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OPINION
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Tuesday, December 4, 2018
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Trump deserves
some credit for
China truce
BY TYLER COWEN
Bloomberg News
Just because the U.S. and China have agreed
to call a truce in their trade war doesn’t mean
that it’s over: This was a classic exercise in can-
kicking. Nonetheless, most cans have quite a
few kicks in them, and overall this is good news
for the global economy. Instead of sweeping
everything under the rug, as was the case before
Donald Trump took office, America and China
have found a new way of addressing conflict by
talking openly.
Let’s consider the announcement itself. The
U.S. has pledged to postpone raising tariffs to 25
percent on $200 billion of Chinese goods. China in
turn has pledged to buy more U.S. goods, and the
two countries have 90 days to reach a broader
trade agreement, which is supposed to cover
forced technology transfer and cyberattacks in
addition to typical trade issues. That’s not enough
time to allow the bureaucracies to work out the
relevant details, but extensions can and probably
will be granted.
The symbolic elements of the deal are at least
as important. First, China has acknowledged that
exports of fentanyl, a highly addictive synthetic
drug, are a very real problem for the U. S., and
has pledged to ban them. In addition to the ben
efits of the ban itself, simply getting China used
to the idea of accepting blame — for anything —
counts as a step forward. It’s a sign that China will
start conducting its diplomacy less defensively
and more like a normal member of the global
community.
Another symbolically important detail: White
House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a trade
hawk, attended the meetings and participated in
the process. Maybe he’s unhappy with the tem
porary deal, but still this is a sign that Navarro
and a Chinese trade agreement — even if only a
can-kicking one — can coexist. If Trump sees this
deal as beneficial to him politically, Navarro’s
protectionist influence may be reduced.
Perhaps most important, both the Chinese
government and public opinion are not in a
downward-spiraling, negative dynamic. I’m
fully aware that giving China points for not get
ting worse is not the best way to keep score.
Still, the Trump administration has managed to
send China a real warning on trade, more than
it received under previous U.S. administrations,
without destroying relations. That too has to
count as a victory.
Some observers have pointed out that the
American and Chinese summaries of the deal
offer somewhat different emphases. I see that
as a feature of the deal rather than a bug, and
one that is hardly uncommon for can-kicking
arrangements. Each side can present this agree
ment to domestic interest groups in a way that
will shore up political support. The relevant alter
natives on the table, most of all an escalation of
trade tensions, were far worse.
So what is the most likely outcome from here?
The basic problem with any U.S.-China trade
conflict is that there is not very much the Chinese
are interested in offering, and their intransigence
is more than just a bargaining stance. They are
willing to buy more American soybeans and man
ufactured goods (and probably wish to anyway),
and they might give U.S. financial institutions
freer rein within China. But they won’t dismantle
their system of state-owned enterprises, as those
companies are among China’s most powerful
special interest groups. Nor will China give the
major U.S. tech companies free rein in China, if
only for reasons of national security and China’s
desire to build a surveillance state based on data
controlled by China.
Overall, the grievances on the U.S. side are
significant, and the possible concessions on the
Chinese side are minor. So the most likely out
come is only modest progress in difficult negotia
tions. It’s also likely that the power and focus of
the Trump administration will wane as it deals
with investigations from the new Democratic-
controlled House of Representatives. It might be
said that the trade war you now see is the trade
war you are going to get. Foreign relations grid
lock will set in.
Nonetheless, it’s not quite fair to describe the
trade war with China as a problem that Trump
started and then pretended to solve. The reality
is that hostility toward Chinese trade practices
has been building for some time. Anti-China mea
sures have long commanded bipartisan support
not only in Washington but also among corporate
leaders, who see themselves as victims of unfair
Chinese trade practices and espionage. This is an
issue that predates Trump, and he deserves some
credit for doing something to help solve it.
Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
He is a professor of economics at George Mason
University.
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George H.W. Bush and
the last gasp of moderation
BY DOYLE MCMANUS
Los Angeles Times
George H.W. Bush, who lived a long life
of public service, embodied a lost virtue
in American politics: the idea of restraint.
Bush was a man of modest goals whose
often-ridiculed lodestar was prudence,
the determination not to make things
worse.
Moderation was part of his appeal,
and it helped the former congressman,
diplomat, CIA director and Reagan vice
president to win the presidential election
of 1988. But it was also clearly one of his
flaws, and in 1992, it pushed him toward
defeat.
The lesson to most of his successors,
including his own son, was unfortunate:
Restraint and moderation are for losers.
As soon as news broke Friday of Bush’s
death, he began to be eulogized for his
patrician, almost quaint manners; his
reluctance to talk about himself (he is the
only modern president who didn’t write a
post-White House memoir); his personal
courtesy to opponents; his blizzards of
thank-you notes. (He would have been
lost as president in the age of Twitter
wars.) But his devotion to restraint went
well beyond manners.
Bush was a conservative but never a
zealot. “I’m not a nut about it,” he said in
a 1984 television interview. The remark
didn’t endear him to the Republican
Party’s true believers, who understood
correctly that he was talking about them.
“There’s something terrible about
those who carry it” — conservatism —
“to extremes. They’re scary,” he wrote
in his diary in 1988, in a passage cited by
his biographer, Jon Meacham. “They will
destroy this party if they’re permitted to
takeover.”
His domestic policies were the oppo
site of revolutionary.
“I want a kinder, gentler nation,” he
said when he won the 1988 Republican
presidential nomination, a goal that
sounds impossibly naive today.
His willingness to negotiate in rea
sonably good faith with the opposition
allowed him to pass more bipartisan
legislation than is often remembered,
including the Americans With Disabili
ties Act and an important updating of the
Clean Air Act. The recent federal report
warning that climate change will damage
the economy was a product of legislation
Bush helped pass.
Bush’s most famous bipartisan com
promise, of course, was one that got
him into trouble: the 1990 budget deal
in which he agreed to raise taxes to help
shrink the federal deficit, a betrayal of
his “read my lips” campaign promise.
Hard-liners on the right considered it
treachery. Newt Gingrich, then a junior
member of the House from Georgia, led
a congressional rebellion against the deal
made by his own party’s president — a
foretaste of future polarization.
Foreign policy was Bush’s greatest
love, and the arena where restraint —
prudence — delivered the best results.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Bush
refused his political aides’ urgings that he
celebrate the event, much less declare
U.S. victory in the Cold War. “I’m not
going to dance on the wall,” he told them.
To Bush, it was far more important that
the loser in the struggle, Soviet leader
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, emerge with his
dignity intact and work with the United
States to make the outcome peaceful.
The collapse of communist govern
ments in Eastern Europe could easily
have touched off chaos and wars. Thanks
in great part to Bush, it was mostly peace
ful — a genuinely historic achievement.
Bush went to war with Iraq after Sad
dam Hussein’s army pushed its way into
Kuwait in 1991. When U.S. troops routed
the Iraqi army, hawks in Washington
urged Bush to keep the fight going, to
march on to Baghdad and overthrow the
dictator. He refused.
Two decades later, his son President
George W. Bush, tried the opposite
approach. The younger Bush not only
toppled Saddam, but he declared that
he would also make Iraq a democratic
model for the rest of the Arab world.
That experiment in unrestraint did not
end well.
The elder Bush was not mild in all
things. In political campaigns, while
polite on the surface, he authorized
savage attacks on his opponents, most
memorably the “Willie Horton” commer
cial that accused Democratic candidate
Michael Dukakis of letting a black crimi
nal run free.
But he didn’t govern savagely. It was
as if Bush considered campaigns as war
fare, but genuine bipartisan compromise
as essential to getting anything done.
In 1992, when he ran for re-election,
restraint turned into a handicap. His
agreement to raise taxes in the face of
rising deficits enraged the GOP base,
leading some right-wing voters to stay
home or defect to independent candidate
Ross Perot.
Then, as the economy slid into a reces
sion, Bush insisted that a federal stimulus
plan would be imprudent, and barely
even engaged in symbolic measures to
help struggling families. His Democratic
opponent, Bill (“I feel your pain”) Clin
ton, painted him as a plutocrat who didn’t
care about ordinary people.
The takeaway among Republicans and
some Democrats was that moderation —
deliberation rather than unbridled action,
fewer public words and more private
conciliation — was for chumps. Modera
tion’s cousin, bipartisan compromise — on
taxes, for example — was political suicide:
Don’t ever risk losing the support of your
party’s ideological base.
A few years ago, George W. Bush
praised his father as “one of the greatest
one-term presidents in the nation’s his
tory.” He meant it as a compliment; he
was defending his father as a man whose
achievements had been undervalued.
But it’s hard not to notice the fatal
qualifier: “one-term.” If only George
H.W. Bush had been a better politician in
1992, he might not have given restraint
such a bad name. There might even be
one or two moderate Republicans in Con
gress now. And “a kinder, gentler nation”
would be a goal that politicians would be
proud to pursue.
Doyle McManus is a Washington-based
contributing writer.
GEORGE H. UJ. BUSH
192H-2018
Now... a thousand and one points of light.
JIM POWELL I For The Times
BILL BRAMHALL I Tribune News Service
She Stines
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