Stand aside, decorum, while I lampoon this farce some more.
“We had an open and candid conversation about our intentions,” Joe Biden told the press on Monday, after spending three hours staring into the vacant eyes of a reincarnated tyrant. “I absolutely believe there needn’t be a new Cold War.”
Let’s be clear about a few things. First, Xi wasn’t “open and candid” about China’s “intentions” while conversing with Biden on Monday. You didn’t have to be in the room to know that. No world leader is “open and candid” about his or her intentions in discussions with an adversary. The day you’re “open and candid” with a strategic rival is the day you lose the war Biden claims the US and China aren’t in.
Second, the notion that there’s not a new Cold War is only accurate if “Cold War” is a proper noun. There’s not (yet) a Cold War in the US-Soviet sense, but that really just means there’s no chance of an accidental, overnight nuclear war. That’s a pretty low bar for global security, but unfortunately, it’s about the best one can say.
There’s most assuredly a new “cold war,” lowercase. Both nations are deeply suspicious of the other’s citizens, for example. In the US, there’s something akin to a Red Scare going on at universities, and during the Trump era, “spy” talk was a fixture of the daily news cycle. America is actively restricting the sale of technology to Xi’s China on the excuse that Xi will probably use it for military purposes. You’re only worried about that if you’re concerned about being attacked. And in an era when bipartisanship in Washington is anathema everywhere except the White House, politicians on both sides of the aisle have demonstrated their willingness to perpetuate the executive branch’s hawkish inclinations towards China across two consecutive administrations. Russia (America’s erstwhile Cold War, uppercase, foe) is currently occupying a European nation, but on some days, the bigger concern in Washington is a hypothetical occupation of Taiwan by China. An imaginary occupation across one strait is more terrifying for US policymakers than the real occupation across another. And so on.
If that’s not a cold war, then I’m not sure the term has any meaning outside of history books and James Bond films.
After meeting with Xi Monday, Biden said the US and China will “compete vigorously,” but that the White House isn’t looking for conflict.” “I’m looking to manage this competition responsibly,” he added.
It really shouldn’t be a competition. We’ve made no progress on that front as a species. Competition happens between firms competing for profits and sports teams competing for trophies. It shouldn’t happen between nations, because people all generally want the same things: Health and happiness. Competition between state actors, “responsibly managed” or otherwise, isn’t the best way to maximize health and happiness. Cooperation is.
Do note: That’s not some sentimental exhortation that we should all “just get along.” I don’t get along with anybody in person, but I bet if I did, life would be a lot easier sometimes, if not nearly as simple.
What needs “responsible managing” is cooperation. Otherwise, cooperation, when conducted on a global scale, can lead to collateral damage and unintended consequences, which might later manifest in competition. That’s where we are now.
The greatest experiment in cooperation of all time, globalization, was a rousing success on any number of fronts and levels. How many people around the world were lifted out of abject poverty by globalization? I’ve made this argument before, and it doesn’t play well with Western audiences for obvious reasons, but from a strict utilitarian perspective, there’s no sense in which the demise of good-paying factory jobs and the slow decline of the middle-class in America (to use the most glaring example) outweighs the untold millions for whom globalization meant the difference between a life of literal squalor and a life spent enjoying at least some of the trappings of modernity.
I’m sorry, but if 10 families in emerging markets get running water and enough to eat for every one blue collar American worker who, instead of making $80,000 a year at a factory, now makes $45,000 in the services sector, that’s a net win for humanity. And it’s not close.
The trick is retaining the benefits of cooperation while “responsibly managing,” as Biden put it Monday, the consequences, so that cooperation for the good of the species doesn’t end up sowing the seeds of its own demise by stoking disaffection and unrest in locales where the benefits aren’t as pronounced, or are perceived as a Faustian bargain.
The rest of it — the wars, the posturing, the pretensions to cultural superiority, the delusions of historical grandeur and so on — should all be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Most of this (the brinksmanship and competition to the detriment of everyone involved) would seem too absurd to be true if you didn’t know anything about our species’ penchant for wanton stupidity. At every possible turn, we’d seemingly rather kill each other than not, despite the fact that it’s been at least 25,000 years since being willing to kill somebody else, on the spot, was a precondition for survival. (“That flint is mine.” “No, it’s mine.” “One of us is dying here today.”)
Asked Monday about Xi’s disposition, Biden said, “I didn’t find him more confrontational or more conciliatory. I found him the way he’s always been, direct and straightforward.” The vacant eyes of a reincarnated tyrant.
I’m sorry, but if 10 families in emerging markets get running water and enough to eat for every one blue collar American worker who, instead of making $80,000 a year at a factory, now makes $45,000 in the services sector, that’s a net win for humanity. And it’s not close.
What’s grating is when this argument is made by someone who is not taking a cut to his $400,000 salary ex-bonus… (not you specifically, I just mean people in the top of the income distribution).
The solution is pretty obvious – strong redistributive taxation and a focus away from material toys as ‘status displays’. But being obvious doesn’t make it easy…
I’m admittedly biased in that debate by the fact that I had one real friend in the world (outside of the untold thousands of “friends” who read me here everyday), and she was a beneficiary of globalization. Regular readers are familiar. She lived in New Delhi. She died, very suddenly, of pancreatic cancer in 2021. She didn’t have much. To most Americans (or British or French or Canadians or Australians or even South Koreans), she didn’t have anything. But she thought she had a lot. And I just… I don’t know. Regular readers know I’m a (loud) voice for the American middle-class. But when I think about what someone who makes $50,000 in America has versus what she had, and how happy she was with $1,050/month… it’s just a striking thing to think about, particularly considering that were it not for the globalization-related jobs she held, I wouldn’t have known her at all, because she’d have lived in small village.
How did you meet her?
She was about to be fired as part of an organizational shakeup at the bottom of the corporate structure. Basically, she was being let go along with a dozen or so other outsourced / off-shored customer service roles. At the time, I needed an assistant to handle the e-mail load that went along with my office. It made little sense to me not to at least check to see if any of the people we were about to fire might be able to fill the open position I had, even as the odds were long that any of the outgoing customer service reps had the necessary language skills. Basically, I needed someone whose first language was English. But, to my surprise, she was not only fluent, but in fact so fluent that she could easily and seamlessly make jokes about current events in America, including and especially political jokes. To speak to her on the phone, you’d have assumed she was born in America to Indian parents. Her English was, for all intents and purposes, flawless. So, I hired her. If ever I’ve come across a “good” person (and regular readers know I don’t traffic in normative statements), she was surely a good person. That she’s no longer with us, and I am, is a testament to an unjust world.
H, I’m sorry to hear of your friend’s passing. Everything and everyone in this investing game is an abstraction – but they aren’t. We are.
Biden came into office as the most experienced and best prepared President in living memory (even if a little past his verybprime), and he knows very well what Xi is – of that I’m sure.
Biden has so far proven to be an effective geopolitical chess player – outmaneuvering Putin while herding a fractious gaggle of Western allies, violently debilitating the world’s second most potent army without losing a single US soldier, patiently prying Russia away from its Chinese support. That game is not finished but it looks to be positioned well for the US.
The contest with China will be much more complicated and nuanced for Biden, but it will be equally so for Xi. The US has never “needed” Russia for much of anything – pity that Europe and other countries do – but the Chinese and US economies are so interdependent that it is not overwrought to speak of Mutual Assured (Economic) Destruction.
With his equally effective play on the domestic political front – Joe may look Sleepy but he just delivered the best midterm electoral performance in many decades, and not by accident – and helped by racism and xenophobia on the right, Biden should have reasonably sound political foundations for this match.
It will be a weird kind of Cold War. Maybe more like a couple in a loveless, bitter marriage, who can’t afford to get divorced, so they fight and backstab, move out in a huff and come back to yell, split the kids up, do everything short of physical assault. Maybe. Or maybe they start accidentally walking into doors.
I’m certainly glad to be located on the US side of this schism. A lot more investment opportunities here, than there. Also, the whole personal freedom thing.
For the last 5 or 6 years I have been acting as a pre-publication reviewer for a large international academic publisher. The project for which I am an editorial board member involves the development of a a large digital database of business case studies, with an emphasis on cases from outside the US. This new publication outlet has attracted a large number of newish authors who have experience with smaller firms in India and SE Asia. Reading about the plights of these companies and the people they serve has been fascinating and eye-opening. For example, in rural India, which encompasses roughly a billion people, 25% of the population has access to electricity less that 8 hours per day and half have less than 12 hours. Hard to run any business if you can’t turn the lights on. In many areas, per capital income is $2-3K/year. Most of India’s businesses are micro-firms. A successful small firm with may produce an income of INR100,000 for the six family members who work there but INR100k is equal to only USD1250, two hundred bucks a year each. A huge portion of this massive country which could easily become the world’s largest in a decade or so, has no clean water, no secure food supply, and dwells in a place that would be condemned in one of our worst neighborhoods. The more I read about the grinding lives lived by half the people in the world, the more I agree with H. We throw tantrums about dropped cellphone calls. Half of the world is still grubbing in the dirt just to to get by. Even if we were willing to share with these folks, we don’t have enough money. We threw away more than a trillion dollars to to change the culture in Afghanistan and didn’t even make a dent.
I would love to hear more about what you’ve learned in this project.