Author Archives: jfrankel

Apology Tour d’horizon

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July 26, 2018 — American presidents are supposed to take America’s side when dealing with other countries.  (“My country, right or wrong.”)  When Barack Obama was (falsely) accused of starting his presidency with an “apology tour” of the Middle East, it was understood that apologizing to foreigners would have been a bad thing, if true.  Last week Donald Trump received a lot of criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for failing to take the side of his own intelligence services and law enforcement agencies when their findings ran counter to what his friend Vladimir Putin solemnly assured him to be the truth. read more

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Protectionism is Nothing New for Republicans

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June 16, 2018 — Critics of President Trump’s aggressive trade policy have mostly gotten it right.  His tariffs cause economic damage at home – raising the cost of living for American consumers, hurting industry, and taking foreign sales away from farmers and other exporters.   Moreover the threats have been deployed erratically across trading partners and across time in ways that seem calculated to discourage cooperation with the US and rather to isolate the hitherto leader of the free world from even its closest allies. read more

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The “G-6 vs. 1” Summit

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June 8, 2018 —  I did an interview today as the G-7 Leaders Summit got underway in Canada.

In the video at BNN Bloomberg, I said I thought that if Trump’s tariffs are met with united and calibrated retaliation, he might eventually have to back down.

Here are the questions they sent me ahead of time and my responses,  

– Q:  Ideally – what do you want to see come from the Group of 7 leaders’ meeting that starts today in Canada?

– A:

  • If we were truly talking about an ideal world, one would aspire to progress on the issues that the Canadian hosts plan to talk about: environment, inclusive growth, equality, etc.
  • Closer to the real world, one would ideally see the G-7 cooperating to form a common front regarding economic issues with China (reduction of excess steel capacity & enforcement of IPRs) or geopolitical issues (esp. vis-a-vis North Korea & Iran & Russia).
  • This meeting will accomplish no such G-7 cooperation, and to the contrary will almost certainly go down in history as the “G-6 vs. 1” meeting.
    • read more

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