USA-RPDC: bye-bye Premio Nobel da Paz? - Washington Post

Trump’s North Korea diplomacy quietly stalls

Rapprochement with North Korea has been perhaps the biggest foreign-policy achievement of President Trump’s tenure. But a number of quiet developments over the past few days suggest that there are major problems in the diplomatic process. Indeed, the United States and North Korea may have grown further apart since Trump’s historic summit with Kim Jong Un on June 12.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was scheduled to meet North Korea’s nuclear negotiator, Kim Yong Chol, in New York on Thursday. According to the State Department, Pompeo and his North Korean counterpart were to “discuss making progress on all four pillars of the Singapore Summit joint statement, including achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of [North Korea]."

Pompeo said he expected to make “some real progress” at the meeting, which would be used to plan for a second Trump-Kim summit tentatively scheduled for early next year. “I’m confident that we’ll advance the ball again this week when I’m in New York City,” he told CBS News' Face the Nation.

Instead, just minutes after midnight on Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert announced that the Thursday meeting would not take place. “We will reconvene when our respective schedules permit,” she said.

It was yet another sign of how diplomacy has stagnated in the months since the summit. Pompeo has traveled to North Korea and held high-level meetings with his counterparts, much like the one coming up in New York. But at the working level, where the details are actually hammered out, progress has been slow at best.

The Trump administration had hoped to move things along by appointing a dedicated special envoy, Stephen Biegun, to lead negotiations. But Biegun has not yet been able to secure a meeting with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, who is supposed to be leading North Korea’s working-level delegation.

Many U.S. observers had chided the Trump administration for starting with high-level talks rather than with working-level meetings. Now, it seems that North Korea is the one dragging its feet on the more detailed negotiations. “My own concern is the leaders are so way out in front,” Joseph Yun, a former U.S. envoy on North Korea policy, said at a forum in Seoul last month.

The issues with this approach were reinforced last Friday, when North Korean state media suggested that the “arrogant” behavior of the United States could lead Pyongyang to restart its “byungjin” policy — simultaneously focusing on economic development and its nuclear program. It was effectively a warning that North Korea could soon resume the weapons and missile tests that led to so much tension in 2017.

Robert Carlin, a former CIA analyst and State Department specialist on Korea, wrote that the commentary was a new level of warning from North Korea. It “goes to the heart of Pyongyang’s concern that the US has been moving backwards, away from the agenda the two leaders laid out in the Singapore Summit joint statement,” Carlin wrote in a post for the North Korea-focused website 38 North.

The latest warning followed a number of other jibes from North Korean state media, including one that took the unprecedented step of criticizing Trump by name. As NK News noted, it was the “first negative casting of the American president on U.S.-DPRK diplomacy since the Singapore summit took place,” suggesting that even the high-level goodwill between Trump and Kim could be falling short.

For Trump, the breakdown in North Korean diplomacy would be a personal failure. The U.S. leader long suggested that he could solve the North Korea problem if he met with Kim himself — and he had a point. His willingness to meet the North Korean leader face-to-face this year set things in motion in a way previous U.S.-North Korea meetings, which involved officials at a lower levels, did not.

But as the Singapore summit recedes further into the past, its flaws are becoming more apparent. The brief, vague statement that Trump and Kim signed — just 400 words — did not provide a clear path for resolving the key issues in the standoff between the United States and North Korea. Both sides are still arguing over what “denuclearization” means and when it will happen, just as they were before the summit.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before their meeting in Pyongyang on Oct. 7.

The U.S. president, always an unpredictable speaker, is also reported to have raised North Korean hopes about declaring an official end to the Korean War. That would grant Pyongyang some legitimacy, but many in Washington oppose such a move because of its implications for the U.S. military presence in South Korea. A Korean Peninsula formally at peace might be one on which U.S. troops would no longer be welcome.

For Pyongyang, the most important issue right now appears to be sanctions relief. But that is fundamentally at odds with the U.S. position, which says that Washington cannot ease economic pressure on North Korea because it would lose its greatest leverage over Pyongyang. Just this weekend, Pompeo emphasized that the United States would not lift sanctions until it could verify that North Korea had given up its weapons. North Korea, though, is hoping for sanctions first to be lifted.

The larger problem is that both sides are divided not only over what happens next, but also what has happened so far. The Trump administration viewed the Singapore Summit as a triumph of its “maximum pressure” sanctions policy and portrayed North Korean denuclearization as a fait accompli. But North Korea believes it forced Trump into a meeting with the success of its ramped-up nuclear capabilities, an advantage it is unlikely to give up.

Can such different views of negotiations be reconciled? Perhaps, especially given Trump’s own personal investment in talks. With the political test of the midterms over, Trump is likely to turn toward foreign policy again — and any big moves will ultimately come down to his choices.

China is Not the Soviet Union - Amitai Etzioni

Amitai Etzioni é um dos melhores e maiores especialistas em relações internacionais nos EUA. Concordo absolutamente com ele, e fico surpreendido com a paranoia estúpida do Pentágono e das agências de inteligência e segurança dos EUA, ao tentar renovar para a China as mesmas obsessões equivocadas que os mesmos personagens mantinham em relação à URSS durante a Guerra Fria. Acho que impérios quando ficam velhos também ficam estúpidos: bem os EUA exibem apenas pouco mais de cem anos de desempenho imperial, mas como agora tudo corre mais rápido, pode ser que seus declínio também será rápido. Mister Trump faz tudo para acelerar o processo...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The National Interest, August 13, 2018  Topic: Security  Region: Asia 

China is Not the Soviet Union

Some are talking about China in the same expansionist terms as the late USSR—these assessments are wrong.

by Amitai Etzioni

In evaluating recent alarmed assessments of China’s ambitions, one must recall that for decades the American intelligence community, in particular the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), vastly exaggerated the power and hence threat posed by the Soviet Union. These assessments were the basis of huge military outlays by the United States, as well as its military interventions in places such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, which Washington feared were the next “dominoes” to fall. These concerns were scaled back only after the USSR collapsed, mainly under its own weight. We are now told, in an article published in Newsweek , that “China is waging a ‘cold war’ against the United States and trying to displace it as the world’s leading superpower” according to Michael Collins, the deputy assistant director of the CIA's East Asia Mission Center. Newsweek adds that “His comments echo those of other U.S. intelligence chiefs, who earlier warned of the challenge posed by China’s bid for global influence.”

These claims fly in the face of a key observation: during the Cold War the USSR was an expansionist power, which strongly believed that it was called upon to impose its kind of regime on other nations—if need be, to occupy them to bring about the needed changes. The USSR openly sought to dominate the world. China shared this expansionist ideology but abandoned it decades ago. It has not invaded nor occupied any nation and although it prides itself on having developed its own kind of regime (authoritarian capitalism, my words)—it has shown few signs that it seeks to impose this kind of regime on other nations, let alone the world. 

The CIA official cited by Newsweek provides no evidence in support of his claims. It is provided by a leading anti-China hawk Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an article published in the Wall Street Journal . She asserts that China has “destabilized the region” by militarizing seven artificial islands. However, where are the signs that the region has been significantly affected, let alone destabilized? There have been no regime changes in any of the countries in the area. None of them have allied themselves with China. On the contrary, the United States has increased its military presence and ties in several of these countries, including Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and India. Freedom of navigation has not been curbed, despite various claims of exclusive zones. 

Ms. Economy repeats the often-cited fact that China opened one military base in Djibouti. The United States happens to have one in the same country, and—more than one hundred bases in other countries in the region. Economy is also alarmed by China’s Belt and Road Initiative: “Railroads, ports, pipelines and highways built by Chinese workers and funded by Chinese loans are already connecting countries across six global corridors.” It is true that China—which is highly dependent on a steady flow of energy and raw materials, because it has little of its own—is seeking to develop a variety of pathways to secure this flow. However, the various nations involved benefit from the improved infrastructure and enhanced trade. Economy finds that “Chinese state-owned companies have assumed control or a controlling stake in at least 76 ports in 35 countries” which is part of China’s drive to secure a steady and reliable flow of imports. Economy adds that “despite Beijing’s claims that such ports are only for commercial purposes, Chinese naval ships and submarines have paid visits to several of them.” It is a ritual all powers engage in, to show their feathers, to demonstrate friendly relationships, but hardly evidence of a Cold War. It would be a rather different story if Chinese warships were stationed in these countries. However, so far this is true only for American ones and those of its allies.

China has been reluctant to assume global responsibilities. It presents itself as a developing nation that needs to focus on its own growth. However, in recent years it has significantly increased its contributions to peacekeeping forces, foreign aid, humanitarian aid, and fights against piracy and terrorism. 

To the extent that China does loom larger on the global scene, it is largely due to the leadership vacuum created by President Trump. It is China that now is championing free trade, forging free trade agreements in its own region and with the EU. And it works with Russia and the EU to save the agreement with Iran. The Cold War metaphor seems hardly appropriate. 

Amitai Etzioni is a University Professor and Professor of International Relations at The George Washington University. He is the author of Avoiding War with China. A short film summarizes his international relations work.

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O livre comercio de Trump: pela via da reciprocidade mercantilista - American for Limite Government

Os partidários de Trump estão contentes com sua abordagem do livre comércio, que começou com a sua recusa do TPP, o enterro do Trans-Atlantic esquema (com a UE), a denúncia do Nafta e de acordos bilaterais de livre comércio, e que agora quer, porque quer, um acordo de livre comércio com a UE, mas à sua maneira, sem qualquer preparação, estudo, consistência, como sempre, na base de um tweet, como é o seu hábito.

Acho que vai demorar um pouco...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Trump trade deal with Europe proves ‘fair and reciprocal’ lowering of trade barriers only sustainable path to free trade

July 26, 2018, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement praising President Donald Trump’s trade agreement with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker: 

“The U.S-European agreement to zero out tariff and non-tariff trade barriers on non-auto industrial equipment and to lower other barriers for other products is a huge win for the Trump Trade Doctrine and the entire world. It’s proves that the President’s tough approach on tariffs will bring trade partners to the table. Moreover, the President’s determination to get a better deal for the U.S. proves that the only sustainable way to get to free trade is through the ‘fair and reciprocal’ lowering of barriers where all parties act in concert. Whereas past presidents were just fine with the U.S. lowering its barriers while the rest of the world didn’t, finally we have a leader who is fully engaged on trade and will ensure the U.S. is no longer taken advantage of.

“Finally, Trump’s agreement with the EU to reform the World Trade Organization to stop the theft of intellectual property and forced technology transfer by China is another big win for manufacturers, particularly in the technology sector, who have been raided by Chinese companies in the past. This serves notice on China that the WTO will no longer be a vehicle to enable China’s unfair trade practices. 

“Real reform at the WTO is imperative. If the WTO cannot hear trade cases when there are hundreds of billions of dollars on the line in a timely manner or address currency manipulation which is a subsidy on goods, then the U.S. will have no choice but to act. Trump’s agreement with the EU should precipitate urgently needed action to fix the WTO.  In the meantime, the U.S. could simply block Chinese imports that violate U.S. intellectual property laws or levy additional tariffs on those that utilize currency depreciation subsidies. China, which runs a huge surplus, has a lot more to lose in a trade battle than the U.S. President Trump has it exactly right to put the outmoded WTO rules on the table. It’s about time.”

Attachments:

“‘Very big day for free and fair trade’ President Trump declares as European trade concessions prove tough tariffs are working,” By Robert Romano, July 26, 2018 at http://dailytorch.com/2018/07/very-big-day-for-free-and-fair-trade-president-trump-declares-as-european-trade-concessions-prove-tough-tariffs-are-working/