Quote of the day—John Robb

In Trump’s post cold war world, US foreign policy will be dominated by trade policy.  Even national security policy will be subservient to trade policy.  If trade policy is dominant, we’ll see China, Mexico and the EU (Germany) become competitors.  Russia, in contrast will become an ally since it doesn’t pose a trade threat.

National security under this regime will be used to reinforce and grow positive trade relationships.  For example, military tension with China creates the opportunity for sanctions that simulate the function of tariffs (allowing the US to circumvent trade organizations and domestic resistance to tariffs).   In a national security policy slaved to trade, any and all security guarantees extended to other nations will require a positive trade arrangement with the US.  The US simply won’t protect or extent security guarantees to any nation that has a non-beneficial economic relationship with the US (i.e. runs a trade deficit).

John Robb
January 19, 2017
Will the World be Safer or More Dangerous Under a Trump Presidency?
[Interesting. Very, very interesting.—Joe]

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4 thoughts on “Quote of the day—John Robb

  1. He also said in his inauguration speech that “eradicating” radical Islamic terrorism is on the agenda, and that would substantially blow away much of that thesis, depending on which parts of the Trump rhetoric you choose to believe.

    As with Obama, and as I pointed out over a year ago, you can pick phrases from Trump’s bag of phrases, assemble them neatly within your own framework and he’ll be everything you ever wanted. All except for one little thing; Trump doesn’t seem to be attached to the American founding principles.

    You’d all best read the transcript. Read it with the idea that the address is being given, not by someone who came as your savior, to fulfill all your dreams of a an America renewed and re-founded on the principle that all Men are created equal, endowed by their creator with unalienable rights, but by a neo National Socialist scumbag. Just for the manual exercise, mind you.

    Here’s a synopsis of the speech;
    “Blah blah, everyone’s wonderful, The People, You People, Rule (wait; “rule”?) By The People….
    …Jobs, Public works, Kill Those Guys, Totally More Public Works because Public Works, Protectionism, and Top-Down Management Of The Economy Define Our Greatness.”

    I hate to be the one to say this, but you if you replace “America” with “Deutschland” (and you don’t even have to squint, even a little bit), then that speech could have been given by Adolph Hitler in around 1930-Something. I know I know, fuck you; read the transcript and point out exactly where I’m wrong then. Trump didn’t mention the founding, the founders’s vision or the founding principles, instead referring to a “New Vision” and essentially re-hashing the New Deal. I don’t believe he used the words “liberty”, “freedom” or “the constitution” either. Yeah; I’ve seen all of this shit before, and so have you.

    Adolph also had the clergy backing him, by the way, in his early phases of power grabbing, and he talked about Jesus and suchlike. Oh yeah, “Make Deutschland Great Again”, get those damned politicians who’ve been taking advantage of you, and put the German People back to work. That line of fucking horseshit works every time it’s tried, apparently.

    So; be hopeful, sure, be happy, go ahead and celebrate if you think you know what you’re celebrating, but be alert at the same time. Right now I’m not seeing much alertness from the American patriot point of view.

    I still hold out the assertion that the Democrats won this election, with nearly 100% of the vote, and that all their weeping and gnashing of teeth is for show only.

    I await the joy of being proven totally, horribly wrong on all of this. Instead I expect that after a few years, after you’ve all been saying how great things are going, you’ll eventually realize something’s terribly wrong, and then you’ll remember this comment which pissed you off so much back in 2017.

  2. I don’t think it’s possible to ratchet down trade with anyone with whom we run a trade deficit to the point where it’s at parity very fast. What I think we CAN do is quit playing the chump in trade negotiations, and get better deals, and encourage other nations to implement sane regulations and stop artificially mucking around in ways that destroy out domestic industries so they can corner the market. For example, our strict (and ever-stricter) environmental policies have been a huge factor in exporting jobs to nations with lower costs because of lax-to-nonexistent environmental protections. Effectively, the EPA has forced companies to export their pollution to China. If we can relax things a bit here, and strongly encourage them to enforce some basic measures there, their pollution will stop blowing downwind to us and we can bring a lot of jobs back, too. It will also make things enough better there that Chinese will want to stay home rather than emigrate.

  3. I’m hoping that the EPA is one of the depts that gets cut down significantly, or shut down, as it seems to be mostly only used to harm the US, at the direction of the Left. CA’s variation is one of the reasons that the state has been shedding businesses for at least 20 years.
    I’m also hoping that the EPA clowns that deliberately dumped all that stored Mine runoff (Colorado) get prison time.

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