Two items of considerable importance today:
- Biden announced the creation of a watered-down version of the TPP. Since the significance of the TPP always revolved around its geopolitical, not its economic, impacts, that’s a step in the right direction. How big a step it is remains to be seen, given that agreement on trade rules tends to depend on increasing access to American markets, which has not been promised here. Let’s just hope we don’t have to listen to a lot of unjustified whining about it from the protectionist left.
- Following a practice that most people would consider unfortunate, Biden got ahead of his skis and said, in response to a question, that America would provide military assistance to Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. The bureaucracy immediately walked that back and announced that American policy on “strategic ambiguity” had not changed. The divergence between Biden and his staff on key foreign policy issues is starting to resemble the one between Trump and his advisers. The difference between the two presidents is that Biden tends to react emotionally and be too honest in response to questions, without really meaning to change American policy, whereas Trump genuinely disagreed with his advisers on many critical issues and said so. So far, the divergence between Biden and his staff does not appear to have done any lasting harm; perhaps it can be used as a form of good cop, bad cop.
There is still no resolution of the Chinese tariff issue, which, in my opinion, has been one of Biden’s greatest failures. More on that tomorrow.