1. Despite
Obama’s Moves, Asian Nations Skeptical of U.S. Commitment
The New York Times MAY 23, 2016
President
Obama during a news conference with President Tran Dai Quang of Vietnam on
Monday in Hanoi.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
SINGAPORE
— When President Obama announced
Monday that he was ending a half-century-long arms embargo against Vietnam, it was another
milestone in his long-running ambition to recast America’s role in Asia — a
“pivot” as he once called it, designed to realign America’s foreign policy so
it can reap the benefits of Asia’s economic and strategic future.
Yet
as Mr. Obama’s time in office comes to an end, Asian nations are deeply
skeptical about how much they can rely on Washington’s commitment and staying
power in the region. They sense that for the first time in memory, Americans
are questioning whether their economic and defense interests in Asia are really
that vital.
Mr.
Obama is the first president to have grown up in the region — he lived in Indonesia as an
elementary school student — and he has never doubted that America is underinvested
in Asia and overinvested in the Middle East.
In
visit after visit, he has capitalized on the palpable nervousness about
Beijing’s intentions while also cautioning that China’s growing influence
and power are unstoppable forces of history. In Mr. Obama’s view, that means
both the United States and the rest of the region will have to both accommodate
and channel China’s ambitions rather than make a futile attempt to contain
them, while reassuring the Chinese of America’s peaceful intentions.
At
the core, the policy has been building on the two-decade-old opening to
Vietnam; the establishment of a new relationship with Myanmar as it lurches
toward democracy; closer relations with the two largest treaty allies in the
region, Japan and South Korea; and
renewed military ties with thePhilippines. The
administration has also pushed the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, which would set new terms for trade and business investment
among the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations.
Perhaps
most important, Mr. Obama has received unexpected help from the Chinese
themselves, who have so overplayed their hand in the South China Sea that
smaller neighbors suddenly took a new
interest in deepening their relations with Washington.
Countering
those developments, though, is the American political mood, which has darkened
toward longstanding alliances and international trade itself. For Asian allies,
this means the United States might pivot away.
“Every country in Asia views the problem
differently, and through their own lenses, but they all see a twofold risk of
things getting out of balance quickly,” Kurt M. Campbell, one of the architects
of Mr. Obama’s strategy in his first term, said on Monday. “One is that China
seriously overplays its nationalism” and that conflict breaks out in the South
China Sea.
But
Mr. Campbell, who is about to publish an account of Mr. Obama’s efforts titled
“The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia,” also noted that Asian
nations were equally worried that America is no longer willing to be a
steadying power.
“Asian
countries are prone to anxiety about the behavior of major powers, for good
reasons — they have seen a lot go wrong over the past thousand years,” said
Daniel R. Russel, the assistant secretary of state for Asia. “And now there is
angst about what comes next and the sustainability of the rebalance.”
2. China Should Shut Down Zombie Businesses to Help the Economy
The New York Times JUNE 9, 2016
China knows that it has
to shut down steel mills, coal mines and other industrial units that are producing
much more of just about everything than the world needs, depressing prices and
hurting businesses and workers everywhere. But the government has been
reluctant to act for fear of throwing millions out of work and damaging Chinese
banks that have lent money to what are essentially zombie businesses kept alive
by government policies.
That
fear helps explain why Chinese officials pushed
back when the Obama
administration demanded during this week’s U.S.-China Strategic and Economic
Dialogue that Beijing reduce industrial capacity. American officials
need to keep pressing the issue, not only because China is flooding global
markets with steel, aluminum and other goods, but also because China is living
a fantasy that can only hurt its own people.
In
2008, China began pumping tens of billions of dollars into its economy and
encouraged banks to embark on a lending spree to offset the effect of the
financial crisis. As a result, the country continued to grow quickly, even as
other countries slid into recession. The government intervention came at a high
cost as businesses, many of them owned by provincial and local governments,
borrowed excessively to invest in projects based on unrealistic assumptions
about global demand.
The
result is that China now faces a debt problem and an overcapacity problem.
Goldman Sachs estimates that the amount of debt in the Chinese economy jumped
to 235 percent of gross domestic product in 2015, from 130 percent in 2008. At
its current trajectory, Goldman analysts say that number could rise to 344
percent of G.D.P. by 2020.
The
bills for that debt and investment binge are now coming due, including human
costs that merit a compassionate response. Reducing industrial production could
force five million to 10 million workers from their jobs, says Scott Kennedy of
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Banks and
other investors may have to write off or restructure tens of billions of
dollars in loans and bonds.
To
help affected workers, China needs a stronger social safety net — retraining
people for jobs in the service sector, providing generous pensions to workers
close to retirement age and relocating workers in hard-hit areas to cities and
towns where jobs are more plentiful. Increased spending on health and education
would improve social services and create jobs. Over all, these policies should
make it easier for provincial and local governments to shut down unprofitable
enterprises.
On
the financial side, China needs a more effective process for companies to
restructure debts, merge with other businesses or liquidate their assets. The
current bankruptcy system is so inefficient that many smaller businesses that
fail simply disappear without settling their debts. State-owned banks keep
ailing companies, some government owned, alive by rolling over their loans
simply because managers do not want to acknowledge losses.
There
have been signs of progress in recent months. Some state-owned businesses
have defaulted
on bond payments, suggesting that the government will not prop up
failing companies in perpetuity, which is encouraging. But the defaults have
also unnerved investors, because they cannot easily turn to bankruptcy courts
to swap their debt for equity or recoup at least some of their money through
negotiations with management.
President Xi Jinping says he intends to
push for “supply-side
structural reform” that would reduce excess industrial capacity, cut taxes
and relax government control over the economy. That echoed a promise he made in
2013 to give market forces a “decisive
role in the allocation of resources.” So far, he has not supported either
slogan with much substance.
The Project Syndicate MAY 20, 2016
LONDON
– The long phony war about the United Kingdom’s place in Europe is over. An
increasingly vicious domestic “Battle for Britain” has been underway for weeks.
In a referendum on June 23, British voters will decide whether the UK remains
in the European Union or, after more than four decades of membership,
negotiates its withdrawal.
Opinion
polls are finely balanced.
With the EU increasingly seen through the lens of economic crisis, political
turmoil, and unwanted migrants, a British exit – or “Brexit” – is a realistic
prospect. Indeed, advocates would seem to have the wind at their backs: In an
age of widespread anti-establishment rage, their claim that bossy Brussels
bureaucrats are to blame for everything wrong with Britain resonates widely,
tempting voters to project their personal visions of Utopia onto a post-EU
future. The “remain” camp, by contrast, must somehow sell the reality of the EU
as it is, warts and all.
While
Britain’s debate about its relationship with “Europe” is often insular, Project
Syndicate’s commentators bring a broader perspective to the question.
They examine not only the likely implications of Brexit, but also how the UK
arrived at this point and what the referendum – however it turns out – means
for Europe’s future.
Getting to No
Carl Bildt, who was Sweden’s
prime minister when his country joined the EU in 1995, provides an important
reminder of what the European project has achieved – and thus what is at stake
in the current threat to its integrity. “In the 1970s and 1980s,” he writes,
“the magnetic promise of integration helped stabilize democracy in Greece,
Spain, and Portugal.” After the collapse of communism, “the promise of EU accession
eased, encouraged, and to some extent guided the transition” in Central and
Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Likewise, the “soft power of an integrated Europe
inspired democratic reform for decades in Turkey” and has had the same effect
in Ukraine in recent years.
Given
this record of success, why would any country want to leave? For Joschka Fischer, Germany’s
former foreign minister, the Brexit debate reflects a simple reality: “The UK
wants a different kind of Europe than the one that the EU currently represents.
Its preference is a Europe that essentially consists solely of a common
market.”
Actually,
Brexit campaigners want to leave the EU for a variety of reasons. Free-market
Conservatives argue that Britain would be freer, richer, and more democratic if
it left the EU, regained “full” sovereignty, struck its own trade deals,
scrapped burdensome EU regulation, and took control of its borders. For
nativists, notably in the UK
Independence Party, the priority is to restrict immigration. For some on
the hard left, Brexit would enable the country to escape the EU’s “neoliberal”
constraints, such as limits on state ownership and subsidies. Yet the
overwhelming consensus is that Brexit would be bad for both Britain and the EU.
Better Off In
It’s
not hard to see why. Most observers believe, for good reason, that Brexit would
entail huge economic costs for Britain. Just the disruption and uncertainty of
drawn-out and doubtless acrimonious divorce proceedings, I have argued, would depress
investment and growth. Permanent separation would reduce trade, foreign
investment, and migration, hurting competition, productivity growth, and living
standards. And “independence” would deprive Britain of influence over future EU
reforms – notably, the completion of the single market in services – from which
it would benefit.
So
why hasn’t that message sunk in with British voters? “Many advocates of
withdrawal cherry-pick policies and regulations,” says Ana Palacio, a former Spanish
foreign minister. “They want Britons to believe not only that the City of
London would remain Europe’s top financial center, but also that the UK would
retain access to the EU’s single market, even without free movement of labor.”
This is “pure fantasy.”
In
fact, in the event of Brexit, the pound would probably collapse, according to
Princeton economic historian Harold James. And MIT’s Simon Johnson, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute
for International Economics, cites two leading reports suggesting dire
consequences for financial stability following Brexit, with no new export
opportunities to show for it once the turmoil subsided.
In
fact, the long-term effects of Brexit, economic and otherwise, would be no less
serious. Anglo-Dutch author Ian
Buruma points out that Britain would lose global influence. Mark Leonard, director of the
European Council on Foreign Relations, is scathing: Prime Minister David
Cameron’s decision to call a referendum could “bring down his government,
destroy his political party, and literally tear his country apart.” After all,
given Scots’ (relative) enthusiasm for the EU, Brexit would likely be followed
by a second independence referendum, ending the UK as we know it – a key reason
why some prominent Euroskeptics, such as former Foreign Secretary William Hague, now favor
remaining.
Mohamed El-Erian, chief
economic adviser at Allianz, argues that other Euroskeptics should hedge their
bets as well. Because the consequences of leaving are highly uncertain,
Britons’ “most pragmatic choice would be to remain in the EU, at least for now,
thereby preserving the option of changing their collective mind later, should
new information warrant it.”
The Impact on Europe
Britain’s
departure would doubtless damage the EU as well. At one time, France and others
may have believed that the EU could integrate faster without Britain. But that
was when European integration was much more popular than it is today. With
support for an “ever-closer Europe” plumbing new lows, Brexit could cause the
bloc to unravel further.
Javier Solana, a former EU
high representative for foreign and security policy, argues that Brexit would
“weaken the security, foreign policy, and international standing of both
parties.” Similarly, Richard
Haass, a former director of policy planning at the US State Department, is
among many to warn that Brexit would add to the centrifugal forces of
nationalism and “populism” that risk destroying the European project. Haass
also worries that Brexit could undermine the peace agreement in Northern
Ireland.
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