| | | | America Is Losing the Trade War | | If the trade war has any winners, America isn't one of them, according to Robert Zoellick, who served as US trade representative and deputy secretary of state under the last Republican president. President Trump and his tariffs have sacrificed market access for US firms, prompted retaliatory measures, shifted supply chains away from US producers, and incurred higher costs of raw materials and finished goods for US producers and consumers, Zoellick writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
"Mr. Trump counters that these costs are the price Americans must pay for his deal-making," Zoellick writes. "But his record is pitiful." A renegotiated South Korea pact did not improve things, NAFTA's replacement "is a maze of new requirements for how companies should build autos," negotiations with the EU and Japan have sputtered, and a new tit-for-tat has emerged with India.
Even on the metric of America's trade balance, Zoellick writes, Trump is "losing." Looking outside America's borders, Raghuram Rajan writes at Project Syndicate that another casualty is the multilateral, rules-based global trading system writ large. | | Fareed: The End of the Tories | | "Britain's Tories are arguably the most successful political party of the modern age," Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. "The Conservatives have ruled Britain more than 50 of the 90 years since 1929 (the country's first election with equal suffrage for men and women). But this week, we watched the beginning of the end of the Conservative Party as we have known it."
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is turning Conservatives into the "party of Brexit," Fareed writes, as Tories no longer stand for openness and free trade; they now represent a constituency that seeks to turn back the clock and eyes foreigners warily. "[W]hat is happening now in Britain is a telltale sign," Fareed writes. "One of the world's most enduring political parties is cracking—yet another reminder that we are living in an age of political revolutions." | | | The death of former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe—who led the country from its independence in 1980 until 2017—has generated a smattering of retrospectives, including a long New York Times obituary that explains why Mugabe, a "pariah" in the West, was also revered: "If Nelson Mandela of South Africa, his contemporary, won universal admiration for emphasizing reconciliation, Mr. Mugabe tapped into an equally powerful sentiment in Africa: that the West had not sufficiently atoned for its sins and had continued to bully the continent."
Mugabe's status as a "liberation hero" blended with a reputation for association with violence against civilians, alleged hunger for power, and his eventual oversight of a failed economy, the Times writes. Farai Sevenzo concurs in a Foreign Policy op-ed, writing that Mugabe "will be remembered as both a liberator and a tyrant, a man who led his country to independence only to turn a blind eye to those who were looting it until the day he died." | | Syria's war is approaching its end, The Economist writes in its latest cover story: The outcome is a victory for President Bashar Assad, the cost of which will have been immense wreckage for Syria and the region. Within Syria, reconstruction will only deepen divisions, as Assad razes areas that opposed him and redevelops them to house his backers and enrich his "cronies" with construction contracts; a conflict between Turkey and Kurdish forces is brewing in the north; refugees have spilled over into Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey; and the global diaspora of those who've fled, dispossessed as they are, could be at risk of radicalization.
Western powers can't do much to change that, the magazine concludes; when it comes to rebuilding Syria, it's best to steer clear and "let Russia and Iran pay." Writing at the Middle East Institute, Elizabeth Dent reaches a similarly moribund conclusion, examining US options: It's time to accept that President Trump won't devote more resources to Syria, she writes, meaning America's only choice is to try to maintain a counter-ISIS mission and "scal[e] back on everything else." | | A Dirty Road to Clean Energy | | The world may indeed need a clean-energy revolution, but in a Foreign Policy op-ed, Jason Hickel points out that would mean digging up tons upon tons of rare-earth metals to build all the necessary wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries. In some cases, mining of elements would double.
The potential extraction boom is worrisome because, as Hickel puts it, mining can be an "ecological disaster," bringing with it "deforestation, ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss." It also costs resources (it "takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium," Hickel writes), and all that havoc is typically wrought on developing countries that could see a resource scramble and "new forms of colonization." Those uncomfortable truths mean that reducing energy demand, not just beefing up renewable production, will have to be part of the solution, Hickel writes. | | | | | | |
