Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Sure. This is a measured take. Familial ties are real, childhood upbringing is influential, and they impact things.
This is not, however, an argument of inherent ethnic loyalties overriding all else.
Moreover, it's also not approaching a policy argument of the tradeoffs- costs, benefits, opportunity costs, and so on- that go on with addressing policy questions on, say, college research. Particularly when the actor these people may hypothetically support is using them as complimentary, as opposed to primary, sources, and you do not actually have a monopoly on information control.
China, for example, is generally understood to conduct not only human espionage (asking ethnic Chinese to do things), but engage in routine cyberespionage against not just governments, but commercial actors, including almost certainly universities. (I say almost certainly because attribution is hard.) If the same thing is stolen from all four sources by different means- by the Chinese student, from the university the Chinese student worked at, from the corporation commercializing the research, and from the government that was funding the project / holding the data- then the Chinese student is not, actually, that important to the loss of information.
To be clear, it is a thing, but the nature of information security is that you have to be secure in all zones, and the adversary has to only succeed in one for all the measures taken to fail. There are, in turn, different policy implications for whether you can expect to control the loss of information versus if you cannot. If the student would go to another university at home but get the same research data thanks to theft, there may be an (in)efficiency cost with that for the adversary but it's not like the student isn't getting their hands on the data anyway.
This makes the strategic competition less about 'can students get the data'- the assumption is already 'yes'- to 'who benefits the most when they get their hand on the data.' In other words, who benefits the most- not exclusively- from human capital.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute maintains a Critical Technology Tracker intended to track various critical technologies and who writes the most cited papers on them. This includes their human talent flow tracker, which tracks where the authors of those papers went for undergraduate education, graduate education, and follow-on employment.
From a strategic competition perspective between states, even if you doubt the trustworthiness of these students, the optimal allocation is not 'more educated students employed in the hostile country.' Instead, you want to minimize the number of employed top performers in the countries you want the least benefit. Just like you can't control / maintain a monopoly of the information, you can't maintain a monopoly on the employment prospects of the students. That Top Producer of Cited Research is going to be employed somewhere. You can't feasibly prevent that.
What you can do- and where the cost-benefit tradeoff comes- is shape where they work.
Yes, a Chinese student doing industrial theft is bad. That is both a cost (loss of profits) and a relative loss (gain to the Chinese CCP). But if the cost is going to be incurred in some form regardless (alternative modes of theft), is it a worse cost than the gains of employing the student yourself, and denying them to the competition?
Or- put another way- is China benefiting more from a student-who-could-be-a-rocket-designer being a possible corporate spy facilitating the occasional IP theft, than by having them home being a senior rocket designer?
For a strategy game metaphor, in strategy games there are occasional tradeoffs between an ability that provides a buff with no downside, and another ability that provides a greater buff but with a downside, such as reducing health in exchange for greater offense. While the actual best option is context-dependent, as a matter of human psychology a lot people instinctively shy away from assuming known costs, even if they would be better for it. (Such as the health debuff actually letting you kill more enemies before they can hit you, saving you health despite an upfront cost.) Loss-aversion is real, even if the losses accepted enable greater profits / reduce greater lasses.
This is- loosely- analogous to the costs/benefits of brain drain of foreign students and would-be experts. There are costs to the receiving party / benefits to the sending policy, but these alone do no make refusing the costs an ideal position.
What it should mean- in a reasonable exchange- is setting reasonable limits of cost-benefit tradeoff.
You don't want Iranian students to be on nuclear submarines? Sure. But how about the experimental reactor design program? It's not exactly enabling Iran to go from non-nuclear to nuclear. Or how about Fusion? If that is invented, it'll probably be the fastest-stolen tech in history anyway. Etc. etc.
But once we get to this point of discussion on 'which jobs,' we're already accepting the premise that letting them in has merit in the first place, as opposed to the opposite.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
I've always felt that one also pairs nicely with Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
Most people think of stereotyping as “Here’s one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,” and then you correct it with “But we can’t generalize about an entire group just from one example!” It’s less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a day on the task and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend four months doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese – and still have absolutely no point.
Chinese robbers is very relevant to the Outgroup bias when dealing with social media and groups of scale, as with enough scale you can always find outliers and then signal boost their prominence, particularly when there's availability bias shaping access to information.
No, I do not need to defend the meaning of words no matter how much confusion you try to impose on the English language.
Yes, you do need to provide studies that support the motte position you are claiming if you want to claim studies support the motte you are claiming.
Particularly when one of the more influential past works that forms a foundation of the community ethos you are posting in is on the Chinese Robbers fallacy, which is always relevant to topics that mix media posting and China and would also be applicable to gish galloping examples that do not prove population-level assumptions.
Another foundational work being I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, which reviews why ethnic solidarity is not the pre-eminent automatic loyalty determining factor for in-group/out-group dynamics.
I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about whether relying on foreign talent left countries wide open to treachery and manipulation?
You may be, but no.
We were talking about the amusing mix of irony and self-awareness for you to argue for a presumption of suspicion of treachery and manipulation on the basis of foreign origin, when you are not only a foreigner to the majority of your audience, but you routinely express credulous confidence in foreign-controlled social media known to try and manipulate foreign audience perception at an algorithmic level, and you regularly praise foreign policy thinkers who make exceptionally blunt arguments of the properness of manipulating foreigners-to-them like yourself for their own nation's benefit.
A US government official using critical theory, misrepresentation and legendary goalpost manipulation to defend US government policy sounds like something a deceptive and disingenuous US government official would say to manipulate opinions.
This, too, sounds like something a foreigner would say to manipulate other foreigners with whom they share no shared identity or loyalties. Truly, such foreigners should be viewed with suspicion and their potential contributions to the community of one's own should be rejected out of hand as obvious manipulations to influence. Particularly when so heavy handed as with the amusingly blatant use of forum pejoratives tailored to the sub-audience.
(I shall update my list of accused pejoratives to now include 'critical theorist,' which will sit nicely next to the 'neocon,' 'neoliberal,' 'fascist,' and other such ideological slurs. Unfortunately, American was already included in my (multi)nationality mutt pedigree.)
Unfortunately, rejecting such foreigner influence out of hand would require incorporating the influence of said foreigner, which would not be rejecting the untrustworthy influence, hence categorically invalid on its own premise.
It's a particularly shameless given how well Australia has behaved as an ally. Australia shows up to even the silliest US wars, regardless of where they are. Australia provides good bases and good signals intelligence. Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard. It is not 'treacherous and manipulative' for an Australian to straightforwardly urge friendly countries to pursue national interests.
Unless you have put on an unprecedent amount of weight over Christmas feasting, you are not Australia, and no one would particularly confuse you for a continent, a nation, or about 26,000,000 other people of various ethnicities, of which only a minority are even ethnically Anglo-Celtic.
I also highly doubt you have ever in your life shown up for even a single American war, based a single American solider in your home, provided the Americans any intelligence function, or made a single decision in the Australian defense community that would warrant anyone to identify you, individually, as an 'ally' of the US, as opposed to someone who lives in the geographic landmass of Australia with a hobbyist level of interest in geopolitics.
I'll leave it to other self-identified Australians of the forum to say whether you are representative of Australians in general. You are certainly not representative of various wings of the Australian foreign policy establishment.
I'm Australian;
[Insert ad hominem fallacy on an account of foreigner category]/Joking.png
Am I correct in thinking that that guy, assuming he really is a US Army recruiter, will probably get in trouble for that? One would assume that this would be in flagrant violation of recruiter codes of conduct, and possibly implicate him in violations of base security protocols.
You could be correct, but you could be incorrect. It depends on more information than we have.
One of the weird things about the initial claim is that the Pentagon banned tiktok from government computers in 2023 barely a year and a half ago. In fact, there was an Army recruiting scandal in 2021 about use of TikTok when not supposed to. If an American recruiter is doing recruitment on TikTok, he is either doing something very wrong regardless of message/loyalty concern (violating policy), or may actually be operating within approved scopes (is operating within special exceptions).
If it's the later, there may be no violation at all. It may, in fact, even be the point.
More on that later, but it's not like the militaries lacks people who garner contempt for wanting to sit out specific conflicts. Kamalla Harris's vice president pick during the recent US election had the baggage that he tried to present himself as a service veteran despite possibly having arranged to get out of his reserve unit's overseas deployment. It's not exactly hard to find dissent within an institution over 2.8 million strong (standing military, reserves, support civilians), with some people shaping (or ending) their careers to not be associated with some conflict / etc. In past unpopular wars, it wasn't unknown for people to join entire other services (such as joining the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army in Vietnam), or to unceremoniously retire to avoid deployments (in the Iraq War era there was a surge of American reserve / national guard retirements by people who were content to be in the reserves during the 90s when it was considered low/no risk).
Ultimately Ranger's argument relies on assumptions of a separate topic (presentation of loyalties, as opposed to policy adherence) where there's a perception of what sort of loyalty people think is required (members must be willing to fight all enemies and say so!) that is less absolute in practice.
It's less absolute because manpower is not only limited (there has never been an endless supply of ideal candidates), but manpower is often both fungible (one person here can free up another person to go there) and mutually exclusive (person trained for expertise A can't be used in occupation B anyway). Full-throated concurrence with all wars wasn't a requirement in the conscription era (where conscientious objectors / pacifists could sometimes be shunted to support roles, or just put in risk and expected to save themselves), nor is it typically demanded in a volunteer-service model (where service members have some significant influence over their careers as they reach higher ranks, and thus can choose areas where they're not likely to do what they really don't want to do).
There are certainly cases / issues when an expeditionary military says 'go' and the person says 'I don't want to,' but these are both very rare at the level of the recruiter in question, and, uh, wouldn't be present for someone who is a recruiter.
///
Now to return to the point passed earlier, where it could be a context of approved message. (Emphasis on could.)
Ranger's argument works from a perspective of how this is terrible because lack of loyalty and inherent untrustworthiness and mercenaries bad and yada. Ranger is also very clearly not thinking like a manpower-capability developer (i.e. recruitment at scale), but operating from a basis of purity politic demands. Purity politics is bad force generation policy. Even governments obsessed with ideological compliance, such as the Soviets, used a purity-cadre model (political officers) as opposed to a purity rank-and-file model.
Starting from the most obvious, monetary incentives are absolutely a basis of building and retaining talent. This isn't an issue of 'mercenary' pejoratives, it's a point that that in a volunteer service model the military is an employer, and as an employer they are competing with all other employers to recruit and retain. Fundamental disconnect there, and also woefully ignorant of why so many of the common US incentives include post-service benefits, like paying for college (i.e. investing in domestic talent development after getting your military use out of them). This is why in modern history the American military has been often seen approvingly as a 'way up' for underclass Americans- it provides substantial training / more structured environments / post-service education that people may not otherwise be able to afford. It's not a guarantee, but it's a powerful incentive. Someone who serves 4 years and than leaves to enjoy college is not a failure, it's a success story of how you got someone to successfully serve 4 years at the lowest runs of the military and then improved their national value potential.
Part of any recruitment pitch, in turn, comes with conveying the perception of costs for taking the job. If a recruiter says 'you may never go see your family abroad,' then that is a lot of people who might be willing to serve but not if it means they can't serve abroad. Similarly, if a recruiter says 'you must be willing to fight the Chinese state, no matter if the PRC attempts to use your family as hostages,' then again, you are winnowing the field. The US military is designed to fight on 2 different continents at any time, with at least Europe and Korea providing non-Chinese fronts.
Further, a recruiting pitch that can appeal to both hard-core joiners (the people who would be more gung-ho than the recruiter) and the wavering (ethnic Chinese who would share the sentiment of not wanting to join a war against China, but would also not want to fight the US) isn't inviting a trojan horse with the later category, it's getting an asset.
The chinese language is, in a word, hard, and there is generally a shortage in any non-Chinese government of people who can speak and/or read it. As a result, there is a demand that far exceeds the supply in people who can (a) read / speak Chinese, and (b) are willing to do it for the government. Someone who is (c) willing to do it at an enlisted soldier's pay (low) at (d) enlisted soldiers hours (no overtime pay) and in (e) enlisted soldier's living standards (non-affluent) and at a (f) enlisted soldier's 'can be moved across the world to where most conveneient (incredibly high) is incredibly good value-for-money.
There is, in other words, a great many useful / desirable roles that a government wants a Chinese-speaker for, many of them that do not require taking up arms against the PRC even in the course of a war against the PRC. Many of them require no access to sensitive material / networks / resources either.
The role of any human resources / recruiting institution is to try to match potential incoming talent to desired needs, not to refuse to accept valuable talents because it is unsuited for any particular need. 'Speaks Chinese, but is not willing to fight the Chinese state' is not a the most desirable recruit package, but it's a very useful one. The questions / investigations of loyalty / questions of what they are willing to do are real considerations, but they are more questions on how to direct talent to the best cost/benefit position after they joined, not whether to encourage them to join.
They are also, critically, questions that go on well beyond the initial recruiter pitch. As such, a recruiter who is authorized to make such a pitch agreeable to such people, may be doing nothing wrong.
I don't need to cite a million papers to show that many Chinese people spy for China or take steps to advance China's interests.
You do, however, need good papers to show that ethnic Chinese are Chinese people solely because they are ethnic Chinese, or that 'many' is 'most' as opposed to 'a small ratio,' let alone whether the costs of the 'many' outweighs the benefits of the other 'many' who do not.
This is the typical smuggling of the conclusion that goes on with ethnonationalist constructs, both in the self-identification (what is an 'ethnic chinese') and in the external identification (the observable versus unobservable nature of loyalty) and in the cost-benefit (whether the costs of PRC-loyal ethnic chinese outweighs the benefits of non-PRC-loyal ethnic chinese).
I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to.
You do, however, need reliable and accurate sources. Particularly, you need reliable sources that can accurately distinguish between 'ethnic ties' and 'familial ties,' as the former has significant organizational and societal implications than the later.
If, for example, you take an ethnicity-based caution, then there are categorical exclusions on the basis of race to positions of trust / the armed forces, which in turn comes with the social and political complications of embracing formal racial discirmination on people for potential actions regardless of guilt, even if they are avowed enemies of the regime. If you take a family-based caution, on the other hand, then perhaps you don't give security clearances to ethnic han with family members in China who can be used as leverage against them, but you can employ people who lack said families in China (or whose families were purged by the CCP).
This is particularly so when much of an ethnic diaspora is a diaspora because of the misconduct of the ethno-state, including a non-trivial number being exiles of the current ruling party for issues in the current living memory.
I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
It would be amusing to see you fail to a practically textbook Chinese robbers fallacy, which was memorably coined for its statistical implications of the availability of non-representative examples.
Furthermore, 'Australian' is not an ethnic group.
It is, however, a distinct cultural group, and a national group, and a political-identity group, and various other forms of groupings that make it distinct, foreign, and unreliable to other [groups] due to the divergence of identity, interests, and expected activities, despite nominal genetic commonalities.
No one is particularly confusing the Australians for the Germans, or the Brits and the French, despite their ethnic commonalities. (Not least because the vague concept of 'ethnic' stretches as far or as narrow as needed for the argument of the moment.)
There is a reason that the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain are very, very closely aligned and similar in many respects. We both know what that is but one of us is choosing to ignore it to score cheap points.
A foreigner inventing caveats to claim they are not a foreigner and so benefit from in-group bias sounds like something a treacherous and manipulative foreigner would say to gain an unwarranted position of trust and persuasiveness over other people's opinions despite a lack of shared loyalties and interests (because they are a foreigner).
Real self-negating advocacy is taking a straightforward opinion 'states should focus more on national interests than profits or ideology' and trying to twist it into 'beware the Eternal Australian trying to manipulate you into... using your own state to advance national interests', as though this is a wise and useful revelation.
The irony, again, exerts itself, though I doubt you'll recognize the applicability (or nested irony) of citing your earlier post.
People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes.
There's nothing in particular that comes to the mind from the last decade or so of western military reporting, so nothing systemic at least, though I am also interested if anything is provided. (Edit: Provided information did not demonstrate any systemic pattern, and was a single alleged ethnic-Chinese NCO claiming he wouldn't fight for US against China or vice versa. Motives appear to have been familial rather than ethnic, and amounted to neutrality on claimed terms.)
However, this is more likely to be an extension / reflection / TikTok propaganda perpetuation of the ethnic 'Chinese story' approach of China's diaspora policy, which seeks to utilize / cooperate / encourage ethnic Chinese in other countries to adopt pro-PRC narratives.
PRC ethnic-chinese diaspora policy has multiple roles. Part of this is to maximize the benefit to the PRC from ethnic chinese out in the world, but another part is to encourage / cultivate the perception-conflation that (ethnic) Chinese = China = PRC = CCP. What's less obvious is that this doesn't just work in so much that it convinces ethnic chinese in the diaspora (so that they believe that there is some duty owed to the PRC), but that it also works when it convinces the non-ethnic-chinese of other states.
Ethnic chinese are encouraged to be distinct, rather than assimilate, and the flip side of this is that the PRC benefits from a 'don't try to assimilate them' suspicion / caution in other parties. It's not so much that they want there to be an actual significant amount of anti-Chinese hostility, but certain amounts of distrust and hostility lets the CCP present itself as the guardian of the ethnic chinese diaspora, garnering local influence and letting them set up proxy influencers, even as it can use those ethnic chinese influence groups to lobby / try to influence the local state.
Going back to this tiktok- the claimed ethnic chinese officer claiming they wouldn't fight China (...note that they are allegedly in a recruiting position, not a combat arms branch), is almost certainly not representative, if they even exist. But encouraging the perception that ethnic Chinese military members can't be trusted would be a exceptionally beneficial propaganda line to signal boost if there was even just 1 example (or invent if there was not).
Note, also, that this is a pretty banal sort of ethnic-solidarity / national diaspora propaganda that you can find in any general ethnonationalist / conflict-adjacent context. In the 20th century, the German diaspora was not only a factor in the WW2 pro-Nazi sympathies in places like Argentina, but even earlier when before WW1 German enclaves / business interests in Africa were used as pretexts for the (late) German colonies in Africa. In WW2, it's far more remembered how few ethnic Japanese in the US tried to support Imperial Japan, but that wasn't for a lack of trying on pre-war Imperial Japanese efforts to mobilize ethnic japanese across the Pacific. Etc. etc. etc.
Relying on foreign talent leaves you wide open to treachery and manipulation
The general irony of the post, but this line in particular, is the Christmas present I didn't know I needed. Truly it could only have come from a self-identified Australian who regularly cites Chinese tiktok as a representative and reliable source of information, who has been an impassioned advocate of deferring to American geopolitical offensive-realists, and whom routinely uses collective self-identification terms with American and European audiences from nearly the literal opposite side of the globe.
(Another irony for non-Australians in the audience being that if you are to rely on the Ranger's opinions to shape your own, you would be opening yourself to treachery and manipulation from a foreigner, the best way to guard against being to disregard any foreigner's opinions. Self-negating advocacy at its most unintentional.)
A pro-social covenant premise?
Abrahamic religions have a common premise that not only is [God] real and present, but that while love may be unconditional favor is not- if you / your collective society sins greatly, not only will god permit the outsider to overthrow you, but God may throw the first meteor. On the flip side, the way to earn / retain gods favor is a bunch of tenants / commandments that, coincidentally, happen to be good for healthy societies that can succeed in cooperation, unleashing those benefits of scale.
This sort of covenant premise is not inherent to monotheism. You could believe there is one god, but that it expects nothing of you and implies no type of action. You could believe there is one god, but they are eternally absent. There could be one god, but it hates you. There could be a god and a covenant, but the demands are less socially beneficial. Etc.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Sure, I get that, but I am genuinely curious in what you would consider a non-suspicious ratio.
For example / my frame of reference, in WW1 there were nearly 8 million military killed/missing, and 22 million wounded. The overall war's killed/wounded ratio at that rate is 1:2.75. Call it 1:3 for simplicity's sake. This is a war of major offensives on both fronts in both directions, of which one- the eastern front- was considerably different than the western front's relatively static trench warfare.
On the Western Front in particular, according to wiki the ratio is similar. About 3.5 million killed out of 13 million total casualties (meaning 3.5:9.5 K/W) - roughly 1:2.71- again rounds to 1:3 as a nice round number. This is roughly the same (1:2.7X) ratio on both sides- but maybe this is because both conducted roughly even spreads of offense versus defense, or maybe not.
But of the 13 million casualties (killed and wounded) on the Western Front for the entire war, nearly 1 million of that was in the Battle of the Somme alone. And while the Battle of the Somme was a 4-month campaign on one specific front, on the first day- when the attack was unidirectional- the British suffered about 55.5 thousand casualties, of which about 19.2k were killed.
Which is to say, on the offense in a trench warfare context, the British suffered a 1:2.9 killed/wounded ratio. Or, again, 1:3.
So on our historical 'this is a trench and artillery war' comparison, the attacking power can reasonably into prepared defenses can get a 1:3 military K/W rate.
I think we can fairly reasonably guess that the Ukrainians have not, as a trend, been suffering casualties comparable to the ratios of Battle of the Somme attacks.
So I am curious- and not trying to belittle!- what you would consider a non-suspicious baseline. I can fully agree that 1:9 is eye-brow-raisingly high. But what is your 'gut' of what it 'reasonably' would be? Was it 1:3, before this? Would it be 1:5?
I am sincerely interested in your thoughts, because I want to know.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
That goes for the US as well, they have incentives to downplay, ignore, reframe all their own barriers(for example in the airbus-boeing trade fights). You said ‘military support for advantageous tariffs’ is an agreement. Doesn’t sound like the EU agreed to it.
Of course the EU did not agree to it. The EU didn't exist at the time the transatlantic alliance was formed.
Partially as a result, the EU inherited the economic aspects of it and not the strategic, and as such paid less concern to the areas outside its perview (the military/geopoligical strategic considerations), which was less a bug and more of a feature for some of the EU's key leaders (Germany but especially France, who has approached the EU as a way to try and decrease American influence and increase French influence over the continent).
Of course they are, the question is what the europeans are getting out of it, since according to your view, the buyer (guy with a trade deficit, here the european) is just handing out ‘subsidies’. So if I buy oil from an arab, that’s a fair trade, but if you buy champaign from me, that’s a subsidy?
This would be an inept reading of the position previously provided, and a worse description of the strategic bargain previously described, unless you believe the European NATO contribution in the Cold War amounted to champaign.
You have a 25% tariff on light trucks including SUVs, which is the majority of the US car market.
And which are not an equivalent portion of the Eruopean market, and which further demonstrates that average tariff barriers are still a meaningless number, for the reasons demonstrated.
As I said on principle I don’t mind equalizing all the tariffs (though I’ve just read the 25% light truck ‘chicken tax’ seems hard to repeal because of bipartisan support) , but it’s not going to help your trade deficit because the deficit is not caused by preferential tariffs.
That sounds like the argument of someone who would like to preserve preferential tariffs, after attempting to quibble that they existed and/or their degree of relevance while existing in a status quo of substantial tariff walls.
This does not sound like a credible argument to an incoming administration who believes that preferential tariffs make trade deficits worse, and notes that you are making your argument from behind substantial tariff walls.
No one ever truly wins these economic fad arguments, they wax and wane. It's true that european elites are fond of their dirigisme, and it always ends up being an expensive clusterfuck.
As it may well be, but both the American trade deficit and the American garrisons in Europe are non-trivial expenses and have been argued to be clustfucks in their own right.
The point that political arguments are overturned over time does not mean that they are not won or loss, merely that their victories are transitory. Take pride in your cultural accomplishments- the Europeans are shaping the Americans, rather than the other way around.
Nothing. If they don’t think trade benefits them, I can try to argue that it does, but if they don’t see it, I’m not offering a bribe, they can just walk away. They’re a free country.
And thus you and Donald Trump have concurred that the baseline alternative to a negotiated agreement is preferable to both the status quo and any of your proposed alternatives, with no blackmail required.
Buying an item in the supermarket (or trading beans for bacon with my neighbour) is a mutually beneficial transaction.
If the supermarket is losing money selling to you, it is not a mutually beneficial transaction.
A transaction is only mutually beneficial for the supermarket if both parties are getting something they want that is worth more (to them) than what they give up. What the supermarket wants in exchange for your purchases is money. If the supermarket is losing money on the deal, it is not getting more than it loses.
I don’t owe walmart military service afterwards.
Because Walmart is not subsidizing you for a military alliance. Which is why the supermarket metaphor is, again, bad. The European-American alliance relationship is not like your relationship with Walmart.
It's fine that you don't want to provide military support to your allies. It's even fine if you don't want military allies. Just don't expect to benefit from economic benefits provided in exchange for a military alliance without the military alliance.
Was this military-support-for-one-sided-tariffs agreement commented on by anyone at the time (preferably european)?
...yes. There is plenty of historical documentation on the strategic rational of the Marshal Plan, from both sides of the Atlantic. It is not hard to find. Nor is the history of the European-Japanese and European-Korean trade relations.
You can search for it on your own if you are curious, though I'd actually recommend against the Europeans for anything more recent (since the EU's creation), since the EU establishment has significant interest incentives to downplay, ignore, or reframe why US-EU tariff barriers are at the level they are. The general EU-adjacent policy sphere refrain is that EU tariff walls don't meaningfully hinder American trade with Europe, but also that equivalent tariff barriers is very bad.
These needlessly complicated ‘subventions’ breed confusions. Next time we’ll take it in cash, not in trade.
If you insist, pending your ability to arrange such. Mercenaries with little military capabilities to offer have little ability to dictate terms, however, and cash transfers are less enduring than trade concessions.
You’ve had a way bigger deficit against china than us for a long time. What did they agree to do for you in order to get this preferential treatment?
And you'll note that Trump has been an even larger advocate of tariffs against the Chinese than against the Europeans. This is a poor whataboutism, given the politician involved.
As for what the Chinese agreed to- the answer is they didn't, nor did they need to beyond some promises for market reforms that they've largely ignored. The post-Cold War US administrations thought integrating China into global markets markets would lead to political liberalization, which would have been the 'benefit.' This was expected to occur naturally. It did not occur / has not occured, and is generally considered a major strategic mistake of the Clinton administration.
We have a big deficit against saudi arabia – is that a subsidy too?
No, European purchases of middle eastern energy is transactional. Notably, the Arabs are making a profit off of providing their good/service to the Europeans at market rates.
The average tariff between US-EU is 3%.
There is no meaningful 'average tariff.' Averaging non-comparable categories leads to meaningless numbers, given the difference in the scale of the economies those tariffs apply to and the relative importance applied to them.
To bring a relevant specific category: automobile manufacturing. During the first Trump administration, it was considered extremely provocative when Trump raised the import tariff of 2.5% on European cars, in a context of importing 1.15 million cars for around 43 billion. At the time, the European tariff barrier for automobiles was 10%, in a market about 260k US cars exported for around 6 billion.
Even if there was an entire category of X-but-small trade volume at 0% tariffs, that wouldn't mean the 'average' tariff was 5%.
I don’t mind equalizing if you find an ‘unfair’ percent here and there, but it’s not going to meaningfully change the balance of trade, because it depends on other characteristics of the economy.
The characteristics of the economic differences is the point of the protectionism.
From a macroeconomic perspective, the US primarily exports services and resources, and inputs manufactured goods. This is in part a result of the American macroeconomic decision to export manufacturing during globalization, which significantly impacted American manufacturing capability while bolstering other parts of the world- especially China. Various parts of those industrial base losses were relevant to military production rates, as military industry is converted from / tied to domestic industrial manufactuing capacity.
The Americans are in the process of re-industrializing, for strategic and other reasons. Part of that is setting the rules so that the economic incentives of companies isn't to immediately decamp industry and then sell from outside of the US to the US. These are characteristics of the economy that are being deliberately changed.
In this respect, the Americans are aligning to a European norm. The Europeans were embracing industrial policy as a systemic government priority well before the Americans, and won the argument. Trump, Biden, and now Trump again are adopting a more European-understanding of the value of trade barriers.
So Trump is still going to claim exploitation and raise tariffs 25 % and so the people, agreeing to disagree, will mutually consent to the unraveling of mutually beneficial trade.
There is not a mutual consensus that it is mutually beneficial trade. That is a point you do not acknowledge because you do not want to agree that it is not mutually beneficial, even though your concession is not necessary, by definition, for there to be a lack of mutual consensus.
You may think the trade is mutually beneficial, and you may think that the Americans should feel the trade is mutually beneficial, but your thoughts do not matter for whether the Americans in question believe it is mutually beneficial trade. If they do not, they will not continue as if it is.
The question, as raised earlier, is what you are willing to offer to make it convincing to the Americans that it is in their interest. Given that they do not believe the current exchange ratio is favorable, you can either increase incentives, or decrease perceived costs.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
This is a phenomenon I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. I don’t have anything against Cathy young, but when I read the article, the pattern really just jumped out at me, and it seemed like a good anchor point for this article. It’s an even more interesting case due to the fact that it’s an article that I essentially agree with, which means my aversion to it was pure sensitivity to the pattern, and not bias against the content itself.
I applaud this writeup, and just want to share something on Cathy Young herself. I have a... fond?... opinion of her, as she was someone I used to read more of last decade.
Cathy Young, not to be confused with the Demcratic senatory Catherine Young who often goes by Cathy in media, is as an older-school republican, the sort most concerned with government proceduralism and how rule of law is handled (treating all people equally). She was an earlier opponent of progressive excess, and as a female journalist of clearly conservative leanings, she was able to carve a niche by being the contrarian to the expected demographic alignment (i.e. a jewish woman who was not a progressive democratic partisan for social justice).
Back then, and in the early Trump, she was something of a 'sane moderate' writer, who was sympathetic enough to give a fair hearing (and presentation) to rightwing people she personally clearly did not fully agree with, while resisting / calling out the excesses of leftwing actors who would be undoubtable in progressive media. She took some public stances that won her no friends, and contributed to her exile to the substack realm, where the sort of quippy/zippy/unprofessional judgments you speak of is more or a survival strategy since that's what the subscribers pay for. If you ever look at the venues she wrote for, you can see shifts by the presidential administration.
Two examples of the classic Cathy that stood out was that she was a relatively clear opponent of the Obama administration's zeitgast rape culture- with articles such as The Injustice of the 'Rape Culture' Theory- and in another she took a large stab at a major progressive media pinata, with the article (Almost) Everything You Know About GamerGate Is Wrong.
Cathy made some harsh critics with those articles, but they were also very much progressive cows she gored, so when I was reading OP's initial post I was surprised when I thought he was perceiving a left-wing bias. Looking back at those articles, though, it's also clear that she has always been rather... opinionated? Or at least very clear on her opinions on matter. The subtitle of the Rape-Culture article, after all, is "For those in the grips of hysteria, proof is the enemy," and her opinion on the Colombia University matress girl saga is similarly unsubtle.
Of course, she also gores in other directions. Cathy is an older-style Republican at heart, and while she rose in conservative media circles for her willingness (eagerness?) to oppose progressivism, her star fell with her opposition to Trump, proof that going sacred cows comes with drawbacks if you gore 'your' side. I don't recall her being an example of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the extreme, but she could reasonably be considered a Never Trump republican, or at least one who is far more down than up. You can read her thoughts on the initial Trump cabinet, and while it's clear she has some strong opinions, and doesn't intent to recant them, it's also notable that she at least tries to note counter-balancing points and doesn't go full doomer. (I believe her general position is 'Trump is bad and high-risk, but checks and balances can constrain the worst.')
In that respect, I'd chalk her up to the same category as the comments on Marina Hyde and Glenn Greenwald- being opinionated is part of her brand. You're not 'wrong' if it sets off your manipulation allergies, but it's less an attempt at subtle manipulation and more a result of her brand being one built on long repetition / expectation of similar tracks.
OK, so the main disagreement is that I think trade balance is irrelevant .
And yet, trade balance is incredibly relevant to a supermarket metaphor. The supermarket is in the business iof maintaining a positive trade balance with its customers, because if the supermarket does not then then supermarket goes out of business. This is, in fact, the basis of the threat to go to another (China) supermarket- it is a threat to reduce the trade income with MuricaMart, on the assumption that MuricaMart makes a profit off of trading with you.
If you think a supermarket's profitability is irrelevant to the interest of a supermarket staying in business, you are not talking about a supermarket.
Trade isn’t a zero sum game where the US sells ‘at loss’ because they have a trade deficit.
Because the trade balance was itself a trade- a systemic trade bias in European favor (thanks to higher tariffs against American goods than for European goods) in exchange for European military cooperation against the American geopolitical rival. That prioritization of shared security over money was the positive sum dynamic that motivated the initial alliance beyond the monetary cost.
When the Europeans are not interested (as you are not) or able (as the continent is not) in upholding that positive-sum game, then the negative-sum game of trade flows absent other interests reasserts itself.
It’s kind of the opposite really, given that trade surplus countries are accused of ‘dumping’ manufactured goods like electric cars or planes they supposedly produce at a loss.
Good news! Donald Trump will graciously allow the Europeans to be free of that accusation by magnanimously leveling trade barriers and trade deficits that the Europeans currently have over the United States. He will even support the Europeans in raising their own anti-dumping tariffs on any global overproducers, of which the most notable is China.
The excellent american economic health has gone hand in hand with trade deficits, to the point that many have suspected that americans get free stuff while the rest of the world gets worthless dollars. I’m not saying it’s causal, just that trump’s domestic story of exploited americans might not play as well elsewhere, when he’s negotiating supermarket prices. Non-americans have their own exploitation story, and at least they're, you know, poorer.
If you are poor, what do you think you have to offer for preferential trade access to the American market?
Remember that the approval of European public is not required for the end of the structural basis of the European-American alliance via the end of American economic subsidies to the poorer European public from the American end. (Arguably, European public opinion has already approved of this from the European end, by continuing to vote for decades of demilitarization and increasing strategic autonomy before there was an end to advantageous trade terms.)
The American public, at least, has in the last election indicated it is not convinced that major trade deficits are the cause of American economic health, as opposed to unnecessary costs that lowered them more than they could have otherwise risen. They may be wrong, but being wrong does not change ambivalence for ending subsidies to other continents, despite the near-term economic disruption that could bring.
The question for the European public, as a result, is what does it want to offer- if does and if it can- to keep some manner of American subsidies coming, even if at a reduced rate.
Because I see trade as mutually beneficial, you can understand why trump’s threats look more like ‘blackmail’ to me , and I understand why to you or trump it’s just ‘putting pressure’.
Apparently not, since you misunderstand my position (or seem to believe it is Trump's). Instead, let me try to place your position and the Trumpian position in an inconvenient context.
You see trade as mutually beneficial, but you do not want to deliver what was traded in the original Euro-American alliance- Europe's military-strategic deference against the American geopolitical rival.
The Trumpian perspective is that this is fine! This is your sovereign choice. He just also does not see a point in continuing to provide concessions that were initially provided for such a military-strategic deference deal. He will not blame you for it if you think it's a bad deal. He doesn't think it's a good deal either. That's why he's willing to reduce it.
The inconvenient context is that this is only blackmail if there is an expectation that European market access preferences are an entitlement that should be provided regardless of degree European strategic alignment.
If there is no European entitlement to preferential market access, then what we are observing is not blackmail, but the mutually consenting unraveling of a former trade deal: the Europeans no longer want to offer strategic deference, and the Americans no longer want to subsidize the Europeans.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
The relative cost of this goes down the more nakedly transactional the US gets in US-European relations. If your choices are to get bent over a barrel now by the US or maybe get bent over by a barrel later by China, cutting a deal with China is going to start looking a great deal more appealing.
You reversed the incentive structure of cutting a deal.
The issue with this framing is that in the non-hypothetical the EU is already getting bent over a barrel by China. This is most notable in the field of green technology (solar panels, EVs, etc.), where for a lot of notable (and sometimes ethically questionable) reasons the Chinese state owned / backed enterprises have cornered the European markets in fields that the Europeans a decade or so thought they would dominate. Moreover, the expectation of China as a forever growth market has given way to the general recognition of PRC mercantilist strategy of IP theft and domestic protectionism, which limits than reverses chinese market share of industrial production, i.e. the great big German hope.
There are other fields and contexts as well, but the construct of a guaranteed versus uncertain screwing has since been passed by the paradigm that Europe is already getting screwed by the one that is presented as the hypothetical lesser risk.
As such, this framing should be reversed for understanding the actor perspectives. There is no choice about Europe being bent over a barrel now- it's already happening- but it's already happening with the Chinese, whereas the potential US risk may be mitigated by cutting a deal.
A large part of US power is that it doesn't demand very much of its allies (occasional Article 5 moment aside); the more the US tries to treat its allies like vassals or tributaries, the weaker that soft power grows. And if you're stuck dealing with a transactional superpower, you might as well go with the one offering money instead of demanding it.
This confuses money flows between various actors, which undermine the monetary argument.
The 2022 China-EU trade balance was roughly 390 billion Euros in China's favor. The 2022 US-EU trade balance was about 130 billion in the EU's favor. Europe is already dealing with a transactional power, and paying quite a bit for the privilege.
The issue with your framing is that you neglect a third and more relevant patron-client relationship: the protectorate. In a protectorate relationship, the patron party subsidizes the client rather than extracts the resources. In the US-European context, this subsidy has been through granting the Europeans favorable access to US markets without reciprocity for US firms to access European markets since the early Cold War.
While in economic terms there is no meaningful difference between raising taxes or decreasing subsidies, in diplomatic terms there is a difference between demanding money and offering less of it.
What ratio and why?
Worse dead-to-wounded ratios historically depend more on the impacts of disease than fighting, with ratios getting better (more wounded to killed) the more access to defensive fortifications, stable rear areas, and mechanized evacuation that are available. This is especially true in artillery wars, where the predominance of shrapnel as a primary threat increases wounds relative to direct kills for forces that are better fortified.
Ukraine certainly has its challenges, but a lack of trenches, helmets, and rear areas to withdraw to are not among them.
If the US and China go at it, it would be far better for us to sit on the sidelines than to be stuck in the US supermarket. The manager’s already raising prices in peacetime, we’d better get out before he turns desperate and asks us to pay in blood.
Why is the manager being desperate if he no longer subsidizes your purchases?
Again, bad market metaphors are bad metaphors, but the US economic relationship with Europe- the 'supermarket'- is not a net moneymaker for the US. The trade balance between the US and EU is, and has for decades been, in Europe's favor, in part because of trade barriers such as the European common market wall.
If you want to make a marketplace metaphor, this is the market selling to the consumers at a loss. There can be benefits for the US side of the of the trade (advantage to the specific industries benefiting more), there can be non-monetary gains from providing subdisized services, but if you want to model the relationship as a commercial transaction (shopper and supermarket), the supermarket stops losing money the sooner it gets out of the business of subsidizing goods.
This is a mercantilist perspectives that get involved in arguments of why mercantilism isn't a good strategy for countries even if it makes sense for businesses, and service-vs-good economy differences, but the business case for the US-European relationship is not 'the Europeans bring in more commercial profits than costs.'
But neither I nor the rest of europe appears to believe that is a real threat – what you interpret as an inability to build a large army, I view as unwillingness because of a perceived lack of need: see minimal percent of GDP invested in the military, lack of nukes despite know-how.
You are not in conflict with Donald Trump when you say you do not believe that there is no real threat, you are in agreement. What you consider blackmail is just the natural extension of that consensus.
The American-European economic relationship for the better part of the last century has been an extension of the Cold War American-European strategic alliance. But instead of the classic hegemon relationship of military protection in exchange for preferential market access for the hegemon (hegemon provides client protection in exchange for money), the Cold War alliance was the inverse- the Americans gave the Europeans preferential market access in exchange for strategic deference. This started with the Marshal Plan, continued with things like the trilateral agreements for getting the Japanese and Koreans during their recognistruction phases, and continued in various forms elsewhere.
If the Europeans are uninterested, unable, and/or otherwise unwilling to provide strategic deference- particularly due to a lack of mutual need- there is no strategic basis for continuing to pay for the strategic relationship.
The result of this what you call 'blackmail'- threatening to no longer pay (via ending preferential trade access that were the forms of payment) for services no longer rendered (strategic deference and military partnership).
It’s a supermarket simultaneously raising its prices while rolling out an anti-competitive new policy where you can’t buy there if you also buy from the competitor.
It's not an anti-competitive new policy. It's an old already practiced by the parties which are facing reciprococity, which they themselves justified in the past on the basis of competition. Note, again, the common market trade barrier.
This is one of the issues with the supermarket analogy. Both parties are 'supermarkets', and the trade barriers have already been in play.
It assumes that the supermarket has infinite leverage, that it is so unilaterally indispensable that the customer has no choice. This kind of blackmail works until it doesn’t, like russia banking on europe’s gas dependency.
There is no assumption that there is infinite leverage, only that there is drastically uneven leverage. This uneveness exists- the US and China are not substitute providers for Europe's priorities, and thus Europe cannot credibly claim to go to a different provider for what Europe seek from the US.
This another of the reasons the supermarket analogy is a bad analogy. Supermarkets provide analogous goods and services- however, the US and China do not.
Psychologically, people prefer a less competitive supermarket to being coerced in that way. I think you overestimate your leverage, and how “rational” your customers are. I’m way more pro-american than average, and even I think US allies should tell trump to take a walk.
You seem to be conflating characterization with advocacy, as well as psychology for policy position.
Unfortunately, you cannot tell a security provider to 'take a walk' from not fighting on your side, because your consent is not required for them to not fight for you. Similarly, you cannot tell someone to 'take a walk' from no longer providing a service to you- the breakdown of the relationship is the BATNA, not the continuation of the status quo.
This is a third reason why the supermarket is a bad metaphor- it reverses the agency in the relationship. The US is not a supermarket trying to persuade a European customer to come in but which the European has plentiful alternatives- the US is the only viable service provider that the European customer is trying to convince to stay when the new boss believes it's a bad business relationship. If the European consumer believes the new price is not worth paying, that's not a victory over the no-longer-provider, that is the provider leaving an unprofitable relationship.
If you don't understand, it would probably help to work on the metaphor.
A tariff barrier is not a closing of a supermarket, not least because tariff barriers already exist between American allies. That is what the EU common market is- a trade barrier between the European group of allies and their other allies, including the Americans, the Brits, and so on.
Even more relevantly, a threat of tariff barriers is not a closing of a supermarket either, particularly when everyone (should) understand that the threat is conditional on [insert trade / political concession here]. The conditionality is critical because it can be used to create and either-or dilemma of which supermarket the consumer goes to, as opposed to the consumer has no choice.
The rise of deglobalization and the multipolar world order is not a close off of markets entirely, but a process of choosing / forcing choices of which markets to associate with. Globalization may have been a 'choose any supermarket you want' dynamic, but deglobalization is a mutually exclusive membership program, where association with one supermarket will lead to increasing limits with the other.
The issue for some countries, of course, is that the two supermarkets are not anywhere near to competitive in attractiveness. The European Family, for example, is not going to fine any meaningful offers from ChinaMart on in the 'expeditionary armies to fight in your defense' market, particularly when ChinaMart is close business partners with 'WeSwearWeWon'tBlackmailYou' Russian Discount Gas, which is currently in a special hostile takeover operation against the cousin down the street.
Is that the theschism pointedly avoiding discussing, or is there a general lack of discussion at theschism?
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Additionally, running with Biden for as long as they did also undermined the competence critiques, while the way they removed him (threatening, but not actually utilizing, the 25th Amendment) undermines process-centric critiques.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
I guess if I have a point, it's that the Roman's were correct. Entertainers are all degenerates and you should scorn anyone who chooses to be one.
Just think of the fiction writers. What sort of sick mind seeks to profit over the imagined suffering of others for a voyeuristic reader base that loves to see its characters suffer?
[/kidding]
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
2016 was a bit of a culture shock, a surprise, and widespready expectation of significant restraining factors (both the still-active Never Trump wing of the Republican party and the Democratic Resistance) that would limit Trump's ability to act.
2024's margin of victory and the nature of the transition to date has made it very, very clear those limiting factors are not in play. The Cheney-Never Trumper wing of the party self-destructed after 2020, the Democratic Party is not what it once was, and not only does Trump have a trifect but it is a far more coherent party base, and one with sharp memories for the obstructors of last time.
As a result, there are far fewer institutional barriers to prevent Trump from acting, and so personal diplomatic mollification has a lot more value.
You know, that would have made an unironic christmas gift for yourself to start on yesterday.
'This year, my gift to myself was starting my path to becoming a bloody Yank.'
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