China in the Boardroom Posted by Suzanne Nossel

China's influence on the U.S. economy and the corporate sector is becoming more powerful by the day.  I was thinking about this trend this morning, and just happened on more evidence that its here to stay:

A Chinese state-controlled energy corporation just made an unsolicited $18.5 billion bid for Unocal, which was slated to be acquired by Chevron for $1.7 billion less.  The deal is driven by China's unquenchable thirst for the energy resources needed to continue to fuel its economy.   Regulatory concerns may well hobble the deal, but the fact that they're in the game in a transaction this big is unprecedented.

This comes on the heels of the acquisition of IBM's PC business (think ThinkPad) by another Chinese company, Lenovo (now the world's 3d largest PC-maker after Dell and HP) and a bid this week by yet another Chinese conglomerate to buy washing-machine giant Maytag.

Meanwhile trade tensions between the U.S. and China are continuing to escalate. Our trade deficit with China is $161 billion, up 30% since 2003.

It's all more than a bit remeniscent of the Japanese takeover of Rockefeller Center and doomsday predictions of NYC-turned-Tokyo that melted into an endless Japanese recession.  But still, a few thoughts:

- It will be fascinating to learn what its like for American employees of Chinese conglomerates -  as anyone whose worked for a foreign-owned company culture plays a big role;

- For a long time people have said that China would remain relatively "inward-looking" for the foreseeable future as their economy grew steadily from a relatively miniscule base.  My sense is that the outward turn is happening faster than expected and will only continue;

- As has been true since they entered office, the Bush Administration doesn't seem to have a clear handle on how to deal with the Chinese - they waver between claiming partnership over North Korea and making empty threats based on China's unwillingness to devalue their currency;

- If these trends continue, then globalization Chinese style will be something we see more and more of.

Strengthening the Arsenal Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Tomorrow afternoon us Arsenalists will be powwowing down in DC, taking stock now that we're roughly 3 months into the enterprise.  In the meantime, if readers have comments, criticism, praise or ideas for this site, please post away.  We promise to read and consider faithfully. 

"Smart" Trade Policy Posted by Heather Hurlburt

The week's shout-out for intelligent progressive thought on trade goes to Dan Tarullo, Dan Restrepo and the good people at the Center for American Progress for their memo on the DR-CAFTA free trade agreement.

Dan T. earned his free trade chops:  he held senior economic policy jobs at the Clinton White House and State Department.  You can't call him a closet protectionist.  When someone with those credentials says that "... this trade agreement, and the policies surrounding it, fall so far short of a much-needed smart trade policy" progressives should start taking notes.

The memo's definition of a smart trade policy is a good start toward helping progressives rebuild our consensus on trade:

"The basic principles of a smart trade policy arise from the reasons for seeking trade agreements in the first place.  Trade agreements should provide significant gains for U.S. workers, consumers, and businesses.  They should support development, democracy, and the rule of law in our trading partners.  Because trade agreements inevitably create losers as well as winners, smart trade policy requires that steps be taken to ensure economic opportunity for all those who may be displaced by trade.  Finally, a trade policy cannot be smart unless it can be sustained, both at home and abroad.  At home, this means pursuing trade agreements in a bipartisan fashion.  Abroad it means exercising U.S. leadership so as to bring the benefits of trade to all countries, including the poorest."

Another Clinton Administration economic guru, Gene Sperling, has been pushing a new trade consensus for a while.  In Googling for links for this item, I discovered that even the bloggers over at Mother Jones, or some of them anyway, think there might be some hope for a new progressive middle ground on trade.  (Based on a post I did here a while back, no less.  Don't you love the web?)

Perhaps this CAFTA mess is an opportunity.  What our smart trade folks have been saying makes a lot of sense.  It's time for the rest of us to start picking it up.

Blogging on Blogging Posted by Suzanne Nossel

I've resisted the temptation to blog on blogging, but since my husband David has burst into the mainstream media after just a week at the keyboard, I am going to indulge just this once.

This is for any NY Times newcomers to the site, and anyone at all.

I started DemocracyArsenal.org about two months ago with the support of the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress through a joint organization they've created called the Security and Peace Institute.  Since I have a day job and a 9-month old I invited 4 of the sharpest and most creative young thinkers on these issues (all of whom have distinguished avocations galore) to join forces.

Our goal is to offer a progressive take on US foreign policy.  We're not trying to accomplish what others - Kevin Drum and Laura Rozen, for example - do so well in keeping a running narrative tagged to the latest news.   Nor do I think we'll wind up mounting the kinds of amazingly effective one-man lobbying campaigns that Josh Marshall pioneered on social security and that Steve Clemons has been waging so relentlessly on the Bolton nomination.

Our goal is to surface and analyze issues that are part of the progressive critique of Bush's foreign policy or, even more importantly, explain how we would approach things differently.   We're trying to broaden the conversation on these issues and also, ultimately, to drive new ideas and positions.

We've been described as wonky but I don't take that personally because at least part of the time we're trying for something that the blogosphere doesn't always do well:  namely, depth.

Over the past couple months we've covered a dizzying array of topics - lots on Bolton, but also some in-depth looks at what UN reform does and ought to mean; a lot on the military; on non-proliferation; Iraq; Democratization; South America; Zimbabwe; human rights (check out the category links on the left-hand side of the site).  If it matters to U.S. foreign policy and it hasn't been dealt with yet, it will be.

Unlike my husband, I am besotted with the blogosphere.   Although I am outside DC and not working in foreign policy, I get to debate the issues I care about with a knowledgeable group of people every single day (actually night - I am a bat of the blogosphere in that most everything I do happens between the hours of 8 PM when a certain 9-month hold hits the crib and 8.30 AM when I morph into a corporate suit).   

I can blog for 10 minutes or 3 hours.  I can research as much or as little as I care to (though if I opt for the latter, its at the risk of an occasionally embarrassing comeuppance in comment form).  I can pick up on a thread from a fellow Arsenalist or another blog, or I can start my own and try to suck others in. 

I don't have to laboriously restate points already made in order to build on them, I just link.  I don't have to fully spell out someone's argument in order to take it apart - I can let readers look for themselves.

In a strange way, I also feel like I've made some friends here.   Matthew Yglesias who, as far as I can tell, is some sort of youthful prodigy who knows more than most on just about everything and must blog to the point of collapse every day, seems to read and care about what's on our blog.  I love him for it.  I had never met or emailed with Dan Drezner before he lent me the keys to his blog, but I hope someday soon I will.

In my view, for those interested in current affairs its just a matter of time before the spontaneity, interactivity, immediacy, and scope of the biosphere becomes more addictive than any other information source.  The problems of reliability and sourcing will probably get worse before they get better, but they won't hold back the momentum.

The fact that the NY Times saw fit to cover my and David's guest blogging stint as if it were the equivalent of Joan Rivers debuting as a stand-in for Carson says a lot.  The next time the Times has a headline like this With Vigorous Defense, Arsenal Stays Open, hopefully they'll be writing about us.

Husband, Wife and 2.2 Blogs Posted by Suzanne Nossel

New York Times, Sunday May 15 2005

By DAVID GREENBERG

"YOU should have a blog."

Apparently I push my opinions on my friends rather aggressively, because I often hear this remark.

Last week, I had my chance. My wife and I agreed to be "guest bloggers" - the online equivalent of what David Brenner used to do for Johnny Carson - for Dan Drezner, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, who runs a popular libertarian-conservative blog, DanielDrezner.com.

How hard could blogging be? You roll out of bed, turn on your computer, scan the headlines, think up some clever analysis while brushing your teeth, type it onto your site and you're off.

But as I discovered, blogging is no longer for amateurs or the faint of heart. Blogging - if it's done well - has evolved into an all-consuming art.

Last Sunday, after a cup of coffee, I made my first offering, a smart critique, I thought, of an article about liberal politics in The New York Review of Books by Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?"

I checked back a while later. There were, I think, three responses. Later, another post generated eight replies. Another, two. A couple got zero.

I checked the responses to Dan's posts. He seemed to average about 50. Sure, my wife, Suzanne, had been blogging for weeks on her own site, democracyarsenal.org, but still how was she getting 12, 19, even 34 replies?

I started to worry. It wasn't just my ego. I didn't want to send Dan's robust traffic numbers into a downward plunge.

As I thought about what else to opine about, I started to see that blogging wasn't as easy as it looked. Who were these people, blogging on other sites, who so confidently tossed about obscure minutiae relating to North Korea's nuclear program or President Bush's proposed revisions to Social Security benefits? Where did they find the time? (To say nothing of the readers.)

Serious bloggers, I realized, aggressively report a pet issue, updating their sites throughout the day. They scavenge the Internet for every shard of information on a hot topic, like John R. Bolton's chances of becoming ambassador to the United Nations or Tom DeLay's ethical troubles.

Since I wasn't going to make myself expert on these subjects anytime soon, I decided to write about what I knew, history.

On Tuesday, I posted a link to a piece I'd written for the online magazine Slate, faulting President Bush for his remarks criticizing the 1945 Yalta agreement, in which he said that Europe was unjustly carved up by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.

This time I got a lot of responses - abusive ones. Sample: "Anyone who thinks its 'ugly' to point out what was done to millions of people at Yalta is a moral cretin."

I posted again to clarify my point - that the Yalta agreement wasn't what consigned Eastern Europe to Soviet oppression. But I wasn't looking forward to the next fusillade of invective.

I did have sympathy for the audience. They expected their usual diet of conservative commentary. Instead, they got a liberal foreign policy expert (Suzanne) and a liberal historian linking to Arts & Letters Daily (aldaily.com) and the History News Network (hnn.us).

One Dreznerite vilified me for linking to a piece by the liberal journalist Joe Conason ("Why on earth would you think that gutter-dwelling hack would have any credibility on this blog?").

At one point, Dan took time out from real surfing in Hawaii to post a note informing readers that he had two liberals subbing for him. He must have been watching the train wreck on his beloved blog with horror.

I posted an item thanking readers for their indulgence.

"Could you please stop with these silly remarks about how you 'liberals' have to deal with Dan's 'conservative' readers?" came the reply. "I'm liberal, and I regularly read Dan's blog."

As I checked other sites for ideas, I now realized that I didn't need only new information. I needed a gimmick - a motif or a running joke that would keep the blog rolling all week. All of a sudden, I was reading other blogs, not for what they had to say, but for how they said it.

The best bloggers develop hobbyhorses, shticks and catchphrases that they put into wider circulation. Creating your own idiosyncratic set of villains to skewer and theories to promote - while keeping readers interested - requires as much talent as sculpting a magazine feature or a taut op-ed piece.

I'd always enjoyed kausfiles.com, for example, but I had taken for granted the way my friend Mickey Kaus paced his entries and mixed his news topics (Social Security) with personal obsessions (Jonathan Klein, the CNN honcho).

I knew I wasn't going to master the art in my few remaining days. And the vicious replies were wearing me down. I've gotten nasty responses to my articles before, but blogging is somehow more personal.

When Dan Drezner guest-blogged at the Washington Monthly site, one reader wished bodily harm on his family members. I found the blood lust jarring - especially when it started arriving in bulk, daily. (Suzanne cheerfully said, "Oh, just ignore them!" and kept posting thousand-word items by night.)

It's not that the readers were dim. Some forced me to refine or clarify my arguments. But the responses certainly got reductive, very quickly. And for all the individuality that blogs are supposed to offer, there was an amazing amount of groupthink - since some of them were getting their talking points from ... other blogs.

By the end of the week, with other deadlines looming and my patience exhausted, I began to post less and less. There was a piece for Slate due, a book chapter to finish, my baby boy, Leo, to entertain and a piece to write for the Week in Review.

I wasn't the only newcomer to blogging last week. On the ballyhooed "Huffington Post," Gary Hart, Walter Cronkite and David Mamet dipped their toes in the blogosphere as well.

I don't know how they'll fare, but I doubt that celebrity will attract readers for long. To succeed in blogging you need to understand it's a craft, with its own tricks of the trade. You need a thick skin. And you must put your life on hold to feed an electronic black hole.

What else did I learn by sitting in for Dan Drezner? That I'm not cut out for blogging.

David Greenberg teaches at Rutgers University and is the author of "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image."

Good Walls Make Good Neighbors? Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Here at DA we've been taking note of what seems to be deteriorating U.S. relations with and influence among Latin and South America.

The latest is that Congress has now passed restrictive immigration legislation that would prevent illegal Mexican migrants from obtaining US drivers' licenses and authorize the construction of a wall on the US-Mexican border.  The Mexicans are irate.  The law wasn't Bush's idea but he evidently got behind it after seeing which way the winds were blowing in Congress.   

So this is what happens to the U.S.'s "good neighbor and friend"; the country tapped as the first beneficiary of Condi Rice's goodwill offensive after entering office earlier this year.  The move comes less than two months after Bush, Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin announced a new era of cooperation in North America.

Speaking of the hemisphere, Democrats are saying CAFTA, we don't hafta, and we won't.  The question is whether they will come forward with a viable plan to address the troubling workers' rights, environmental, and poverty-related issues that CAFTA and like agreements raise, so that we won't be stuck on the wrong side of the free trade issue for long.  This issue is on our homework assignment and we ought to get to it.

Debating the Dreznerites Posted by Suzanne Nossel

My list of questions for conservatives over at the Drezner site elicited an avalanche of replies which I am slowly trying to dig out from under.  There's a fair amount of ranting and raving, but reading through the posts one does get some sense of where we can find common ground and where we part ways. 

On anti-Americanism, I'm not sure there's much disagreement on the causes.  I think most progressives tend to think there are fairly low-cost ways of mitigating a  portion of anti-Americanism, and that doing so would make it a lot easier to achieve policy goals. 

On the UN, I think we likewise agree on what most of the problems are.  But whereas most of the Drezner commentators see them as reason to write off the UN (or, at the very least, let loose John Bolton to go after it), progressives place a lot more importance on the organization's upside and believe that, as difficult as it will be to fix, we need to keep trying.

Anyway, some interesting discussions . . .

Inside the conservative mind Posted by Suzanne Nossel

I have taken advantage of my stint in Dreznerworld to pose a series of questions about the conservative take on a variety of foreign policy issues.  I'm dying to know the truth about conservative viewpoints on a lot of these subjects, though we'll see what replies I get.  I've said that anything that smacks of by-the-books Scott McClellanism won't be worth the html its written with.

I promised the Dreznerites I would ask a bunch of similar questions of the progressive side to be posted here later this week.

Something for Everyone Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Wherein we join Derek in piling on the Europeans; blast trade orthodoxy of all kinds; show some love to our readers; and inaugurate the democracyarsenal politix reading list.

Re Derek's report from the junkets of Europe:  shortly before the election last fall, a European diplomat, from a country that sent troops to Iraq, told me that his European colleagues were rooting for Kerry without considering how quickly we would come knocking if Kerry won.

I used to lie awake at night worrying -- and I assume folks with no nursing baby but lots of foreign policy responsibility did too -- about what Kerry's first six months would have looked like.  He would have had to return troops to Iraq, as Bush did.  He would have had to deal with the pre-vote uptick in insurgent attacks.  He would have found some allies willing to make nice noises about more troops, but likely not in time to do much good.

So here's where I think there's no point in agonizing too much about Europeans' Bush obsession:  for that subset of Europeans who define themselves as "not America," Bush is such a godsend that, if he didn't exist, they'd have to invent him.  And they do, as anyone who has ever spent much time being subjected to European cliches about America knows.  Freedom fries, schmeedom fries -- the Europeans give as good as they get when it comes to transatlantic stereotyping.   

As a final bonbon for the Europe-watchers among us, I have been enjoying the delicious ridiculousness of the situation in which the other Perm Four favor a German seat on the Security Council and the sober, rational Americans are left looking at the EU, which says it coordinates foreign policy among the UK, France, Germany and the rest of them, and saying, "hey, this doesn't make any sense."

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Suzanne's Top 10 mentioned trade policy the other day.  I think the actual mythology problem is broader than she suggests:  both pro-trade idealogues and protectionism purists are working from models that are outdated, don't reflect economic reality and don't represent actual swathes of voting Americans.  Foreign policy progressives ought to get their minds opened on this one for two reasons.  Overseas, trade has the potential to help or undnermine so much of what we are trying to do.  Imagine, for example, if the end of clothing and fabric duties kills off what's left of Pakistan's fabric and garment industry, sending that many more young men to extremist madrasas for hope. 

At home, anybody trying to put a progressive coalition together to govern, much less win elections, is going to have to grapple with the threatened textile, auto and agricultural industries on the one hand, and the copyright-protecting pharmaceutical and entertainment industries on the other.  Not to mention their workers and voters in key swing states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania.

That same pre-election PIPA poll that I cited earlier this week found that 93 percent of Bush voters favored labor and environmental standards in trade agreements.  So deviation from free trade orthodoxy is not a fringe point of view and not limited to union members.  (It's still the case, by the way, that about one in four voters, not likely voters but people who really pull the levers, comes from a union household.)

None other than Bill Clinton said at Davos in 2000:  "Those who heard a wake-up call on the streets of Seattle were right."

In some parts of the developing world, farmers and their families are literally dying for lack of open trade to sell their goods at decent prices; elsewhere, though, free trade is hurting coffee farmers, garment workers and even Chinese factory workers.  Trade policy is no panacea -- economists will tell you that there are always sectoral winners and losers -- and while progressives shouldn't fear trade, we needn't fetishize it either.

Both parties are really stuck right now, to my mind, between ideological free-traders and old-style protectionists.  Meanwhile, we don't have free trade, never have, and never will, given what it would do to Florida sugar and orange growers, just to name two commodities of many.And the 1990s "Washington consensus" of expert advice for emerging economies, including extreme free-trade prescriptions, has quietly been walked back by the World Bank and IMF, and more loudly abandoned by countries in Latin America and elsewhere.

Somebody is going to figure out a smart new middle ground on this issue.  It will include real supports for workers who lose their jobs, not tiny hikes in assistance to community colleges.  It will reverse US intellectual property policies that block life-saving medicines from the people who need them, and may eventually even restrict how we get healthcare here at home.  It will include some global re-thinking about where freer trade is working in favor of stability and freedom and where it is not.

It should be progressives who figure this out.  But the more we cling to old orthodoxy and tell ourselves not even to talk about trade, the more likely it is that smart conservatives will beat us to the punch.   

They could do worse than go back and look at Clinton as a place to start.  And one thing Clinton was too smart ever to do was stick outdated labels on his progressive allies.   

I'm looking forward to hearing what Derek, whose former employer represented a whole lot of un-and under-employed former millworkers, has to say on this one.  I for one thought Edwards did a nice job of connecting with real folks' concerns on this without grossly pandering.

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I'm guessing I speak for all five weapons in democracyarsenal when I say that the response has been just amazing... and gratifying.  I want to make a habit of responding to at least some of the comments and emails we get.

So, Ezra asked me for five books that every aspiring political writer should read.  I'll offer one, to get us started, and then invite fellow bloggers and readers to jump in with suggestions for the democracyarsenal reading list.

What I Saw at the Revolution:  A Political Life in the Reagan Era by Peggy Noonan.

Her politics are not mine.  But this book is beautifully-written, vivid and real -- about how young people get their politics, and their jobs; how movements, specifically Ronald Reagan's, form; and how lofty and petty the world of White House politics can simultaneously be.  I don't believe it's been equalled.

Other submissions?

Not Crazy, Just Chaotic Posted by Michael Signer

Very quickly -- as my billables are calling -- I also don't find either of the two hypotheses Suzanne discusses about the Administration's foreign policy compelling (is that slalom metaphor great, or what?)  To assume either that all the Administration officials are marionettes dangling under Rove's nimble fingers, or that the Administration is "schizophrenic," misses the underlying dynamic.

I have never believed in the Omnipotent Rove myth -- his politics are too heavy-handed, too broad-stroke and clumsy for that (Bush's popularity is too low, his victories too narrow, to convince me that Karl is a Svengali).  Instead, David Brooks' recent New York Times column "A House Divided, Strong", was more accurate:

Conservatives have not triumphed because they have built a disciplined and efficient message machine. Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly. As these factions have multiplied, more people have come to call themselves conservatives because they've found one faction to agree with.

So, instead of thinking of the Administration governed by Rove-as-Magician or Bush-as-Crazy-Man, imagine instead a loose, federalist republic riven with internal division between competing, rational states.  You have the Visionary State, filled with neocons like Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle, who tend not to care about short-term political success, convinced as they are in the divine righteousness of their mission.  Then you have the Muscular State, dominated by realpolitikers like Condi, Rumsfeld, and Bolton, who want American might and ballsy exertions of it.  Finally, you have, well, Sweden, led by neo-Clintonian constructivists like Powell and -- well, who else? 

Like any loose federalist republic -- think Iraq right now, or pre-Civil War America, or pre-Bismarck Germany -- these factions fight, hard and rationally, to win discrete battles, and they each do win, from time to time.  The weak central government tries to arbitrate by handing out its support, and victories, serially.  Everyone wins from time to time -- but nobody wins permanently.  And so the Bush Administration -- weak, weird state that it is, staggers from one pattern to the next.

This is what happens when you have an intellectually unmoored President susceptible to faddish thinking, and very powerful inner advisors primarily interested in politics, rather than ideas.

It's chaotic, true -- but it isn't crazy.