Movimento de peças no grande xadrez estratégico do Pacífico Sul: Australia faz roque com EUA - Damien Cave, Chris Buckley (NYT)

Não se trata de um simples acordo de segurança estratégica, e sim de uma aliança para a guerra...

Why Australia Bet the House on Lasting American Power in Asia

Less than three years ago, Australia’s leader said his country need not choose between the U.S. and China. A nuclear submarine deal shows that much has changed since then.

Damien Cave and Chris Buckley

 The New York Times – 17.9.2021

 

Sydney , Australia — When Scott Morrison became Australia’s prime minister three years ago, he insisted that the country could maintain close ties with China, its largest trading partner, while working with the United States, its main security ally.

“Australia doesn’t have to choose,” he said in one of his first foreign policy speeches.

On Thursday, Australia effectively chose. Following years of sharply deteriorating relations with Beijing, Australia announced a new defense agreement in which the United States and Britain would help it deploy nuclear-powered submarines, a major advance in Australian military strength.

With its move to acquire heavy weaponry and top-secret technology, Australia has thrown in its lot with the United States for generations to come — a “forever partnership,” in Mr. Morrison’s words. The agreement will open the way to deeper military ties and higher expectations that Australia would join any military conflict with Beijing.

It’s a big strategic bet that America will prevail in its great-power competition with China and continue to be a dominant and stabilizing force in the Pacific even as the costs increase.

 “It really is a watershed moment — a defining moment for Australia and the way it thinks about its future in the Indo-Pacific region,” said Richard Maude, a former Australian security official who is now a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“It does represent really quite sharp concerns now in the Morrison government about a deteriorating security environment in the region, about China’s military buildup and about China’s willingness to use coercive power to pursue national interests,” he said.

Clearly, the United States also made a choice: that the need for a firm alliance to counter Beijing is so urgent that it would set aside longstanding reservations about sharing sensitive nuclear technology. Australia will become only the second country — after Britain in 1958 — to be given access to the American submarine technology, which allows for stealthier movement over longer distances.

Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said during a regular news briefing in Beijing that the submarine agreement would “seriously damage regional peace and stability, exacerbate an arms race and harm international nuclear nonproliferation efforts,” according to a transcript issued by the ministry.

“This is utterly irresponsible conduct,” Mr. Zhao said.

For the United States, the decision to bolster a close Asia-Pacific ally represents a tangible escalation of its efforts to answer China’s rapid military growth. The Defense Department said in its most recent report to Congress that China now had the largest navy in the world, measured in numbers of vessels, having built a fleet of approximately 350 ships by 2019, including a dozen nuclear submarines.

By comparison, the U.S. Navy has around 293 ships. While American vessels tend to be larger, China is also catching up with aircraft carriers while surpassing the United States with smaller, agile ships.

At the same time, China has moved aggressively to secure locations for outposts and missiles, building up its presence on islands that it constructed in the South China Sea. Security analysts believe that Australia would be likely to use nuclear-powered submarines to patrol the important shipping lanes there, in waters also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia. The choice of vessel, they said, sends an unmistakable message.

“Nothing is more provocative to China than nuke stuff and submarine stuff,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, who is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and at the American Enterprise Institute. “China’s so weak in anti-submarine warfare in comparison to other capabilities.”

“To me,” said Ms. Mastro, a regular visitor to Australia, “it suggests that Australia is willing to take some real risks in its relationship to stand up to China.”

 

The U.S. Defense Department says China now has the largest naval fleet in the world. 

 

American and Australian officials, seeking to douse proliferation concerns, emphasized that the submarines were nuclear-powered but had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. The promise of eight American vessels coincided with Australia’s cancellation of a contract for 12 conventional French-designed submarines that had been delayed and running over budget. French officials reacted angrily, calling the abandonment of the deal a betrayal of trust.

Speaking Thursday, Mr. Morrison said the reinforced security alliance with the United States and Britain, which will include collaborations on artificial intelligence and other emerging technology, reflected the needs of a more dangerous dynamic in the Asia-Pacific region.

“The relatively benign environment we’ve enjoyed for many decades in our region is behind us,” he said, without directly mentioning China. “We have entered a new era with new challenges for Australia and our partners.”

Some security analysts argued that China’s recent retaliation against Australia over its harder line — slashing imports of coal, wine, beef, lobsters and barley, along with detaining at least two Australian citizens of Chinese descent — appeared to have pushed Australia in the Americans’ direction. In response, China may extend its campaign of economic sanctions. Australia seems to have calculated that Beijing has little interest in improving relations.

“I think the fear of doing this would have been much more palpable even three or four years ago, maybe even two years ago,” said Euan Graham, an Asia-Pacific security analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies who is based in Singapore. “But once your relationship is all about punishment and flinging of insults, frankly, then that’s already priced in. China doesn’t have the leverage of fear, of being angry, because it’s angry all the time.”

A looming question, according to critics of Australia’s steadfast faith in the United States, is whether Washington will measure up. Ever since President Barack Obama announced a “pivot to Asia,” speaking before Australia’s Parliament in 2011, America’s allies have been waiting for a decisive shift in resources and attention. For the most part, they have been disappointed.

Dr. Graham said that the submarine deal would temper some of that criticism. For other allies like Japan and South Korea, he said: “It answers that question that the U.S. is still engaging in its alliance network in this part of the world.”

Still, the agreement did not erase all doubts about America’s commitment to countering China and defending its role as the dominant power in a complex region far from Washington and much closer to Beijing.

Sam Roggeveen, director of the international security program at the Lowy Institute, a research center in Sydney, said that over the long term, the United States might decide that the contest with China is too costly, forcing some degree of power sharing and reduced influence.

“The U.S. has never faced a great power of China’s size in its history,” he said. “It has never faced down a challenger like this.”

An alternative risk is that the American pushback against China spirals into a conflict that Australia, because of its bolstered partnership, cannot avoid. The two superpowers have experienced deepening tensions over Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as Chinese territory. The United States says that using force to determine Taiwan’s fate would be of “grave concern,” leaving open the possibility of military intervention.

“As the U.S.-China rivalry escalates, the United States will expect Australia to do more,” said Hugh White, a defense analyst at the Australian National University and a former military official.

“If the U.S. is allowing Australia to have access to its nuclear technology,” he added, “it’s because the U.S. expects Australia to be deploying its forces in a potential war with China.”

For now, the Australian government appears to view even that risk as worth taking on. James Curran, a historian of Australian foreign relations at the University of Sydney, called the decision to double down on the United States “the biggest strategic gamble in Australian history.”

“Australia is betting its house,” he said, “on the U.S. maintaining its resolve and will.”

 

A divisão do mundo na grande competição estratégica - Thomas Wright (Foreign Affairs)

 Foreign Affairs, Nova York – 17.9.2021

The Center Cannot Hold

Will a Divided World Survive Common Threats?

Thomas Wright

 

Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, Washington was coalescing around a new bipartisan consensus: great-power competition, especially with China, ought to be the main organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. For some, the pandemic called that notion into question by suggesting that transnational threats pose an even greater danger to the American public than ascendant rival powers. Skeptics of great-power competition, such as Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, argued that the United States should seek to de-escalate tensions with China so that the two countries can work together to manage borderless risks such as pandemics and climate change. 

But the debate over whether great-power competition or transnational threats pose the greater danger to the United States is a false one. Look back at strategic assessments from ten years ago on China and Russia, on the one hand, and those on pandemics and climate change, on the other, and it is clear that Washington is experiencing near-worst-case scenarios on both. Great-power rivalry has not yet sparked a hot war but appears to be on the brink of sparking a cold one. Meanwhile, the worst pandemic in a century is not yet over, and the climate crisis is only accelerating. 

What COVID-19 has made powerfully clear is that this is an age of transnational threats and great-power competition—one in which the two phenomena exacerbate each other. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese government has been obsessed with maintaining its grip on power and has refused to cooperate with the international community to fight the virus. For its part, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump framed the international dimensions of its pandemic response almost exclusively in terms of competition with China, extinguishing any hope of a multilateral cooperation, even with other democracies. At the height of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) became an arena for U.S.-Chinese rivalry, leaving the rest of the world to fend for itself. 

Great-power rivalry and transnational threats will both shape U.S. foreign and national security policies in the years to come. Washington cannot downplay one in order to better deal with the other. Attempting to ease tensions with China to make cooperation on global public health possible won’t work, partly because Beijing cannot credibly commit to being more transparent and cooperative in the future. By the same token, ramping up competition with China without a plan to rally the world to deal with transnational threats (which can themselves fuel rivalry between great powers) would only guarantee future disasters. 

The United States needs a strategy to address transnational threats under the conditions of great-power competition. It must aim to cooperate with rivals, especially China, to prepare for future pandemics and to tackle climate change. But in case cooperation fails, it must have a backup plan to rally allies and partners to provide a much greater share of global public goods, even if that means shouldering more of the costs. None of this will be easy, but all of it is necessary. 

 

SECRECY AND SURVIVAL

 

Competition between the United States and China has made the pandemic worse, and the pandemic, in turn, has deepened U.S.-Chinese rivalry and inhibited international cooperation more generally. But the negative synergy between great-power rivalry and transnational threats was evident even before COVID-19. In the decade after the SARS epidemic of 2002–4, the United States and China had developed a working relationship on global public health. On the eve of the current pandemic, the United States had dozens of public health professionals stationed at the U.S. embassy in Beijing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. Among them was a team of approximately 12 CDC officials working on infectious diseases and pandemic preparedness. (The Trump administration had redeployed a number of CDC officials working on AIDS funded through the President’s Emergency Plan for aids Relief to countries such as Uganda, but the embassy team working on pandemic preparedness remained in place.)

But as a number of U.S. embassy officials told the foreign policy analyst Colin Kahl and me for our book Aftershocks, this team’s cooperation with the Chinese government became more challenging as U.S.-Chinese rivalry intensified, largely because of China’s actions. In 2018 and 2019, for instance, Chinese officials refused to fully share samples of a strain of bird flu known as H7N9 with the WHO’s “collaborating centers” for influenza, frustrating their U.S. counterparts. At the time, public health experts believed that this form of influenza, or some variant of it, could potentially be the source of the next global pandemic. 

Chinese public health officials also grew more reluctant to engage with their U.S. counterparts. In 2019, the U.S. embassy in Beijing hosted an event to mark 40 years of U.S.-Chinese relations. U.S. officials had planned to highlight public health cooperation—widely regarded as a success story in a sometimes tumultuous bilateral relationship—and several Chinese public health officials were slated to speak. But 24 hours before the event, amid rising trade tensions, all the Chinese officials canceled. It was a harbinger of things to come.

When COVID-19 hit, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintained near-absolute secrecy. All channels of communication between Beijing and Washington went silent, as they did between Beijing and other governments. Chinese leaders sought to conceal vital information about the emerging epidemic in China from the rest of the world, even attempting to prevent Chinese scientists from sharing the genetic sequence of the virus with scientists in other countries. (A Chinese scientist deliberately disobeyed the order and collaborated with an Australian counterpart.) Beijing also pushed the WHO not to declare the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern,” an official designation that would have required a coordinated international response, and not to support or even remain neutral on placing travel restrictions on China. 

What COVID-19 has made powerfully clear is that this is an age of transnational threats and great-power competition.

The Chinese government’s actions put the WHO in a difficult position and constrained its choices. During the SARS epidemic, Gro Brundtland, the director general of the WHO, called out the Chinese government for covering up the outbreak and refusing to cooperate fully with the international community. The strategy helped persuade Beijing to shift course and eventually to engage with the WHO. The United States had hoped the WHO would use the same playbook with COVID-19 and publicly criticize—or at least refuse to praise—Beijing for withholding cooperation. 

But senior WHO officials believed that Chinese President Xi Jinping was more dictatorial and less susceptible to outside pressure than his predecessors. If they tried to call him out, he was likely to shut them out completely. WHO officials also believed that working with China offered the only hope of stopping the virus. If that required publicly flattering Beijing, then so be it—a calculation that put the WHO on a collision course with the United States. 

It is impossible to say for certain why the Chinese government behaved the way it did, but secrecy and control make sense in light of what the vast majority of China experts believe to be Xi’s top priority: regime survival. Xi did not want to facilitate an international response to COVID-19 that could have attributed blame to China or isolated it through travel restrictions, either of which might have damaged the regime’s domestic legitimacy. Instead, Xi leveraged the pandemic to his advantage: China’s suppression of the virus became a matter of national pride, held up by Beijing in sharp contrast to the experience of the United States. 

Once it had controlled the virus at home, China became more assertive in its foreign policy. It linked pandemic assistance and, later, access to its vaccine to public praise for China and to favorable policy choices, such as participation in the health component of its Belt and Road Initiative. It also retaliated against Australia for seeking an international investigation into the origins of COVID-19. As the world reeled from the pandemic, China imposed a draconian national security law on Hong Kong, provoked a deadly border spat with India, and engaged in combative “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy around the world—aggressively responding to criticism, including by peddling falsehoods and disinformation. For China’s leaders, the pandemic revealed the inexorable decline of the West, confirmed Beijing’s power and capabilities, and created more latitude for the CCP to do as it wished.

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THOMAS WRIGHT is Director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution.

Para acessar a íntegra:

 

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-08-24/center-cannot-hold

O fracasso do Brics como ideia e como resultados práticos - Jim O'Neill (The Telegraph)

 Will the BRICS Ever Grow Up?

In the two decades since Brazil, Russia, India, and China were recognized for their unique growth potential, they, along with South Africa, have so far proven incapable of uniting as a meaningful global force. This comes at the expense not only of the bloc, but of better global governance as well.

Jim O’Neill

The Telegraph, Londres – 16.9.2021

 

 Having created the BRIC acronym to capture the collective potential of Brazil, Russia, India, and China to influence the world economy, I now must ask a rather awkward question: When is that influence going to show up? Given today’s global challenges and the enormous issues facing the BRICS (which subsequently became a real-world entity and was expanded in 2010 to include South Africa), the bloc’s ongoing failure to develop substantive policies through its annual summitry has become increasingly glaring.

This November will be the 20th anniversary of the BRIC acronym, which I first used in a 2001 Goldman Sachs paper entitled “Building Better Global Economic BRICs.” At the time, I offered four scenarios for how each country could develop over the next decade, and made the case for why global governance needed to become more representative and include these four rising powers.

That paper was followed by a series of others, starting in 2003, which showed how China’s economy could become as large as the US economy (in nominal dollar terms) by 2040; how India could surpass Japan to become the third-largest economy soon thereafter; and how the BRIC economies together could grow larger than the G6 (the G7 minus Canada).

But the bloc’s economic trajectory since 2001 has been a mixed bag. While the first decade was a roaring success for all four countries, with each surpassing all four scenarios that I originally outlined, the second decade was less kind to Brazil and Russia, whose respective shares of global GDP have now fallen back to where they were 20 years ago.

If it weren’t for China – and India, to some degree – there wouldn’t be much of a BRIC story to tell. Yet, notwithstanding the difficulties the BRICs have faced, China’s growth alone is on track to lift the technical aggregate of all four economies to match the size of the G6.

In terms of global governance, the only notable shift over the past two decades has been the rise of the G20 since it took center stage in the response to the 2008 global financial crisis. Representing the world’s 20 largest economies, the organization seemed immensely powerful at the time, and it managed to implement policies of potentially lasting importance. But since then, it has generally been a disappointment, saying much but achieving very little.

With the world on track to reach 1.5°C of planetary warming by 2040, the Paris agreement’s preferred climate scenarios are slipping out of reach. Countries, cities, businesses, and financial institutions must move quickly to address the increasingly urgent climate adaptation and mitigation challenges. At Building the Green Consensus, distinguished speakers will explore how new regulatory frameworks and public finance can be used to accelerate private-sector investment in the green transition. 

For their part, the BRICs held their first annual meeting as a political club in 2009, in Russia (the first to include South Africa took place in China in 2011). And this year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted the BRICS leaders (virtually) for their 13th summit. Every leader made bold statements about what they had supposedly achieved together, and all discussed avenues for future cooperation. Yet they have accomplished very little; lofty statements are usually accompanied by only scant policy moves.

Nothing in the bloc’s latest joint declaration suggests that anything has changed. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the attention this year has been on security and terrorism. After all, recent developments in Afghanistan will have serious, direct implications for Russia, India, and China. But this singular focus is disappointing nonetheless, because it highlights the group’s limited joint ambitions.

Modi would seem to agree, saying, “We need to ensure that the BRICS are more productive in the next 15 years.” Beyond creating the BRICS Bank, now known as the New Development Bank, it is difficult to see what the group has done other than meet annually.

Following the bloc’s rather dismal second decade, there are many things that BRICS leaders could do collectively to help revive the kind of economic gains made in the first decade, all of which would be good for the rest of the world, too. In doing so, they could create a much stronger impression of their usefulness alongside the G20, strengthening the case for more substantive reforms to global governance.

For starters, the BRICS need to strengthen trade between themselves. China and India could both gain enormously from a more open and ambitious trading relationship, which would redound to the benefit of the rest of the region, the other BRICS, and the world. In fact, more India-China trade alone would visibly boost global trade.

Moreover, while the BRICS have little in common other than large populations, they also share a significant exposure to infectious diseases. The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance that I led in 2014-16 showed that all of the BRICS were worryingly vulnerable to drug-resistant tuberculosis. And as COVID-19 has shown, most have health systems that are poorly equipped to deal with pandemics. Unless they treat global infectious diseases more seriously, they will never be able to reach their economic potential.

Since the fall of 2020, I have had the privilege of serving on the World Health Organization’s independent Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development, which is chaired by former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti. One crucial proposal from our initial Call to Action this past spring, now outlined in detail in our final report, is to establish a Global Health and Finance Board under the auspices of the G20. The reasoning is simple: unless we place global health challenges at the heart of regular economic and financial dialogue, we will remain ill prepared for them. And as the pandemic has shown, global health challenges are also economic and political challenges.

This proposal already has the support of several key governments, notably those of the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy, and the European Union. Yet for reasons I fail to understand, the BRICS, especially China, seem to be opposed to it. Such resistance makes no sense and will have dire consequences for the rest of the world. It gives me and other longtime champions even more reason to doubt the group’s collective potential. (P.S.)

 

Jim O’Neill, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a former UK treasury minister, is a member of the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development.

The United States of Sanctions - Daniel W. Drezner (Foreign Affairs)

The United States of Sanctions

The Use and Abuse of Economic Coercion

Daniel W. Drezner

Foreign Affairs, Nova York – 16/09/2021

 

In theory, superpowers should possess a range of foreign policy tools: military might, cultural cachet, diplomatic persuasion, technological prowess, economic aid, and so on. But to anyone paying attention to U.S. foreign policy for the past decade, it has become obvious that the United States relies on one tool above all: economic sanctions.

Sanctions—measures taken by one country to disrupt economic exchange with another—have become the go-to solution for nearly every foreign policy problem. During President Barack Obama’s first term, the United States designated an average of 500 entities for sanctions per year for reasons ranging from human rights abuses to nuclear proliferation to violations of territorial sovereignty. That figure nearly doubled over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency. President Joe Biden, in his first few months in office, imposed new sanctions against Myanmar (for its coup), Nicaragua (for its crackdown), and Russia (for its hacking). He has not fundamentally altered any of the Trump administration’s sanctions programs beyond lifting those against the International Criminal Court. To punish Saudi Arabia for the murder of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi, the Biden administration sanctioned certain Saudi officials, and yet human rights activists wanted more.Activists have also clamored for sanctions on China for its persecution of the Uyghurs, on Hungary for its democratic backsliding, and on Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. 

This reliance on economic sanctions would be natural if they were especially effective at getting other countries to do what Washington wants, but they’re not. The most generous academic estimate of sanctions’ efficacy—a 2014 study relying on a data set maintained by the University of North Carolina—found that, at best, sanctions lead to concessions between one-third and one-half of the time. A 2019 Government Accountability Office study concluded that not even the federal government was necessarily aware when sanctions were working. Officials at the Treasury, State, and Commerce Departments, the report noted, “stated they do not conduct agency assessments of the effectiveness of sanctions in achieving broader U.S. policy goals.” 

The truth is that Washington’s fixation with sanctions has little to do with their efficacy and everything to do with something else: American decline. No longer an unchallenged superpower, the United States can’t throw its weight around the way it used to. In relative terms, its military power and diplomatic influence have declined. Two decades of war, recession, polarization, and now a pandemic have dented American power. Frustrated U.S. presidents are left with fewer arrows in their quiver, and they are quick to reach for the easy, available tool of sanctions.

The problem, however, is that sanctions are hardly cost free. They strain relations with allies, antagonize adversaries, and impose economic hardship on innocent civilians.Thus, sanctions not only reveal American decline but accelerate it, too. To make matters worse, the tool is growing duller by the year. Future sanctions are likely to be even less effective as China and Russia happily swoop in to rescue targeted actors and as U.S. allies and partners tire of the repeated application of economic pressure. Together, these developments will render the U.S. dollar less central to global finance, reducing the effect of sanctions that rely on that dominance. 

Washington should use sanctions surgically and sparingly. Under a more disciplined approach to economic statecraft, officials would clarify the goal of a particular measure and the criteria for repealing it. But most important, they would remember that there are other tools at their disposal. Sanctions are a specialized instrument best deployed in controlled circumstances, not an all-purpose tool for everyday use. Policymakers should treat them like a scalpel, not a Swiss Army knife. 

 

A HISTORY OF ECONOMIC VIOLENCE

 

Economic statecraft has been a vital component of U.S. diplomacy since the early days of the republic. As president, Thomas Jefferson urged passage of the Embargo Act of 1807 to punish the United Kingdom and Napoleonic France for harassing U.S. ships. That effort at sanctions was a disaster. Back in the day, the United States needed European markets far more than the United Kingdom and France needed a fledgling country in the New World; the Embargo Act cost the United States far more than it did the European great powers. Even so, the United States continued to use trade as its main foreign policy tool, focusing on prying open foreign markets for export and promoting foreign investment at home. This was only natural given the paltry size of the U.S. military for most of the nineteenth century. The preeminence of the British pound in global finance also meant that the U.S. dollar was not an important currency. Trade was the primary way the United States conducted diplomacy. 

At the end of World War I, the United States renewed its enthusiasm for trade sanctions as a means of regulating world politics. President Woodrow Wilson urged Americans to support the League of Nations by arguing that its power to sanction would act as a substitute for war. “A nation boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender,” he said in 1919. “Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy.” Americans were unconvinced, and the United States never joined the League of Nations. In the end, sanctions imposed by the league failed to deter Italy from invading Ethiopia in 1935 or stop any other act of belligerence that led to World War II. To the contrary, the U.S. embargo on fuel and other war materials going to Japan helped precipitate the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Policymakers should treat sanctions like a scalpel, not a Swiss Army knife. 

The advent of the Cold War expanded the array of tools of economic statecraft available to the United States. For the first time, the country supplied a significant amount of multilateral and bilateral foreign aid; stopping that aid was an easy way of applying economic pressure. The United States’ most successful use of economic sanctions in this period came during the 1956 Suez crisis. Outraged by the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, Washington prevented the United Kingdom from drawing down its International Monetary Fund reserves to defend its currency. The subsequent run on the pound forced London to withdraw its troops.

Most of the time, however, U.S. sanctions failed. In the early years of the Cold War, the United States embargoed Soviet allies to deny them access to vital resources and technologies. That embargo succeeded as an act of containment. But sanctions designed to compel changes in behavior had little bite, since the Soviet Union simply stepped in to offer economic support to the targeted economies. In the early 1960s, for example, as the United States tightened its embargo on exports to Cuba, the Soviets threw Fidel Castro’s regime an economic lifeline by channeling massive amounts of aid to Havana. Later in the Cold War, the United States used economic sanctions to pressure allies and adversaries alike to improve their human rights records. Beyond the rare success of sanctioning a close ally, economic pressure worked only when it came from a broad multilateral coalition, such as the UN sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa.

The end of the Cold War brought an initial burst of hope about sanctions. With the Soviets no longer automatically vetoing UN Security Council resolutions, it seemed possible that multilateral trade sanctions could replace war, just as Wilson had dreamed. Reality quickly proved otherwise. In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Security Council imposed a comprehensive trade embargo on Iraq. These crushing sanctions cut the country’s GDP in half. They were nonetheless unable to compel Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait; it took the Gulf War to accomplish that. Sanctions against Iraq continued after the war, but the humanitarian costs were staggering: infant mortality rates were widely viewed to have skyrocketed, and per capita income remained stagnant for 15 years. Iraq manipulated figures to exaggerate the humanitarian costs of the sanctions, but the deception worked. Policymakers came to believe that trade sanctions were a blunt instrument that harmed ordinary civilians rather than the elites whose behavior they were intended to alter. So they searched for smarter sanctions that could hit a regime’s ruling coalition.

The centrality of the U.S. dollar seemed to offer a way of doing just that. Beginning in the late 1990s and accelerating after 9/11, the United States made it harder for any financial institution to engage in dollar transactions with sanctioned governments, companies, or people. U.S. and foreign banks need access to U.S. dollars in order to function; even the implicit threat of being denied such access has made most banks in the world reluctant to work with sanctioned entities, effectively expelling them from the global financial system.

These sanctions have proved more potent. Whereas restrictions on trade incentivize private-sector actors to resort to black-market operations, the opposite dynamic is at play with measures concerning dollar transactions. Because financial institutions care about their global reputation and wish to stay in the good graces of U.S. regulators, they tend to comply eagerly with sanctions and even preemptively dump clients seen as too risky. In 2005, when the United States designated the Macao-based bank Banco Delta Asia as a money-laundering concern working on behalf of North Korea, even Chinese banks responded with alacrity to limit their exposure. 

As U.S. sanctions grew more powerful, they scored some notable wins. The George W. Bush administration cracked down on terrorist financing and money laundering, as governments bent over backward to retain their access to the U.S. financial system. The Obama administration amped up sanctions against Iran, which drove the country to negotiate a deal restricting its nuclear program in return for the lifting of some sanctions. The Trump administration threatened to raise tariffs and shut down the U.S.-Mexican border to compel Mexico to interdict Central American migrants; in response, the Mexican government deployed its new National Guard to restrict the flow.

 

(……………………………………………………………………………)

 

Yet for every success, there were more failures. The United States has imposed decades-long sanctions on Belarus, Cuba, Russia, Syria, and Zimbabwe with little to show in the way of tangible results. The Trump administration ratcheted up U.S. economic pressure against Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela as part of its “maximum pressure” campaigns to block even minor evasions of economic restrictions. The efforts also relied on what are known as “secondary sanctions,” whereby third-party countries and companies are threatened with economic coercion if they do not agree to participate in sanctioning the initial target. In every case, the target suffered severe economic costs yet made no concessions. Not even Venezuela, a bankrupt socialist state experiencing hyperinflation in the United States’ backyard, acquiesced.

Sanctions cannot and will not go away anytime soon. Other great powers, such as China and Russia, are becoming increasingly active sanctioners. China has used an array of informal measures to punish Japan, Norway, South Korea, and even the National Basketball Association over the past decade; Russia sanctioned former Soviet republics to deter them from joining an EU initiative in eastern Europe. Aspiring great powers, such as Saudi Arabia, have also tried their hand at economic coercion. There will be more sanctions in the future, not fewer. 

But that doesn’t mean the United States has to be part of the problem. Even the countries now discovering sanctions still rely on them for only a fraction of their foreign policy goals; they also sign trade deals, engage in cultural diplomacy, and dole out foreign aid to win friends and influence countries. So did the United States once. Washington needs to exercise the policy muscles it has let atrophy, lest a statecraft gap emerge between it and other governments. U.S. policymakers have become so sanctions-happy that they have blinded themselves to the long-term costs of this tool. To compete with the other great powers, the United States needs to remind the world that it is more than a one-trick pony.

 

DANIEL W. DREZNER is Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

 

Para acessar a íntegra: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-08-24/united-states-sanctions

 

Countering Chinese Industrial Policy Is Counterproductive - Chang-Tai Hsieh (Strait Times)

Countering Chinese Industrial Policy Is Counterproductive

The United States’ real business-related challenge vis-à-vis China is the tradeoff between national security and the benefits of economic exchange, not China’s support for state-owned firms or its industrial subsidies. And the worst thing America could do is to enact industrial policies of its own

Chang-Tai Hsieh

  Straits Times, Singapura – 16/09/2021

 

Chicago – US political leaders have long tried to counter Chinese industrial policy. And now they seem to have decided that the best way to do that is to emulate it. But their agenda betrays a profound lack of understanding of the unique challenge posed by China’s coupling of an authoritarian political regime with a dynamic market economy.

Millions of Chinese firms, including some of the world’s most innovative, are occasionally asked to serve the regime’s political objectives – an unprecedented marriage of pioneering private companies and a Leninist one-party state. Western countries cannot match it, and should not begin to try. But much of the US economic policy response to China is misdirected.

For example, the United States wants to curtail China’s support for state-owned firms, despite the overwhelming evidence that such assistance starves private Chinese businesses of resources. The real challenge to America comes from private companies such as Huawei and Alibaba, which produce goods that US consumers eagerly buy. It does not come from state-owned firms like aircraft manufacturer COMAC, which has never made a profit and, more important, has prevented the emergence of a private-sector Chinese equivalent of Boeing.

In fact, the private firms that now dominate the Chinese economy took off only after former Premier Zhu Rongji closed or privatized hundreds of thousands of state-owned companies in the early 2000s. The closures released capital to private firms and cleared the way for them to grow. Does anyone seriously believe that the Chinese economy would be stronger if policymakers were to undo Zhu’s reforms and revive all the old loss-making state enterprises?

Or consider the US obsession with the Chinese government’s so-called “Made in China 2025” plan, which channels subsidies to private firms in “strategic” sectors such as semiconductors. The jury is still out on whether the billions of renminbi spent to support such industries will prove effective, but the evidence so far is not encouraging.

The dominant global semiconductor manufacturer is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, not the Chinese champion Shanghai Semiconductor. And until now, the huge sums that China has plowed into this sector have resulted in spectacular failures such as the Hongxin Semiconductor, and the emergence of close to 60,000 new companies that have no technological expertise but are seeking to capitalize on the subsidies. Such outcomes are all too common when governments subsidize industrial sectors, perhaps owing simply to a lack of accountability. After all, who is held responsible when billions have been wasted and the officials who allocated the funds have moved on to other posts?

The growth of China’s business sector has been fueled not by support for state-owned firms or industrial policy, but by powerful local governments’ backing of private firms – including Hyundai in Beijing, and Tesla and General Motors in Shanghai. “The commercial goal of selling more GM Buicks and Chevrolets in China becomes a political and economic campaign to enhance the power and might of the city of Shanghai,” says one long-time observer of the car industry in China. “Think of it as Shanghai Inc., with the mayor as the chairman and CEO.”

The support of local governments is particularly crucial for private Chinese firms. For example, the East Hope Group became the largest private aluminum producer in China with the support of the small city of Sanmenxia in Henan Province, despite the fierce opposition of the state-owned giant Chinalco.

Chinese local governments also compete ferociously with each other to attract business – a crucial factor in allowing private firms to grow. This reflects the rivalry between the Communist Party of China’s powerful local secretaries, many of whom eventually become members of the CPC’s Politburo. In contrast, the central government ministers who run industrial policy and state-owned firms almost never make it into the party’s top tiers.

If the US forces China to dismantle its support for state-owned firms and roll back its industrial policy, it would succeed only in removing the shackles on the private sector, making it more likely that other innovative private companies, supported by local party secretaries, would emerge to challenge US businesses. Although US consumers would benefit, these Chinese firms – regardless of their intentions – have no choice but to comply when asked to advance the CPC’s political goals.

But US strategy instead seems focused on emulating the worst aspects of Chinese industrial policy. One example is the Facilitating American-Built Semiconductors Act, recently introduced in Congress, which would provide investment tax credits to US chip manufacturers. This follows the US Senate’s approval in June of a $52 billion investment in the sector as part of the US Innovation and Competition Act.

It is easy to understand why the US semiconductor industry would welcome the $52 billion. But besides the questionable equity of subsidizing wealthy US firms that use chips, the measure will produce the same result as the billions that China has poured into semiconductors. It will spawn companies that specialize in obtaining free money instead of investing in new technologies and products, causing the US semiconductor industry to fall further behind the leading global players.

So, what should America do instead? Late in his life, the twentieth-century US diplomat George F. Kennan said that “the best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian.” His advice also applies to US policy toward China today, with the added complication that the current authoritarian superpower also has a market economy.

The real business-related challenge the US faces vis-à-vis China is the tradeoff between national security and the benefits of economic exchange, not China’s support for state-owned firms or its industrial subsidies. And the worst thing America could do is to enact industrial policies of its own. (P.S,)

 

 Chang-Tai Hsieh is Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

 

Menos Marx, mais Mises - Luiz Alberto Machado (resenha de livro)

Menos Marx, mais Mises 

 Luiz Alberto Machado, economista e colaborador do Espaço Democrático

Espaço Democrático, 15/09/2021 

https://espacodemocratico.org.br/artigos/menos-marx-mais-mises/

Em 2015, por ocasião das gigantescas manifestações que precederam o impeachment da presidente Dilma Rousseff, escrevi um artigo neste mesmo espaço com o objetivo de esclarecer o significado de um cartaz com os dizeres do título acima, exibido por manifestantes na avenida Paulista, que foi focalizado repetidas vezes pelas câmeras das emissoras de televisão que cobriram o evento.

Volto ao tema agora para comentar o recém-lançado “Menos Marx, mais Mises”, de autoria da cientista política Camila Rocha (Editora Todavia, 2021)¹.

No livro, que tem por subtítulo O liberalismo e a nova direita no Brasil, a autora faz uma radiografia do liberalismo brasileiro, tomando por base o papel desempenhado, primeiramente, pelos think tanks e personagens que foram protagonistas nas décadas de 1960, 1970, 1980 e 1990 e, num segundo momento, pelas redes sociais e movimentos da sociedade civil nas primeiras décadas do século 21.

Camila Rocha, que faz questão de declarar-se de esquerda, consegue tratar a questão sem se deixar levar pela preferência ideológica, muito comum em obras dessa natureza.

O livro teve origem na tese de doutorado em ciência política pela Universidade de São Paulo, laureada com os prêmios de melhor tese de doutorado da Associação Brasileira de Ciência Política e de Tese de Destaque USP na área de Ciências Humanas.

Na pesquisa que fundamentou sua tese, Camila entrevistou, entre 2015 e 2018, dezenas de nomes representativos das diversas tendências do pensamento e das instituições liberais², chegando mesmo a morar por alguns meses no Rio de Janeiro, com o objetivo de fazer pesquisas na sede do Instituto Liberal do Rio de Janeiro.

No capítulo inicial, Camila explora aspectos semânticos relacionados à expressão direita, por reconhecer que “é muito comum entre analistas políticos o uso de expressões como ‘direita radical’ ou ‘extrema direita’ para se referir ao fenômeno da nova direita brasileira”. Nessa exploração, a autora recorre ao cientista político britânico Michael Freeden para esclarecer o significado de ideologias políticas. Para Freeden, “as ideologias políticas seriam um conjunto de ideias, crenças, opiniões e valores que: 1) possui um padrão recorrente; 2) é sustentado por grupos relevantes; 3) é utilizado nas disputas em torno da adoção de planos para políticas públicas; e 4) procura justificar, contestar ou mudar arranjos sociais e econômicos”. Desse modo, conclui, “as ideologias políticas possuiriam uma relação estreita com a prática política, permeando conflitos que se dão na esfera pública em torno do desenho de amplos programas que dizem respeito a políticas sociais e econômicas”.

Na parte final deste capítulo, Camila enfatiza a importância dos think tanks para a disseminação da defesa do livre mercado, mencionando alguns exemplos que obtiveram notoriedade tanto no Brasil como no exterior, entre os quais o Institute of Economic Affairs, na Inglaterra, a Foundation for Economic Education, nos Estados Unidos, e o Instituto Liberal, no Brasil.

O tema será retomado e aprofundado no segundo capítulo, em que a autora mergulha na ação dos principais think tanksbrasileiros nas quatro últimas décadas do século XX, procurando mostrar a influência das ideias do economista austríaco Friedrich Hayek, principal idealizador, em 1947, da Sociedade Mont Pèlerin, que até hoje reúne, sistematicamente, representantes das diversas tendências do pensamento liberal do mundo inteiro.

Entre os think tanks citados por Camila, destaque para o Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais (IPES), fundado em 1961, em São Paulo; a Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura – Convívio, também de São Paulo; a Câmara de Estudos e Debates Econômicos e Sociais (Cedes), que reunia relevantes empresários brasileiros; o Instituto Liberal, fundado em 1983, no Rio de Janeiro, pelo empresário Donald Stewart Jr., mas que teve filiais em nove Estados do Brasil; o Instituto de Estudos Empresarias, fundado no Rio Grande do Sul pelos irmãos William e Winston Ling; e o Instituto Atlântico, fundado em 1992, no Rio de Janeiro, por antigos membros de Cedes liderados pelo economista Paulo Rabello de Castro, que se uniram ao empresário carioca Thomaz Magalhães. Em diferentes momentos os referidos think tanks conseguiram exercer – em maior ou menor grau – o papel a que se propunham na defesa do livre mercado, até entrarem em decadência com a chegada ao poder do Partido dos Trabalhadores e o progressivo afastamento dos principais financiadores dessas instituições.

Se a preocupação central dos think tanks focalizados no segundo capítulo era o combate ao comunismo, a dos think tankse dos movimentos da sociedade civil surgidos a partir do início do século XXI e identificados à nova direita passou a ser o combate à hegemonia cultural esquerdista, principal aspecto examinado por Camila no terceiro capítulo, no qual cinco fatores, em minha opinião, merecem destaque especial.

O primeiro diz respeito à importância de Ludwig von Mises, também da Escola Austríaca de Pensamento Econômico, apontado por Camila como principal referência teórica da nova direita. Autor, entre outras obras, do clássico Ação humana³, Mises dá nome ao principal think tank liberal surgido neste século no País, ao lado do Instituto Millenium.

O segundo fator que merece destaque é a unificação dos diversos grupos da chamada nova direita em torno do combate à hegemonia cultural esquerdista que passou a vigorar desde a redemocratização e que é representada pelo pacto democrático de 1988, cujo símbolo maior é a Constituição Cidadã, responsável, de acordo com a visão da nova direita, pelo maior grau de intervenção do Estado na economia e pela proliferação exagerada dos direitos sociais.

O terceiro fator reside na relevância do filósofo Olavo de Carvalho em especial no referido combate à hegemonia cultural esquerdista. Embora sofra diversas restrições por sua postura e seus pronunciamentos não democráticos, Olavo de Carvalho conseguiu incutir na cabeça de Jair Bolsonaro e seus três filhos a ideia da necessidade de combater violentamente a influência da esquerda nos meios culturais e educacionais, bom como nos meios de comunicação.

O quarto refere-se ao forte impacto das redes sociais, começando pelo Orkut e continuando com o Facebook, Instagram e Twitter, não só para a reunião de simpatizantes da defesa do livre mercado e das ideias liberais, mas também, numa etapa posterior, para a convocação de seguidores para manifestações populares e campanhas políticas, como ficou evidenciado na eleição de Jair Bolsonaro.

O quinto, por fim, pode ser associado ao surgimento de movimentos da sociedade civil que proliferaram a partir da descoberta e ampla divulgação dos casos de corrupção durante os governos do PT, como foram os que se tornaram conhecidos como mensalão e petrolão. Ainda que com pautas diferentes, surgiram na esteira desses casos movimentos como o Vem Pra Rua, os Revoltados On-line e o Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL), dos quais saíram candidatos nas últimas eleições de partidos defensores da bandeira do livre mercado, como o Novo e o Partido Social Liberal (PSL).

Mesmo reconhecendo a excelência da pesquisa realizada por Camila Rocha e a qualidade do livro Menos Marx, mais Mises, reservo-me o direito de fazer uma ressalva. A meu juízo, ela não conseguiu deixar suficientemente clara a diferença entre direita, conservadorismo e liberalismo, nem entre as diversas ramificações do pensamento liberal.

Apesar dessa ressalva, concordo com suas conclusões citadas por José Fucs na resenha publicada no jornal O Estado de S. Paulo (21 de agosto de 2021): “Embora a maior parte da nova direita tenha apoiado a eleição de Bolsonaro e defenda, como ele, o rompimento do ‘pacto de 88’, o movimento representa um fenômeno diferente do bolsonarismo. É o que mostra o afastamento de grupos que se alinharam a Bolsonaro em 2018. Por isso, independentemente do rumo do governo, a nova direita veio para ficar”.

 

1 Tema por mim comentado na reunião do Espaço Democrático do dia 14 de setembro.

2 Um dos entrevistados pela autora foi o filósofo e historiador Antonio Paim, colaborador do Espaço Democrático, falecido em maio deste ano.

3 MISES, Ludwig von. Ação humana – Um tratado de Economia. Tradução de Donald Stewart Jr. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Liberal, 1990.

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Fiz um grande comentário a esta resenha e à questão, mas o sistema, infelizmente, parecer ter deglutido meu comentário.

Farei um outro, quando ler o livro. (PRA)

Felicidades ao povo judeu no Yom Kippur - Carmen Licia Palazzo e Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 Mensagem de Carmen Lícia Palazzo a propósito do Yom Kippur, seguida de meus próprios cumprimentos:

Hoje, 15 de setembro 2021, Yom Kippur. Com essa arte de "Downstar Studios" envio a todos os meus amigos da comunidade judaica, mas também para todos nós, luz e amor em tempos que pedem muita reflexão sobre nossos pensamentos e atos, sobre a VIDA!

Carmen Lícia Palazzo

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Felicidades ao grande pequeno povo que representa a continuidades das melhores tradições humanas, e humanisticas, no prrocesso civilizatório. Com exceção da China, nenhum outro povo conseguiu sustentar tal continuidade cultural, civilizatória, durante milhares de anos. Um feito e tanto na breve história de dez mil anos da humanidade tal como a conhecemos. Um grande feito. Na escala civilizatória, poucos povos, como o judaico e o chinês, conseguiram produzir tantas contribuições benéficas para a história humana quanto esses dois, o judaico em primeiro lugar, pela reduzida dimensão demográfica de seu povo e cultura e pelo pouco, ou nenhum poderio, que exerceram sobre outros povos e civilizações, pois nunca constituiram um império universal (a não ser o do conhecimento e o da perspectiva humanística). Parabéns!

Paulo Roberto de Almeida