Odd Arne Westad: How the Past Shadows China’s Future | Foreign Affairs Interview
Odd Arne Westad: How the Past Shadows China’s Future | Foreign Affairs Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubdp8te6rd4
Tag: foreign policy
Trump Said His Tariffs Would Reduce the Trade Deficit and Bring Back Manufacturing. Here’s What the Data Show.
“From January through September, the most recent month for which U.S. Census Bureau trade data are available, the U.S. imported $1 trillion more in goods than it exported. This is a $118 billion jump compared to the goods trade deficit that the U.S. ran from January to September 2024. (Likewise, the overall trade deficit, which includes services, increased by $113 billion.)
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Recently published data from China’s General Administration of Customs show the Chinese goods trade surplus has increased since Trump took office. From January to September, China exported $875 billion more goods than it imported—a $185 billion jump vs. the same time period in 2024.
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Fortunately for consumers, these macroeconomic statistics are meaningless. You run a trade deficit with your grocery store, I run a trade deficit with McDonald’s, good little boys and girls run a trade deficit with Santa Claus, and we’re all better off for it. As as the economists Daniel Klein and Donald Boudreaux have put it, a trade deficit is equivalent to running a surplus on current stuff.
Likewise, as countries get richer, their labor markets transition from agriculture to industry and then to the service sector. Declining manufacturing employment as a share of overall employment is a sign that Americans are richer, not poorer, than our ancestors.
Trump’s targeted metrics are meaningless as proxies of prosperity. But the fact that his protectionist policies are failing to achieve their stated goals shows just how flawed they—and their justifications—always were.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/17/trump-said-his-tariffs-would-reduce-the-trade-deficit-and-bring-back-manufacturing-heres-what-the-data-show/?itm_source=parsely-api
French and German adults lean toward dialing back Ukraine support, new POLITICO poll shows
The French and Germans have turned into little bitches.
“In France and Germany, the EU’s two biggest democracies, new polling shows that more respondents want their governments to scale back financial aid to Kyiv than to increase it or keep it the same. In the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, meanwhile, respondents tilt the other way and favor maintaining material support
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The most frequently cited argument against additional assistance was concerns about the cost and the pressure on the national economy.
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Support for Ukraine was driven primarily by those who backed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 election in the U.S.
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“In Germany and France, opposition to assistance was especially pronounced among supporters of far-right parties — such as the Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally — while centrists were less skeptical.
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The softer support for Ukraine in France and Germany does not appear to reflect warmer feelings toward Moscow, however. Voters in all five countries backed sanctions against Russia, suggesting that even where publics want to pare back aid they remain broadly aligned around punishing the aggressor and limiting Russia’s ability to finance the war.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/french-and-germans-lean-toward-dialing-back-ukraine-support-new-international-politico-poll-shows/
Trump declares fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction
Huge difference between a terrorist killing people with a nuclear bomb and a person voluntarily taking a drug that he knows is risky and then dying from it.
“President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, giving the U.S. government additional legal firepower in its efforts to combat illegal trafficking of the synthetic drug.
The executive order cites the lethality of the drug, which kills tens of thousands of Americans every year, and the fact that transnational criminal groups the Trump administration has designated as foreign terrorist organizations use the sale of fentanyl to fund activities that undermine U.S. national security.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/15/trump-fentanyl-weapon-mass-destruction-00691742?media_author_id=63054589126&media_id=3788579575710098494_63054589126&ranking_info_token=GCA0Y2IzY2U2NTEyYmQ0NGNhYjM4Zjc3ZTA1YjVhOWJiNiX2tbwFFZADFurohpQNGBMzNzg4NTc5NTc1NzEwMDk4NDk0KANydmEA
Frontline states want EU cash as Russian threat intensifies
“In recent months Russia has flown fighter jets into Estonian airspace and sent dozens of drones deep into Polish and Romanian territory. Its ally Belarus has repeatedly brought Lithuanian air traffic to a standstill by allowing giant balloons to cross its borders. And last week, Moscow’s top envoy Sergey Lavrov issued a veiled threat to Finland to exit NATO.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/frontline-states-eu-cash-russia-threat-defense/
Trump Orders Blockade Over Stolen Land and Oil
The reasons for current military action against Venezuela given by Trump and his allies are various. And the list of reasons to justify war sound a lot like Putin before and after invading Ukraine and W Bush before and after invading Iraq. Reasons for action in Venezuela include: drugs, terrorism, the influence of Russia and Iran, stolen land, stolen oil, opening up Venezuelan oil to American companies, and Maduro being the illegitimate ruler of Venezuela.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ocuj4Adtw
Why America’s massive defense budget just isn’t enough
The US military is weakening compared to its peers and is too heavily relying on aging legacy systems. US military spending is incredibly low compared to the Cold War. If the US doesn’t remain the strongest country, then the US, for all its flaws, will look like an angel compared to the authoritarian countries who will replace the US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0TTtD8l9lI
The ‘Threat’ That Supposedly Justified Killing 2 Boat Attack Survivors Was Entirely Speculative
“While the renewed congressional interest in the legal and moral justification for Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy is welcome, that inquiry should not be limited to the question of whether one particular attack violated the law of war.
The details of Bradley’s defense nevertheless illustrate the outrageous implications of conflating drug smuggling with violent aggression. He argues that the seemingly helpless men in the water, who were blown apart by a second missile while clinging to the boat’s smoldering wreckage, still posed a threat because they could have recovered and delivered whatever cocaine might have remained after the first strike.
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In reality, there was no “fight” to stay in. The violence exemplified by this attack is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants”—who, contrary to that label, are not actually engaged in combat.
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Bradley seems to have determined that the flailing men were engaged in a “hostile act” simply by existing near a boat remnant that might have contained salvageable cocaine. As ridiculous as that position is, it is only a bit more risible than Trump’s assertion that supplying cocaine to Americans amounts to “an armed attack against the United States” that justifies a lethal military response.
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“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” Cardozo School of Law professor Rebecca Ingber, an expert on the law of war, told The New York Times. “The administration’s evolving justification for the second strike only lays bare the absurdity of their legal claims for the campaign as a whole—that transporting drugs is somehow the equivalent of wartime hostilities.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/05/the-threat-that-supposedly-justified-killing-2-boat-attack-survivors-was-entirely-speculative/
Putin Wanted Moldova… Now He’s Losing Transnistria Instead
Russia likes to heavily support breakaway regions to have influence in a country and to weaken and divide those who may oppose Russia’s power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgxVmB0rvCE
Trump threatens to raise tariffs on Mexico over Rio Grande water deliveries
“Texas farmers have long pushed for Mexico to send more water to meet the obligations of the 81-year-old treaty that says Mexico is obligated to deliver 1.75 million acre-feet of water to the U.S. every five years. Trump also threatened sanctions and tariffs against Mexico in April, complaining then that the country had delivered less than 30 percent of the requirement over a five-year window that ended in October.
Mexico argues that climate change-driven drought has hindered its ability to send the requisite water, but officials promised to send 420,000 acre-feet to the U.S. by October.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/08/trump-tariffs-mexico-rio-grande-water-00682220