What All This Has In Common
There’s a common thread between President Trump’s tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China (and perhaps soon on the EU), his deportations of illegal aliens, his threat to take back the Panama Canal, and his aggressive overtures to buy Greenland.
They are all part of repositioning America for the reality of a multipolar world.
Acknowledging The Current Multipolarity
Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged the current multipolar reality in his appearance on Megyn Kelly’s podcast last week. At about 9:16 he says,
It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… it was the product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world—multiple great powers in different parts of the planet.
Rubio goes on to say that American policy should be to further America’s interests, suggesting we deviated from that at the end of the Cold War. When it comes to trade, we arguably deviated from it at the beginning of the Cold War.
As economist Ian Fletcher pointed out (“America Was Founded As A Protectionist Nation”), protectionism was the rule for most of America’s history. That only changed after World War II:
America only seriously turned away from protectionism as a Cold War gambit to prop up capitalist economies abroad and tie them to the U.S. Geopolitics trumped domestic economics.
That’s no longer the case under the Trump 2.0 Administration. Geopolitics and domestic economics are becoming more aligned.
Adjusting To The Current Multipolarity
When you have the world’s strongest military and largest economy by far, maybe you can afford to be a bit lax about migration and trade. That’s not the case for America …
Full story available on Benzinga.com