Trade Wars and Consequences

The Trump administration is forfeiting a great US asset. The US has long been at the center of world trade, and the US dollar has become the currency-of-currencies, the numeraire. That fact has worked in our national favor in countless ways.

Now, some of my readers might say that it is "about time the US lose this privileged position." But of course the Trumpets won't say that. They're the "America First" administration after all. Yet their actions will remove American firstness in one very important respect.

How? Well, one object of Chinese policy for a long time has been to rebuild the famed "Silk Road," the trade route leading from China through the Middle East, to Ottoman lands and northeastern Africa. Marco Polo tapped into it when he wasn't too busy inventing swimming pool games.

China wants to revive that route, and wants it emphatically to include all of Europe this time, not just for an occasional traveler, and ideally it would want its own currency to be the defining one among the nations of the route. A new numeraire.

The US government is now advancing that cause by generating simultaneous trade wars with both China AND the EU. This is very likely to improve their trade relations with each other. And with the nations in between them. The whole vast stretch of the globe known as Eurasia, with the possible exception of Russia and the other former Soviet republics, could in principle become a single trade union. (Why wouldn't it include the former USSR? Because the Silk Road Nations are all much more dubious of Putin and his allies than the POTUS now seems to be.)

In this scenario, it isn't just Russia but the US which could find itself very much on the out. The biggest fish in the smaller pond of the Americas, but very much cut down to size.

Further, if Trump has eight years in office than the ninth year may be rather late for anyone seeking to reverse this "Silk Road first" policy.

Just thinking aloud here folks.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog