Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have been squalling for years about how China controls most of the “rare earth” metals that are vital for much modern technology.[1] Also, they are hard to find and difficult to develop in the United States. That is “We’re doomed!” Then, turns out that there are important “rare earth” sources in…wait for it…Greenland and Ukraine. President Donald Trump has made plain his determination to get a tight grip on both. “Oh what an awful man he is, trying to insure the well-being of the United States in such a rude fashion!”
The same religious-fanatic dictator has been ruling Iran for 35 years. The elections are rigged to keep out any representative of “liberal” opinion; there’s a big political prison into which prisoners disappear and from which they rarely emerge; the morality police can get away with murdering girls who don’t wear the hijab properly; corruption is rife and the upper ranks of society live well; living standards low for most people, in large part because the country spends a lot of its oil wealth on weapons systems and on the Revolutionary Guards Corps; the regime built a “ring of fire” around Israel not as a defense against the “Zionist entity,” but as the front line in Iran’s drive to revolutionize the Middle East on its own model; and the regime is close to producing nuclear weapons.[2] Iran also is allied with Russia, China, and North Korea. Lots of Iranians are unhappy with their masters. Help them pressure the regime for meaningful change.
America built its economic power behind a high tariff wall in the later 19th and early 20th Century. Yes, that kept prices for consumers high. It also created a huge number of blue collar and white collar jobs; vast national wealth, and the industrial base that decided the outcomes of both World Wars and the Cold War. After the Second World War, the United States adopted a free trade policy as a way to restore prosperity to a war-ravaged world. Part of this plan involved accepting higher tariffs on American imports than the Americans imposed on their trading partners.[3] The US was big, rich, and easy, while everywhere else was a pile of rubble.
By the end of the Cold War (c. 1990), these conditions no longer applied. It might have been a good time to renegotiate trade relations with many countries. “But you didn’t do that, did you?”[4] Instead, we doubled down by admitting China to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Cheap consumer goods flooded the country, wrecking many industrial areas of the United States. In the first Trump administration, the president wall-papered China with tariffs and harassed Huawei, allegedly because it posed a security threat. First, enlightened opinion deprecated this departure from “norms.” Then Biden continued them. Now President Trump is hammering everyone with tariffs. People say “well the tariffs on China are OK, but he’s also hitting our friends and allies.” Give it a couple of years and everybody will be on-board, just like before.
Trump’s cabinet is mostly made up of clowns. The president is pursuing real policies along with the rest of his nonsense. This is what you get when the Establishment abdicates on solving big problems for decades.
[1] Take a gander at Rare Earths – The New York Times
[2] Now big chunks of Iran’s client states are reeling from hard blows struck by Israel.
[3] The US also accepted Canada adjusting the exchange rate to make American goods expensive in Canada and Canadian goods cheap in the US.
[4] Looking at you, William Jefferson Clinton. We should have re-elected George H. W. Bush.
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