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Fareed: The US Trade Deficit Is Soaring, and That’s Fine
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Feb 21, 2020, 5:10 PM (22 hours ago)
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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good
February 21, 2020
Fareed: The US Trade Deficit Is Soaring, and That’s Fine
The US economy is booming by most metrics, but Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column that “the one area where [President] Trump has most clearly failed to keep his promise is central to his ideology and appeal: the trade deficit.”
Trump entered office pledging to slash US trade deficits, and yet they’ve persisted. The thing is, Fareed writes: That’s okay. An economy like America’s—which buys more than it sells, produces loads of services but exports fewer manufactured goods than it used to, and attracts hefty amounts of foreign investment—is doing just fine. So why worry?
“Trump’s trade policy has been an enormously costly exercise,” Fareed writes, “forcing Americans to pay tens of billions in taxes on imported goods, then using tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to compensate farmers for lost income (because of retaliatory tariffs) and ensuring that the global trading system will now be weakened by lots of new tariffs and barriers. All to solve a problem that isn’t really a problem.”
Germany Faces Down a Right-Wing Threat
The attacks Wednesday night on two hookah bars in the western German town of Hanau have been called “a shock but not a surprise”—and that comment, by a journalist for a Kurdish newspaper living elsewhere outside Frankfurt, coheres with some of The Economist’s analysis that Germany has yet to get a handle on the threat of right-wing violence. Germany’s political far right has shown itself to be adept at staying relevant, as Emily Schultheis writes for CNN, and The Economist notes that some suspect a link between rhetoric and violence: “Since the refugee crisis in 2015-16 the [far-right party] AfD has shifted ever-rightwards, fostering racial tensions that some say contribute to an atmosphere in which violence thrives,” the magazine writes. “Its politicians delight in portraying shisha bars as shady dens of money-laundering and other nefarious activities.”
Meanwhile, right-wing terrorism seems to be evolving: German authorities broke up a cell last week that “had been assembled largely through chat rooms and messaging services,” and there’s a risk that “organised neo-Nazis and internet-enabled terrorists may start to blend,” the magazine writes. Jihadist terrorism drew more attention in recent years, but the “Islamist threat is dwarfed by that of the far-right. Last year domestic intelligence agencies counted 32,200 far-right extremists in Germany. The army itself is suspected of harbouring hundreds,” The Economist writes—arguing Germany’s government appears to be “ill prepared to meet” the challenge.
Does Immigration Lead to Right-Wing Terrorism?
Are immigration, xenophobia, and right-wing violence really intertwined? In the current edition of the Journal of Global Security Studies, a paper by Richard J. McAlexander supports the idea. In “How Are Immigration and Terrorism Related? An Analysis of Right- and Left-Wing Terrorism in Western Europe, 1980–2004,” McAlexander finds, via statistical analysis, that more right-wing terrorism correlates to more non-European immigration.
“[A]n increase in migration is positively related to an increase in terrorism, but only right-wing terrorism. … For German states, the percentage of foreign-born immigrants is a bigger predictor of anti-immigrant violence than economic variables such as employment or trade levels. The flow of immigrants from outside of Europe is also positively related with right-wing terror, while no relationship exists for intra-European migration,” he writes. In his view, it’s about social resentment, not jobs: “[T]he mechanism linking immigration and terror is likely related to grievances about the existence of migrants and the changing social order rather than economic competition between natives and immigrants,” McAlexander argues.
Do Iran’s Elections Matter?
Despite the waves of protest seen in Iran since November, Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute advises that no one should expect today’s parliamentary elections to amount to much. “A younger generation of Iranians is no longer willing to play along with this charade,” Vatanka writes, of Iranian elections writ large. “A historic low turnout is expected. Not only does [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei decide who can run for any office, through his control of the vetting process by the unelected Guardian Council, but he can also veto literally anything any elected office puts forth as policy. … Meanwhile, the sense in Tehran is that Khamenei has decided the Islamic Republic can only survive if the entire regime is in the hands of the hardliners.”
If one is looking for a story to track in Iran, Chatham House’s The World Today points us toward an unusual wave of criticism that flashed across Iranian media last month, after the government’s admission to having downed a Ukrainian airliner. “Key figures in the media had a moment of open self-reflection. A handful of presenters resigned from the state broadcaster and several outlets and journalists apologized to the public for their coverage,” writes Tse Yin Lee. If notable, the trend was also short lived, and we should “[c]onsider Iran’s media narratives re-set to normal.”
Can Journalism Survive the Internet?
Weaving in analysis from no fewer than 14 books on the state of journalism in the US, Columbia Journalism Dean Emeritus Nicholas Lemann asks in a New York Review of Books essay whether newspaper journalism can survive, and if so how. Lemann progresses through the industry’s various Internet-era snags, from the low dollar value of online ads to the partisan, opinion-confirming slant he sees in Internet-age citizen journalism—all against the backdrop of a semi-collapsed newspaper industry: In 2014, Pew found that “the number of full-time reporters assigned to cover state capitols had declined by 35 percent since 2003,” Lemann writes, “and the decline has surely continued since then.”
He also examines possible paths to stability, from wealthy owners to nonprofits like ProPublica, to the specter (which may elicit a “strong visceral recoil” from journalists) of more government funding. His conclusion is that journalism needs new answers, which no one has thought of yet.
“What has happened in journalism in the twenty-first century is a version, perhaps an extreme one, of what has happened in many fields,” Lemann writes. “A blind faith that market forces and new technologies would always produce a better society has resulted in more inequality, the heedless dismantling of existing arrangements that had real value, and a heightened gap in influence, prosperity, and happiness between the dominant cities and the provinces. The political implications of this are painfully obvious, in the United States and elsewhere: in journalism, the poorer, the more nativist, the angrier parts of the country (which vote accordingly) are the ones where journalism can’t deliver on its public promise because of its severe economic constraints. Journalism is a case in which it’s going to take a whole new set of arrangements, and a new way of thinking, to solve the present crisis.”
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