Trump’s Foreign Policy Agenda Must Start By Undoing Four Years Of Global Insolvency

American resources are limited. We must address the greatest threats from large, powerful countries like China first, then everyone else.

Justin Logan reporting for The Federalist 

As the second Trump administration prepares to take office, it faces a full slate of foreign policy crises and a limited capacity for dealing with them. For decades, U.S. foreign policy has been led by people who saw a world without tradeoffs. There was no need for prioritization, either among foreign policy goals or between domestic and foreign projects. America could have more guns and more butter, forever.

Even at the height of the unipolar moment, tradeoffs still existed, but now they are back with a vengeance. The Trump administration will have to deal with insolvency in its foreign policy, both in terms of material resources, as well as its attention. Strategy is about prioritization among various objectives and applying resources commensurately. The D.C. foreign policy establishment is bad at strategy.

In his 1943 book, US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, Walter Lippmann famously worried about the alignment of American ends and means. Solvency, Lippmann wrote, was achieved when “our power [was] adequate to our commitments.” Still, it was not merely balance that policy should seek, but “a comfortable surplus of power in reserve.”

Can anyone with a straight face argue that U.S. foreign policy is, at present, solvent? Much less that we have a comfortable surplus of power in reserve?

The questions answer themselves.

Since President Trump left office in 2021, the People’s Republic of China has eroded the U.S. military advantage each year. In Europe, U.S. policymakers deploy tumid prose to argue that unless Ukraine is capable of defeating Russia (it is not), Americans cannot be safe. For its part, Israel has consumed roughly $18 billion in U.S. military aid for its wars in Gaza and Lebanon. All this while Washington spends more than a trillion dollars per year on defense programs.

There is no slack capacity to draw from. The national debt is $35 trillion and growing. The Congress is racking up budget deficits in excess of $1.5 trillion each year. Unsurprisingly, forward-looking budget projections are absolutely dismal. With Medicare, Social Security, and interest on the debt largely off the table to close the gap, defense hawks have no stash of money into which they can tap.

Unfortunately, the insolvency of America’s allies and partners is, if anything, even larger. Taiwan, which faces arguably the worst threat environment on earth, spends a piddling 2.5 percent of its own GDP on defense, piling its insolvency on top of ours. U.S. policymakers have made matters worse by not prioritizing the provision of weapons to the island. Taipei is still waiting for roughly $20 billion of U.S. weapons it has purchased but not yet received, but the Biden administration made clear in June that its priority for weapons transfers was Ukraine, not Taiwan. As Biden put it, other recipients are “going to have to wait. Everything we have is going to go to Ukraine until their needs are met.”

Despite this, Ukraine is presently losing its war, and our European allies are also insolvent. Drawing on a tradition four generations old, European capitals have chosen to rely on our largesse rather than defend themselves. Since Trump’s election, some European leaders have made the right noises, such as France’s Emmanuel Macron, who observed that Trump “was elected by the American people, and he’s going to defend the interests of the American people — that’s legitimate and a good thing. The question is, are we ready to defend the interests of Europeans?”

The fact that the division of labor in Europe — and the answer to Macron’s question — is unclear is particularly perverse because Europe is the theater in which actual U.S. interests have largely been achieved. If any progress is going to be made toward American solvency, the new Trump administration must force Europeans to grow up and lead on their own security.

Existing efforts to grapple with insolvency have been disheartening. For its part, Congress appointed a commission to examine the resourcing of the National Defense Strategy. The commission held U.S. foreign policy constant, while admitting the strategy was insolvent. It recommended that Congress should fund huge increases in defense spending through “additional taxes and reforms to entitlement spending.” Congress asking to be told to raise taxes and cut entitlements to pay for hundreds of billions more in defense spending is a new level of cynicism, even for Congress.

Other hawks assume away tradeoffs altogether. AEI foreign policy chief Kori Schake, who has marketed herself as a Trump Whisperer, argues that the historic U.S. debt and deficits should not limit defense spending, since “Washington devised emergency spending mechanisms during the financial crisis and the pandemic” and the administration can fund a massive increase in defense spending with “growth-friendly policies on taxes and regulation.”

This is magical thinking. The trillions in additional spending during the financial crisis and pandemic helped bring us to the national debt that exists, and constrains us, today. Were there growth-friendly policies lying around that could forestall a reckoning, policymakers would have used them already.

There is one tribe of foreign policy thinkers on the right that doesn’t assume away tradeoffs or the need for strategy. Often referred to as “Prioritizers,” these analysts argue that American resources are limited, and the greatest threats to the United States emanate from large, powerful countries, which in practice has meant “China, then everyone else.” 

Referring to strategists who focus on material tradeoffs and great power competition should be like referring to economists who focus on supply and demand. The fact that it is treated as an innovation shows how poor the DC foreign policy consensus is.

American foreign policy is insolvent. So are those of its allies. The early indications on Trump’s foreign policy appointments are good: reflexive hawks like Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley have been sent to exile. For the sake of the country, we should all be rooting for the Prioritizers to carry the day.

Line-Item Veto Would Be a More Enduring Tool With Which To Cut Waste Than Trump’s Government Efficiency Department

 Presidents of both parties have since before the Civil War sought a line-item veto to enable them to end individual parts of a spending bill without rejecting the entire thing.

President Trump is appointing two businessmen, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. Its goal is to cut wasteful spending. Rather than adding a new bureaucracy to shrink the existing one, though, why not go for a line-item veto as the more constitutionally logical  solution — one that would ensure that the goal of fiscal responsibility endures long after Trump’s term expires.

A statement by the Trump-Vance Transition team stated on Tuesday that Messers. Musk and Ramaswamy will “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.” Their goal is to “drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout” the $6.5 trillion, or so, that the federal government is spending a year.

The statement said that the new department aims to “make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘We the people.’” However, their “work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026,” the 250th anniversary of American independence. It’s a lofty goal, but whatever they accomplish can be undone by subsequent administrations and congresses absent a permanent tool to curtail future expansion.

Presidents of both parties have sought a line-item veto since before the Civil War, enabling them to kill individual parts of a spending bill without rejecting the entire thing. It would empower chief executives to eliminate regulations and wasteful spending, such as earmarks individual members of Congress add to legislation, which contribute to the expanding federal government and national debt.

“The natural progress of things,” President Jefferson said, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” To combat this trend, 44 states — all except Indiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Vermont — give their governors some form of a line-item veto. It also helps them obey laws requiring balanced budgets, which all states have except Vermont.

In January of 1938, the Senate Appropriations Committee denied President Franklin Roosevelt’s request for an “item veto” after the House of Representatives approved it. The senate then added over $1.4 million — $32 million today — to the appropriations bill that passed the House, demonstrating the scope of spending the president might have restrained.

In his 1984 State of the Union address, President Reagan asked for a line-item veto, too. “I’ll make the cut,” he said. “I’ll take the heat.” In 1995, President Clinton made the same pitch in his State of the Union. The Republican-controlled Congress, elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility similar to Trump’s, agreed and passed the Line-Item Veto Act of 1996 to kill “pork barrel spending.”

Mr. Clinton used the line-item veto to slash 82 items from the budget. That amounted to $1.2 billion in federal spending while Congress overrode vetoes — by super majorities of two-thirds — that would have saved $287 million more. These were small bits of the $1.6 trillion total budget, but as Senator Everett Dirkson said, “a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking real money.”

In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled six to three in Clinton v. City of New York that the new law was unconstitutional. “Writing for the majority,” the Wall Street Journal reported, Justice John Paul Stevens all but apologized.” He wrote that although “the court realized that the Line-Item Veto Act was ‘the product of much debate and deliberation’ in Congress,” the Nine “concluded that our duty is clear.”

The majority found that the line-item veto violated the Presentment Clause of the Constitution, which requires a president to either sign or veto bills and resolutions passed by Congress in their entirety. Mr. Clinton described the ruling as “a defeat for all Americans,” one that denied presidents “a valuable tool for eliminating waste in the federal government.”

The Great Scalia, in his dissent, wrote that he found “the president’s cancellation of spending items to be entirely in accord with the Constitution,” meaning he was within his rights not to spend money Congress had authorized. President George W. Bush asked Congress to pass a new line-item veto in line with the high court’s ruling, but the Legislative Line-Item Veto Act of 2006 failed to garner enough support.

The new Congress can try writing legislation that survives a court challenge or propose a constitutional amendment to get the job done. Trump could pursue both paths at once and — likely with support from former presidents of both parties — ensure that his goal of cutting wasteful spending and bureaucracy endures long after the Department of Government Efficiency concludes its mission.

DEAN KARAYANIS

Mr. Karayanis worked for the king of talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, for over 25 years with stints in TV news, on campaigns, and ghost/speechwriting for a variety of newsmakers. He is the creator/host of the History Author Show on iHeart Radio, producer of its documentary-style video specials, and a contributor of political and social commentary for various news organizations. He is a producer for the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.

https://www.nysun.com/article/line-item-veto-would-be-a-more-enduring-tool-with-which-to-cut-waste-than-trumps-government-efficiency-department

'She Needs to Take a Seat,' House Democrats Turn on Nancy Pelosi As Civil War Begins

 

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

Are Democrats finally getting sick of Rep. Nancy Pelosi ruling the roost? A new report is shedding some light on the internal civil war that has broken out within the Democratic Party, and the California congresswoman has found herself at the center of it. And to be clear, it's completely her fault.

Pelosi made waves over the summer when she led the effort to end President Joe Biden's re-election effort, ultimately leading to the coronation of Kamala Harris. I don't think I need to explain how that turned out. Yet, in the aftermath of Donald Trump's landslide victory, Pelosi is still talking, and some of her colleagues are just about sick of it. 

House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is ticking off some House Democrats for publicly opining on what her party did wrong in 2024.

Why it matters: Pelosi needs to let House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) lead the caucus, Democrats tell Axios.

• "She needs to take a seat," said one senior Democratic lawmaker.
• "Making scattershot comments is not just unhelpful, it's damaging," said the lawmaker.

"Hakeem has been tremendously graceful and respectful of her, but I don't think she is being respectful of him," said a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The latest controversy was sparked by Pelosi telling The New York Times that had Biden dropped out sooner, the election may have turned out differently. Specifically, she cited the possibility of having a compressed primary instead of anointing Harris, which is what ultimately occurred. 

Is she wrong? Not necessarily, but how do Democrats want to hear what they "should" have done from the person who so royally screwed things up that Donald Trump, the man they compare to Adolf Hitler, got re-elected? Pelosi flew too close to the sun. She believed herself to be above the will of her party's primary voters and executed a soft coup on the rightful nominee. The result was an abject disaster. 

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The Nasty Move Pelosi Reportedly Made to Push Biden Out

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So can you blame other Democrats for saying enough is enough when it comes to her holier-than-thou attitude about what should have occurred? Pelosi is 84 years old and promised to step aside for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Instead, she took on the made-up title of "Speaker Emerita" and still called the shots from the shadows. That she failed so miserably has turned what was formerly fear and respect among the Democratic caucus into resentment. 

The bottom line: Some Democrats are clearly frustrated Pelosi isn't fading into the sunset like she promised when she lost the gavel two years ago.

• "My advice to my fellow Democrats is simple: Follow the leader. Hakeem Jeffries has done a great job," Pelosi said in 2023.
• "I understand that this is a difficult transition for her, not being the leader, but she is not," the member of the Congressional Black Caucus told us.
• "She needs to understand what her new role is."

Her new role should be retirement. What exactly is she sticking around for? Much less still trying to run the caucus? Those are rhetorical questions. 

Pelosi won't go away because her ego won't let her. She's sociopathic in her pursuit of power and prestige, and while the press has long lauded her as a historic figure, reality tells a different story. Despite doing everything she could to take down the Republican Party, she ended up being the Speaker who lost the gavel twice. Worse, she helped usher Donald Trump into office twice. 

She desperately wants to save her legacy, but pushing Biden out to defeat the bad orange man was likely her last chance at redemption. It's all downhill from here whether she wants to accept it or not, and if she doesn't, the civil war in the Democratic Party will only get worse.

The History Lesson Democrats Can’t Afford to Forget

 Forty years ago the party was in the political wilderness. Then a band of centrist insurgents took on the left wing and got Clinton in the White House.

That was a thumping, wasn’t it?  Even optimistic MAGA fans didn’t see Donald Trump winning the popular vote, taking control of the Senate and the House, and sweeping all seven swing states. He came within five points of taking New Jersey! Exit polls showed more than half of Latino men voting for him! 

The results are devastating for Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of the Democrats: They lost the nation. So what on earth do they do next? 

One approach would be to repeat what they’ve been doing. Resist! It’s what they chose the last time Trump won. In the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory, America was stunned. There had never been a president so immune to normal analysis, and, as such, so unpredictable. Each time he opened his mouth, Trump exploded political norms—and Democrats responded in kind. Being an opposition party was not enough, they believed. Instead, they would fight his very legitimacy. They built this idea of resistance into their very fabric, and it infected every aspect of progressive society—from raging late-night talk show hosts to left-wing prosecutors determined to put Trump in prison.

But while the Democrats won in 2020, the resistance ultimately failed. Democrats spent nearly a decade telling Americans that Trump was an existential threat to the republic. And what happened? Americans from all walks of life voted for him in overwhelming numbers. The Democrats wanted to erase Trump from the political scene; instead he now controls it. 

Perpetual outrage was not the path to power. Let’s be honest, it was a total disaster: The resistance pulled on pink hats, and hollered about fascism—and then gasped with shock when the nation chose Trump again. 

Democrats Have Recovered from Worse Defeats

So the party is in a pickle. If the Democrats want a shot at winning in 2028, then they need a new direction. Losing parties survive by figuring out why they lost and trying something different next time. In the meantime, they take incremental wins when they can. They act like an opposition, not a resistance. 

The good news for Democrats is that they’ve been here before. Forty years ago, a few centrist renegades mapped out a course that eventually saved the party from oblivion. If you are devastated over last week’s electoral blowout, well, Trump’s victory was a squeaker compared to Ronald Reagan’s landslide over Walter Mondale in 1984. The Democrats were not just in disarray, they were on life support. 

It’s hard to overstate the scope of that Reagan victory. Mondale, who was vice president during Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency, lost everywhere except his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Reagan swept up everything else. A conservative Republican won Massachusetts, New York, and Hawaii, for God’s sake. 

And yet only eight years later, the Democrats found their savior, a young governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. 

Democrats Were Backed by Special Interest Groups, Not Voters

Mondale’s loyalty to interest groups inside the Democratic party was his Achilles’ heel. Gary Hart, a senator from Colorado and his chief rival in the primary that year, summed up the problem as follows: “You have to reach [those voters] who don’t feel represented by the AFL[AFL-CIO], the NAACP, NOW [National Organization for Women], or the Sierra Club.”

But Mondale could not see beyond the demands of the noisiest factions in his coalition. His campaign attacked one of Reagan’s most innovative initiatives—research into space-based missile defense—claiming “killer weapons” would send the arms race with the Soviets spinning out of control.

And Reagan countered with one of the most effective ads in American political history. 

Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear?

Al From, one of the men who would eventually remake the Democratic Party, watched all this with dismay. In one sense, Mondale was an effective candidate. He unified all the special interest groups in the party. 

Except for one thing. 

“The only people who didn’t support him were the voters,” he told The Free Press. “And to me, that was a big problem.”

You can see an echo of that problem today. Here’s Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman from New York, on the 2024 election: “My basic diagnosis is that we have allowed the far left to have outsize power over the messaging and policymaking of the Democratic Party, which is causing us to fall out of touch with the working class,” he told The Free Press. “Particularly working-class voters of color who have been the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”

A Centrist Insurgency

In 1985, the Democrats were a big government, soft-on-crime party, animated by nostalgia for FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s War on Poverty. The party functioned as a coalition of unions, environmentalists, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, women’s groups, peace activists, and other progressive tribes convinced that rallying under a common banner every four years was the way to win and hold power. 

But they didn’t win. Between 1968 and 1992 the Democrats only won a single presidential election, Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976, following the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard Nixon. 

The Reagan landslide of 1984 was the final straw for Al From. He got to work in 1985 with another Democratic staffer, Will Marshall, forming a group that would bring moderate governors, senators, and Congressmen together to steer the party to the middle. It was an insurgency led by people terrified the Democrats would never win the White House again—that the party would vanish into history, like the Whigs. They weren’t afraid to play hardball. 

One of their first tricks was the name. They called themselves the Democratic Leadership Council, even though the leadership of the Democratic party didn’t like them one bit. It was an audacious gambit that catapulted them into the center of the political conversation. 

“We were an entrepreneurial, insurgent operation,” From recalled. Marshall, his partner at the DLC, put it this way, “The Democratic establishment was not happy about the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council. And the premise on which it was based was that in some way the party establishment was failing.”

The first job for the Democratic Leadership Council was to focus on the Republican-controlled Senate for the 1986 midterms. And here, they had some early success. 

They began to germinate deeply un-Democrat-sounding ideas. The DLC critiqued Reagan on his strongest issue, national defense. Instead of slamming the hawkish president for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, the DLC chastised wasteful Pentagon spending. They weren’t saying, “Stop building bombs,” they were saying, “You’re building bombs badly!” They wanted national service for young people who received scholarships. They became deficit hawks, a threat to their party’s big spenders. And on crime, the DLC—unlike the mainstream of the Democratic Party—supported the death penalty and more police on the streets. 

Willie Horton and Sex Changes for Prisoners

In 1986, the DLC had momentum. The Democrats gained eight seats that year, wresting back control of the Senate. Eight of the 11 new Democratic senators had run as DLC Democrats. From and Marshall were ecstatic. After a strong showing in the midterms, the Democrats thought they were in great shape to end the Reagan era with a Democratic victory in 1988. 

It didn’t work out that way.   

The Democratic candidate that year, Michael Dukakis, the governor from Massachusetts, did not run on the interest-group coalition campaign of Walter Mondale. He ran on his competence as an executive. 

But his party was still vulnerable to the taint of excessive liberalism. And it caught up with Dukakis in devastating fashion in a single ad. Produced by supporters of the Republican candidate, George H.W. Bush, it slammed Dukakis for a program in his state that allowed a convicted murderer named Willie Horton to go free on a weekend pass. He went on to rape a woman and stab her partner. 

And again, we see an echo in 2024, in the commercial attacking Kamala Harris for supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners,” that ended with the tagline, “Kamala's for they/them. President Trump is for you.” 

Harris did not campaign on gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants in prison. She ran on keeping abortion legal in all 50 states and on Trump’s unfitness for office. But her past position as a senator from California and her ill-fated primary run in 2019 allowed the Trump campaign to paint her as an out-of-touch elitist lacking common sense. 

The same thing happened to Dukakis. Bush thumped him in the 1988 election. Another Republican landslide.  

Bill Clinton Led the Party Out of the Wilderness

The DLC decided the party needed what From called reality therapy. 

“Over the 1980s, the Democrats lost the three elections in landslides that were greater than any party has ever lost in history, in terms of the Electoral College,” From recalled.  (In addition to the Dukakis and Mondale losses, Carter had been crushed by Reagan in 1980.) “If you continue doing that, that's the definition of insanity.”

After three election fiascoes, the Democrats were ready for a change and the DLC was there to offer exactly that, and they had a secret weapon—maybe the greatest political athlete of the last 50 years: Bill Clinton.

Barack Obama and Reagan were outstanding orators, but no one combined the abilities to think like a policy wonk and to sell those policies to everyday people like Clinton. At a time when his party was wary of the police, Clinton would just amble up to cops and ask them about their jobs. He was obsessed with making schools better and could talk for hours about it. And he had a knack for presenting center-right ideas in the language of folksy liberalism. After all, it was Bill Clinton who promised and delivered the end of welfare as we knew it. 

Clinton’s ideas didn’t come out of the vapor; they were honed during his time as the chairman of the DLC. And in that role, Clinton in some ways began his campaign before his announcement. He would travel throughout the country to spread the gospel of the new Democrats. 

From explained that a core value of the DLC was to distinguish between equal opportunity, which these new Democrats favored, and equal outcomes, which they opposed. “We believed the Democratic Party's fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not government,” he said.  

This did not go over well with other members of the party’s core coalition. And at the top of that list was Jesse Jackson, who was—like Clinton—a great talker. In 1990, he sought to kill the DLC with kindness. He asked to speak at the group’s convention that year in New Orleans, where he delivered a speech in which he claimed the DLC and his Rainbow Coalition had similar agendas. “We are delighted to be united,” he said. 

This was a poison pill, because in 1990 the DLC’s mission was to distinguish itself from the kind of identity politics Jackson championed. Jackson believed the Democratic Party was a big tent of different minorities. He wanted equality of outcomes. 

Going into the 1992 election year, the relationship between the New Democrats and Jackson was frayed. It was about to get worse. After Clinton survived the first of many sex scandals in his career, he came in second in the New Hampshire primary and pronounced himself the Comeback Kid. He would go on to vanquish his primary opponents, and as he was preparing for the general election, Clinton decided to deliver a little payback to Reverend Jackson. 

Clinton addressed Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition on June 12, 1992, five weeks after the Los Angeles riots. Racial tensions were at a boil. The Arkansas governor focused on one of the young black leaders at the conference, a rapper named Sister Souljah. He noted that she had called for a day when black people should kill white people. “If there are any good white people, I haven’t met them. Where are they?” he quoted the rapper saying. Then he paused and answered her rhetorical question: “Right here in this room.” 

Clinton’s speech would come to be known as a “Sister Souljah moment,” when a politician rebukes someone ostensibly on their own side to appeal to a broader constituency. Clinton invented the tactic. 

It was a masterstroke. Bush had been trying his best to turn Clinton into Dukakis. Clinton gave him quite a bit of material. For example, he wrote a letter in 1969 reneging on his earlier commitment to join the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Clinton was a draft dodger. He also smoked marijuana, though he incredulously claimed not to have inhaled. His rebuke of Sister Souljah was a kind of political inoculation. Clinton was not an out-of-touch liberal, he was a new Democrat, fighting for hardworking Americans who played by the rules. 

This kind of politics had a darker side as well. Clinton flew back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a lobotomized cop killer named Rickey Ray Rector in the middle of his primary campaign in New Hampshire. Rector had the mind of a child. To execute such a person was cruel, even if the messaging was savvy.  

Clinton would go on to win the election that year, ending the drought for his party and completing the mission of the DLC. One of the ways he was able to pull this off was to pick a fight with a pressure group that advanced a politics out of touch with the majority of voters.  

Resistance Theater Has Been a Voter Turnoff

The value of taking on the left-wing fringe was one of the first lessons the DLC  taught the Democratic Party. Torres wants the party to relearn that lesson. “The far left is pressuring the party to take positions that are deeply unpopular with the American people,” he told The Free Press, citing the ad about illegal immigrant prisoners and transgender healthcare. 

“It was effective because it weaponized the vice president’s words against her. And the question is, why did she feel the need to ever say that in the first place? Because the pressure from the far left on center-left Democrats is overwhelming.”

But there are other lessons as well. It’s not just the substance of resistance politics, it’s the style that’s been repellent to many Americans—the shout-downs, the screaming, and the loaded rhetoric, all of it making the normal give-and-take of democratic politics impossible. Sometimes resistance is necessary. But few political disputes revolve around existential threats. Normal politics demands compromise, and that means acting like a political opposition. 

To Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, compromise with Trump isn’t a dirty word.

“Donald Trump signed five of my bills,” he told The Free Press, referring to Trump’s first term in office. 

“He's the president of the United States or will be. He was elected by over 50 percent of this country. My job in representing my district is to first do what is best for America. They elected me to represent them in what is good for this country. And if there is someone who is president proposing something that is good for America, even if it’s not perfect and I can be part of the solution, that’s my responsibility. That doesn't mean that when he proposes things that are bad for America, that I won’t speak out. And I think the American people want that.”

Clinton’s political strategy and tactics were unimpeachable (pardon the pun), but the substance of his policies has fallen out of favor. The Democrats would be wise to follow the DLC’s lead in tacking to the center. But today the center is a different place than it was in 1992. 

The Backlash Against Neoliberalism

Clinton’s governing agenda planted the seeds of an eventual electoral rebuke. One of his big ideas was that the middle class and working class would rise with the tide of globalization. That worked really well in the 1992 election. But, by 2015, as both Trump and Bernie Sanders were energizing a new wave of populism, public perception had shifted against the neoliberalism of the Clinton era. In office, he celebrated successes like the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the repeal of the banking legislation known as Glass-Steagall. These measures were fantastic for the coastal elites. But they ended up leaving too many in middle America behind. Factories went overseas. The knowledge class prospered while the working class suffered.

Trump just won the 2024 election, in part, by promising tariffs, the opposite of free trade. And his appeal to the forgotten men and women is aimed directly at working-class voters whose economic fortunes were punished by the globalization that accelerated in the 1990s. 

From said the embrace of free trade and globalization was a successful formula in the 1990s. Incomes rose across the entire working population. “Our goal was to deal with the problems that we were facing, and one of them was that we had to grow the economy and we had to equip people to take advantage of that growth. And we did.” 

Khanna, though, argues that elements of Trump’s critique ring true.

“Towns were being hollowed out,” he said. “We were giving condescending lectures for people to either train for jobs that they never had or to move miles away. And that was wrong. And I think the first thing a Democratic politician needs to say is ‘We messed up.’ ”

The key to success in the 1990s, selling neoliberal policies to working-class voters, led to eight years of Democratic rule; eight years of peace and prosperity. But it was also a kind of time bomb. The 2024 election in that sense is the bookend of the 1992 election. It’s the year when Clinton’s working class coalition became Trump’s. 

The Path Forward for Democrats

That’s a bitter pill for Democrats old enough to remember the glories of the Clinton years. At the same time, it can offer a ray of optimism for a rising generation in the party. Trump’s coalition looks formidable after last week’s election. But if he imposes all the tariffs he promised, a bout of inflation is likely to follow. If Trump alienates America’s allies, he will make the wars he wishes to end last longer. Sometimes the best an opposition can hope for is to let the party in power make its own mistakes. 

And that brings us back to the emergence of the DLC. They realized the voters weren’t buying what their party was selling. So they offered something else. Power is earned through persuasion in democracies, not through cosplay. So the party is at a crossroads: One path is the make-believe theatrics of the last eight years. The other is for Democrats to roll up their sleeves and offer the voters an agenda worth voting for. 

 

 

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Megaport opens up Latin America to Chinese trade as US looks on

 As the world waits to see how the return of Donald Trump will reshape relations between Washington and Beijing, China has just taken decisive action to entrench its position in Latin America.

Trump won the US presidential election on a platform that promised tariffs as high as 60% on Chinese-made goods. Further south, though, a new China-backed megaport has the potential to create whole new trade routes that will bypass North America entirely.

President Xi Jinping himself attended the inauguration of the Chancay port on the Peruvian coast this week, an indication of just how seriously China takes the development.

Xi was in Peru for the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Forum (Apec). But all eyes were on Chancay and what it says about China's growing assertiveness in a region that the US has traditionally seen as its sphere of influence.

As seasoned observers see it, Washington is now paying the price for years of indifference towards its neighbours and their needs.

"The US has been absent from Latin America for so long, and China has moved in so rapidly, that things have really reconfigured in the past decade," says Monica de Bolle, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

"You have got the backyard of America engaging directly with China," she tells the BBC. "That's going to be problematic."

Reuters

Chinese President Xi Jinping met Peruvian President Dina Boluarte on 14 November

Even before it opened, the $3.5bn (£2.75bn) project, masterminded by China's state-owned Cosco Shipping, had already turned a once-sleepy Peruvian fishing town into a logistical powerhouse set to transform the country's economy.

China's official Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, called it "a vindication of China-Peru win-win co-operation".

Peru's President Dina Boluarte was similarly enthusiastic, describing the megaport as a "nerve centre" that would provide "a point of connection to access the gigantic Asian market".

But the implications go far beyond the fortunes of one small Andean nation. Once Chancay is fully up and running, goods from Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and even Brazil are expected to pass through it on their way to Shanghai and other Asian ports.

China already has considerable appetite for the region's exports, including Brazilian soybeans and Chilean copper. Now this new port will be able to handle larger ships, as well as cutting shipping times from 35 to 23 days.

However, the new port will favour imports as well as exports. As signs grow that an influx of cheap Chinese goods bought online may be undermining domestic industry, Chile and Brazil have scrapped tax exemptions for individual customers on low-value foreign purchases.

Reuters

Brazilian soybeans and other commodities can now reach China more swiftly

As nervous US military hawks have pointed out, if Chancay can accommodate ultra-large container vessels, it can also handle Chinese warships.

The most strident warnings have come from Gen Laura Richardson, who has just retired as chief of US Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.

She has accused China of "playing the ‘long game’ with its development of dual-use sites and facilities throughout the region", adding that those sites could serve as "points of future multi-domain access for the [People's Liberation Army] and strategic naval chokepoints".

Reuters

The US fears Peru's new megaport could end up hosting Chinese warships

Even if that prospect never materialises, there is a strong perception that the US is losing ground in Latin America as China forges ahead with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Outgoing US President Joe Biden was among the leaders at the Apec summit, on his first and last visit to South America during his four-year term. Media commentators remarked that he cut a diminished figure next to China's Xi.

Prof Álvaro Méndez, director of the Global South Unit at the London School of Economics, points out that while the US was taking Latin America for granted, Xi was visiting the region regularly and cultivating good relations.

"The bar has been set so low by the US that China only has to be a little bit better to get through the door," he says.

Of course, Latin America is not the only part of the world targeted by the BRI. Since 2023, China's unprecedented infrastructure splurge has pumped money into nearly 150 countries worldwide.

The results have not always been beneficial, with many projects left unfinished, while many developing countries that signed up for Beijing's largesse have found themselves burdened with debt as a result.

Even so, left-wing and right-wing governments alike have cast aside their initial suspicions of China, because "their interests are aligned" with those of Beijing, says the Peterson Institute's Ms de Bolle: "They have lowered their guard out of sheer necessity."

Reuters

The Apec summit in Peru has highlighted the complex relations between the US, China and Latin America

Ms de Bolle says the US is right to feel threatened by this turn of events, since Beijing has now established "a very strong foothold" in the region at a time when president-elect Trump wants to "rein in" China.

"I think we will finally start to see the US putting pressure on Latin America because of China," she says, adding that most countries want to stay on the right side of both big powers.

"The region doesn't have to choose unless it's put in a position where they are forced to, and that would be very dumb."

Looking ahead, South American countries such as Peru, Chile and Colombia would be vulnerable to pressure because of the bilateral free trade agreements they have with the US, which Trump could seek to renegotiate or even tear up.

They will be watching keenly to see what happens to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which is up for review in July 2026, but will be subject to negotiations during 2025.

Whatever happens, Prof Méndez of the LSE feels that the region needs more co-operation.

"It shouldn't be that all roads lead to Beijing or to Washington. Latin America has to find a more strategic way, it needs a coherent regional strategy," he says, pointing to the difficulty of getting 33 countries to agree a joint approach.

Eric Farnsworth, vice-president at the Washington-based Council of the Americas, feels that there is still much goodwill towards the US in Latin America, but the region's "massive needs" are not being met by its northern neighbour.

"The US needs to up its game in the region, because people would choose it if there was a meaningful alternative to China," he tells the BBC.

Unlike many others, he sees some rays of hope from the incoming Trump administration, especially with the appointment of Marco Rubio as secretary of state.

"Rubio has a real sense of a need to engage economically with the Western Hemisphere in a way that we just haven't done for a number of years," he says.

But for successive US leaders, Latin America has been seen primarily in terms of illegal migration and illegal drugs. And with Trump fixated on plans to deport record numbers of immigrants, there is little indication that the US will change tack any time soon.

Like the rest of the world, Latin America is bracing itself for a bumpy four years - and if the US and China start a full-blown trade war, the region stands to get caught in the crossfire.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg79y3rz1eo

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