This combination of ‘containment’ and ‘engagement’ inspired a name that itself was a contradiction: ‘congagement.’”

Trump is attempting to unravel “congagement” via the embrace of a more nationalistic industrial policy. That means returning to “the time-tested and successful Hamiltonian industrial strategy of using whatever means are necessary—tariffs, subsidies, procurement, tax breaks, even overseas-development loans to countries that purchase U.S. manufactured exports—to ensure that strategic industries necessary to U.S. military power are introduced to America or remain here,” as Lind writes.

So with regard to China, this means exporting U.S. goods made on American soil. It therefore disrupts existing supply chains. It’s not free trade by any stretch, but the virtue of numerical targets is that they are actually easier to monitor and enforce than vague promises to respect intellectual property or eliminate state subsidies. Under a managed trade framework, if China does not meet its quota of American goods, then Trump could slap on new tariffs. For America’s trade nationalists, this sort of a deal also has the happy byproduct of undermining the multilateral trade framework established by the World Trade Organization because enforcement mechanisms are left in the hands of the two parties to the agreement. With regard to national security considerations, it means preserving domestic manufacturing capacity in “dual-use” industries important in both defense and civilian commerce.

But in resolving one contraction, Trump might well be introducing a new one. While managed trade might well dislocate many existing “Chimerica” supply chains, such disruption would likely come at the economic expense of America’s traditional allies in Europe, Japan, Taiwan and Korea. If Beijing were to accept specified quotas, it means some other country loses out. Not only will this likely prove unacceptable to China’s non-U.S. trade partners, but it will also further exacerbate widening divisions between the United States and its traditional allies, making coherent economic diplomacy against Beijing less likely (especially against a backdrop of rising national populist movements that have rendered problematic any idea of a united European response in a protracted rivalry with China). And if it comes against a backdrop of China viewed as a national security threat, Beijing itself has even less incentive to accept such a deal, even if it means risking some short-term economic damage.

There are also economic pitfalls for the United States in embracing such a narrowly nationalistic approach. High-tech “knowledge” industries (e.g., biotech, health care, AI, robotics, etc.) are crucial for future growth prospects. At the same time, growing concerns about climate change risk consigning one of America’s major comparative advantages—namely, its dominance in the fossil fuel industries—to obsolescence, as the rest of the world works to decarbonize their economies. The issue here is that only a few countries matter in these industries (as opposed to, say, resource-based exporters). If the global economy continues to evolve into a series of regional, balkanized competing military-economic blocs in a post-unipolar world, it behooves the United States to be part of the biggest, most advanced of those geo-economic blocs. That becomes harder to do if the EU, Japan, Korea, etc., increasingly view America as an unreliable partner, pursuing a narrowly nationalistic policies that damage their own economic interests. Or the United States pursues more preemptive wars of choice, without any degree of international support (e.g., Iran).

All of which stands in marked contrast to the post-WWII period, where the United States consciously made trade-offs that often worked against narrowly nationalistic considerations, but which sustained a coalition that ultimately won the Cold War. For example, it largely tolerated Asia’s mercantilist trade practices in order to secure the region’s cooperation as part of a U.S.-dominated security umbrella (even though the resultant Asian export onslaught proved damaging to a number of American manufacturing interests). Trump has evinced little awareness of, or inclination to pursue, these trade-offs. In fact, “America First” almost makes it impossible to consider them.

In any case, the breakdown in these trade negotiations is yet another sign that we have likely passed the high-water mark of globalization, both in economic terms and also ideologically. We are long past the point of making the naïve assumption that the end of the Cold War means a universal embrace of Western liberal capitalist democracy (i.e., the “end of history”). Beijing may in reality have relatively limited options to retaliate against the trade sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. But it won’t stand still and will seek out new partners to offset this containment as much as possible. At the same time, Trump will find it hard to sustain a multilateral coalition to contain China if the United States continues to pursue narrowly nationalistic managed trade goals that damage its allies. Something will have to give.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.