By John F. Di Leo -
The most important question raised in the Democratic Party’s South Carolina debate did not concern such foolish measures as Medicare-for-All, reparations for slavery, or Joe Biden’s imbecilic exaggeration about murder statistics (150 million murders in the USA? Really?).
The key issue of the day was only mentioned in passing, by Michael Bloomberg, of all people, and it was immediately set aside… and of course, he got it wrong.
Michael Bloomberg tried to make a case for his nomination, on the grounds of his own extensive business experience… and his own long and happy collaboration with Mainland China. He talked about the importance of dealing with Red China, as if this interdependence is a given, because, as he said, “our economies are inextricably linked.”
That one word, “inextricably,” should have dominated the night… but of course, it didn’t; neither his fellow candidates for the nomination even noticed it as potentially controversial.
Let’s contrast this, shall we, with a very similar debate during our own Founding era.
In the 1790s, when our francophile Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, and his many sycophants wanted to partner with the bloodthirsty French revolutionary mob government during the Reign of Terror, Jefferson and his allies also maintained that we – the USA and France – were inextricably linked.
The Jeffersonians believed that we had forged a bond, with France, over the 20 years since our own revolution began, and the Jeffersonians maintained that this bond should last forever, regardless of the behavior of the homicidal maniacs that overthrew and assassinated the Bourbon king and took over the country.
Hogwash.
President George Washington and the Federalists wisely recognized that our real, natural bond was with England. Despite our recent revolution, the English were and remain our kind of people – our allies, our natural friends. All this, despite our need to sever our political bond with their king and parliament.
As an independent nation, the USA and the United Kingdom – not feudal, backward France – were natural allies.
Our first major dispute as a nation, therefore – during our very first decade of existence under the Constitution – was between the rational Federalists and the irrational Jeffersonians: With which countries we should align ourselves, now that we were independent? With a homicidal dictatorship of the proletariat in Paris, or with sane, responsible, market economies like our own?
To most Americans, this was not a difficult question.
Just as, in the 1790s, we could look back on some good things in our brief association with the French, it was also undeniable that America’s long-term trading partnerships and foreign policy friendships would logically be with the English-speaking world… Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean… We had a longer and closer bond with them already, so when the government of France went to Hell in the 1790s (as all the world except for Tom Jefferson readily recognized), most Americans could easily see the need to withdraw a bit from that friendship, and to concentrate again, instead, on our more natural alliances.
The Jeffersonians, who were to evolve into the Democratic Party, fought this logic tooth and nail.
In the 1790s, they insisted that our brief wartime alliance with France was the permanent one, and that we must side with France forever, in all of Revolutionary France’s wars.
It took all the diplomacy of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, all the steadfast leadership and political skills of Presidents George Washington and John Adams, to guide the ship of state through the 1790s, and avoid the results of Secretary Jeffersonian’s horrendous judgment.
Fast forward to today.
Over the past 40 years, the United States economy has become incredibly entrenched in Mainland China. We have Americans living there, working in factories that American and multinational corporations think they own. We have American businesses here who depend on suppliers in China for raw materials, intermediate parts, and even finished goods. Even before the n-coronavirus appeared in the neighborhood of the Wuhan biological weapons lab and started to spread, this massive dependence on China was already utterly untenable.
So we are now in the midst of a trade war, one desperately needed, but one appreciated in advance by very few.
President Donald Trump, to his credit, recognized that we are far too dependent on China, and took action, against all opposition, to start reducing this dependency.
It is critical to remember that, like our 1790s relationship with France, this one too is a relatively recent relationship.
It’s difficult to imagine today, but we did no business at all with mainland China until the 1970s, when Presidents Nixon and Carter made the foolhardy decisions to treat Communist China differently from the way we treated the very similar nation, Communist Russia.
We had almost absolute sanctions on Communist Russia (the USSR) at that time, so we had no trade, no interdependence, no commercial risk, with that communist enemy.
As a result, there were no American-owned businesses, no American factories, no American nationals to speak of, stuck in Russia when their country started suffering its economic and political turmoil in the 1980s, and eventually collapsed in revolution, as the Communists were finally overthrown and the Iron Curtain finally came down. We could watch it happen on television news… but we didn’t have to fear for the lives and well-being of our friends and relatives; none were over there, because we had wisely not allowed it.
When, in the 1970s, we made the fatal errors of not only opening up trade with Communist China, but even granting them Most Favored Nation trading status, we opened the floodgates to an interdependence that we are only now learning we could never afford.
Mike Bloomberg and the rest of the Democrats are happy with that interdependence.
Today’s Democrats double down on it, and vilify President Trump daily for trying so hard to reduce these dangerous ties with China.
Rather than acknowledging the fact that our economic dependence on China is a horrific error, the Democrats on that dais argue over who is best to restore and improve our relationship with Beijing.
Mike Bloomberg attempted to make the argument, based on his own business dealings with China, that he is the best of the field to do so.
In point of fact, to be honest, the entire Democratic Party is qualified for restoring our dependence on China to its former levels… if that’s what we want to do.
Virtually all of the Democratic Party’s major political leaders has deep business ties with China – either through their spouses owning businesses there, or their kids having consulting contracts there, or their business partners having built sketchy income streams from China.
It’s not just the Feinsteins, the Clintons, the Bidens, the Schakowskys… practically the entire Democratic Party is inextricably linked with Chinese funding sources… and because of the way that the Chinese economy works, that means that the trail goes right to the politburo in Beijing.
Just like the political dividing lines between the Federalists and the Jeffersonians in the 1790s, we have today a battle of philosophies: between the party that wants to reduce our dependence on an authoritarian, homicidal regime, and a party that wants to increase that dependence.
In 2020, this argument is between Donald Trump, who wants America to be more independent, and to increase our trade with fellow, free, honest market economies… and the modern Democrats, who want America to be ever more dependent on trade with Communist China.
We cannot completely undo the (admittedly bipartisan) mistakes of the 70s, when we started down this errant path. We cannot easily untangle ourselves from a relationship that has put hundreds of thousands of Americans in danger by moving their families and living as expats in joint ventures in a communist country…
…but we can gradually continue to reduce this dependence, by gradually moving those foreign plants or sources to other countries (or sometimes even back home to the USA)… and gradually free more and more of our friends and neighbors of any need to be stationed in China.
It will continue to take years… this necessary disentanglement can’t be done in a day… but at least President Donald Trump, through his dogged, steadfast leadership, has us going in the right direction at last.
Copyright 2020 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer, and actor. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review.
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