Trump Will Go the Way of Nixon

I've been telling people since before the inaugural that it can't be sustained, that Trump will flame out. My epiphany yesterday was that what we are are dealing with here is a convoluted backward reanimation of Nixon.

Nixon came to power after winning a squeaker in 1968 because the Democratic Party had imploded. A shrewd campaigner and a dirty tricks magician, Nixon colluded with the South Vietnamese to upend LBJ's peace initiative, dooming Humphrey's chances of victory; then, in 1972, thanks to Kevin Phillips' Southern Strategy and the assassination attempt and crippling of George Wallace, Nixon reaped the whirlwind and smoked McGovern, remaking the GOP as the party of the cracker working man.

After that '72 landslide there was Watergate, and it was the GOP's turn to wander in the wilderness. Until the Reagan messiah appeared to cleanse the body politic six years later.

But Trump, who fancies himself a Reagan, is no Reagan. Trump is a Nixon, a deluded, brooding, grudge junkie without any of Nixon's Deep State sophistication, on foreign policy, on the labyrinthine federal bureaucracy, etc. Rather than recording himself on mountains of magnetic audio tape, Trump mainlines himself into the global noosphere via Twitter.

Nixon's election was a river flowing backward against the zeitgeist. The country continued to get freakier as Nixon welcomed Billy Graham to the White House. The same thing is going to happen now. Western society is now solidly feminist and multicultural and pantheistic. The old time dysfunctional cracker monotheistic patriarchal order is broken beyond repair. It can appear from the corner of the eye, like a ghost encountered on the staircase of the Winchester Mystery House, as majority sentiment, but it is not. Trump's 45% approval rating is probably his maximum level of support. We'll see tomorrow when a Right-to-Life march stacks up against last week's women's march.

Trump is headed full speed for the cliff. If I had to bet I would say that his goading of the Dragon is an almost certain path to destruction. To understand why read "Trump Injects High Risk Into Relations With China" by Jane Perlez and Chris Buckley. Trump's scrapping of the TPP convinced the Chinese that he might do the same thing with Nixon's One China policy. The Chinese are now preparing for a trade war; they will target Boeing aircraft and U.S. agricultural bounty. The Trump administration has also been hinting at a blockade of the islands China has recently constructed in the South China Sea. According to Perlez and Buckley,

Mr. Trump has also threatened China on control of territory it claims in the South China Sea. The comments by Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, on Monday echoed those made by his nominee for secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, at his Senate confirmation hearing.

While Mr. Trump has not explained how he will keep China off islands where it has built airstrips and installed weapons, the comments by his appointees suggest the possibility of an American blockade. While Mr. Obama tried unsuccessfully to leverage American allies in the region to compel China to back down, Mr. Trump seems willing to abandon them and face China on his own.

That go-it-alone attitude has raised alarms at the Pentagon and among American Navy experts, who said such a blockade would be tantamount to war. The idea has also alarmed America’s allies.

Australia, Washington’s staunchest ally in the Asia Pacific region, would not participate in such a venture, its defense officials said, adding that a blockade could not be successful and could serve to persuade disenchanted American friends in the Asia Pacific to pivot toward China.

A scenario where the Pentagon refuses orders of the commander in chief and then works with allies in Congress to remove him is not far-fetched.

One thing is certain, the Masters of the Universe, the 0.1%, are nervous. "Elites Eying the Exits Signals America's Crisis," by Robert Johnson, was posted yesterday on Naked Capitalism:

Yves here. A former private equity partner mentioned the New Yorker story on 0.1% bunkering. He noticed how they focused on the private jet pilot as a point of vulnerability, that he might fly his family out and leave them stranded. So the approach is to assure him that his relatives get seats on the plane too.

Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

Interviewed as part of an extraordinary New Yorker investigation into growing anxiety among America’s corporate elite over the potential for anarchic social collapse, Institute President Robert Johnson saw his peers’ talk of bolt-holes in New Zealand as reflecting a deeper crisis.

Johnson told writer Evan Osnos of the mounting anxiety he had encountered among hedge-fund managers and other wealthy Americans he knew. “More and more were saying, ‘You’ve got to have a private plane,” Johnson said. “You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’ ”

Osnos writes: “By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, ‘I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.’ ”

Johnson bemoaned the lack of a “spirit of stewardship” and openness to more aggressively redistributive tax policy among the wealthy.

“Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he told the New Yorker. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.”

If anything, Osnos wrote, inequality is widening, noting recent statistics from the National Bureau of Economic Research that showed that while incomes for the top 1 percent of Americans have nearly tripled, half of the population was earning at the same level they did in 1980, comparing America’s wealth gap to that seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society,” Johnson said. “We’ve largely dismantled those things.”

He saw elite anxiety as an indicator America’s social crisis.

“Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson said. “What does that really tell us about our system? It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”

Trump is a manifestation of end times. When it becomes apparent that he is a lens magnifying end times, hastening their arrival, rather than punting them downfield for another decade or two, the GOP in Congress will abandon him. But by that time it will be too late.

All the U.S. Can Do is Play Cat and Mouse with the Dragon in the South China Sea

Austin Ramzy has a decent story, "KFC Targeted in Protests Over South China Sea," about an uptick in Chinese protests directed at the United States for its support of the Philippines' successful suit, decided last week in The Hague by an international tribunal, denying China's territorial claims over the South China Sea. According to Ramzy,

KFC outlets in about a dozen cities, including Hangzhou, in Zhejiang Province; Changsha, in Hunan Province; and Yangzhou, in Jiangsu Province, were targeted by protests and calls for a boycott on Monday, according to a report from Sohu News, a Chinese online news outlet. But the campaign was far smaller than previous nationalist boycotts, and state media outlets warned protesters to avoid any illegal behavior.

Ramzy doesn't mention the bombings of Kentucky Fried Chickens in Egypt last year. Yum Brands, the corporate owner of KFC, says it plans on selling its China operations, no doubt a shrewd business decision given that we are at the beginning of what promises to be a prolonged period of showy super-power saber rattling.

Yesterday Michael Forsythe reported, "China Begins Air Patrols Over Disputed Area of the South China Sea," that the Dragon would begin overflight of the Spratly Islands:

HONG KONG — China said Monday that it had begun what would become regular military air patrols over disputed islands and shoals of the South China Sea, highlighting its claim to the vast area a week after an international tribunal said Beijing’s assertion of sovereignty over the waters had no legal basis. 

China’s air force flew a “combat air patrol” over the South China Sea “recently,” Xinhua, the official news agency, reported, citing Shen Jinke, an air force spokesman. The patrol consisted of bombers, fighters, “scouts” and tankers and would become “regular practice,” Mr. Shen said, according to Xinhua.

The announcement of the air patrols, plus a separate statement that China would conduct military exercises in the South China Sea off the coast of Hainan Island, came as Adm. John M. Richardson, the chief of United States naval operations, was in Beijing to discuss the South China Sea and other issues that arose after the tribunal rebuked China’s claims over the waters on July 12.

The landmark decision rejected China’s assertion that it enjoys historical rights over a huge area of the South China Sea encompassed by a “nine-dash line.” China had argued that the tribunal had no jurisdiction in the matter.

***

On Monday, Admiral Richardson’s Chinese counterpart, Adm. Wu Shengli, said China would continue construction in the South China Sea. In the past two years, China has reclaimed thousands of acres on seven features in the Spratly Islands, an area where Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims, building ports, large airstrips and radar installations.

“We will never stop our construction on the Nansha Islands halfway,” Xinhua, in a separate report, quoted Admiral Wu as saying, using the Chinese name for the Spratly chain. “The Nansha Islands are China’s inherent territory, and our necessary construction on the islands is reasonable, justified and lawful.”

***

Bonnie S. Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that a more telling test of China’s posture after the decision last week may come when the United States Navy resumes so-called freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, which often involve testing Chinese claims by ordering American ships to transit within 12 nautical miles of Chinese-claimed features.

The story is worth reading for its helpful map of the South China Sea.

The U.S. is in a pickle here. It can only threaten belligerence, belligerence that the Chinese know is a complete farce. Is the U.S. willing to go to war over territorial claims and island construction in the South China Sea? How can it when it is fighting multiple wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa and every aspect of its political life is divided? The GOP is split, as are the Democrats. The deep state is intact but it is at capacity managing the rewrite of Sykes-Picot and its reboot of the Cold War, not to mention the dissolution of the European Union that these moves have elicited. Also worth mentioning, a completely moribund U.S. antiwar movement will rise from the dead if it looks as if Obama's Asia pivot is going to morph into a shooting war.

No, all the U.S. can do is plead for the Dragon to come to the negotiating table. An illuminating sample of the pleading tone can be found in an unsigned editorial published by The New York Times last week, "Testing the Rule of Law in the South China Sea":

Given China’s stake in peaceful trade with the rest of the world, it would be foolish for President Xi Jinping to take provocative actions that could inflame regional tensions and conceivably lead to a military confrontation with its neighbors or the United States. Retaliatory measures — further island-building at Scarborough Shoal, for instance, or declaring an air defense zone over large portions of the South China Sea — would be risky.

In fact, the ruling offers a fresh opportunity to address maritime disputes in a peaceful manner. China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, condemned Tuesday’s ruling but said Beijing remains open to negotiations. Nations in the region have often gone wobbly in the face of pressure from Beijing. At this critical moment, despite competing interests of their own, they need to join the Philippines in endorsing the tribunal decision and then proceed, if necessary, with their own arbitration cases.

The United States, which is neutral on the various claims, can help ensure a peaceful, lawful path forward. The Obama administration has said that disputes should be resolved according to international law, a position it now reaffirms. It has built closer security relations with Asian nations and responded to China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea with increased naval patrols. This combination of diplomacy and pressure is sound, but the hard part is getting the balance right.

My guess is the U.S. is going to play the long game. Draw out negotiations, play cat and mouse with its destroyers and its spy planes, and hope that Abe can rapidly militarize a pacific Japanese populous. Better than a war with China, but still foolish and unsuccesful.