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Eco Fashion Week April 22, 2013 Three stylists with $500 each made three runway collections from outfits presented by Value Village. Photos by Sean Herd.
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One of the community wells in Kirehe, eastern Rwanda provided by our 2008 partnership with the Lutheran World Federation and Inter-Faith Action for Peace in Africa,to supply clean water to rural communities.
This picture best represents value since it shows the color of the top of the leaves first which is yellow and then it gradually turns into a darker orange color. I edited the levels to make the picture a little bit brighter and used a shutter speed of 1/ 100 and an aperature of F. 6.3.
It's funny the value we put on objects. How they come to be of value in the first instance by means of market value and actual worth, or simply the value we place upon them ourselves.
My ring is valuable and it's worth a bit of spondulicks for sure and of course I value it's meaning. These pearls however are of no value in terms of monetary worth. But they were my Grans pearls. She treasured them and wore them for best. She never really had anything of any monetary value in her life but she never saw this as a bad thing - anything she ever had she gave away. Even down to sweets she won at bingo! They are all I have of hers and I often take them out and just hold them and remember her for a while. They used to smell of her perfume - but sadly over the years this has now gone.
So back to the value of these pearls. Nothing could replace them, nor the memories that they hold. So they are priceless. Plain and simple.
I guess what I am getting round to is that sometimes in life things happen that make us stop and put a true value on what's really important. It happens to us all I am sure and it puts thing all in perspective.
And yes I cried while writing this, I miss her.
Texture courtesy of: Paree
Now that Tesco claim to be matching Sainsbury's prices, you might be forgiven for thinking there's no real difference between the two.
But take the water above. One's from Sainsbury's basics range. It comes from a spring in Yorkshire, filtered through mineral-rich Greenmoor rock.
The other's Tesco's Everyday Value Water. It starts at the mains supply, like the water in your tap.
They cost exactly the same. But the difference between them is clear.
Price comparison made using Tesco.com on 31st October 2013. Sainsbury’s basics water 2L, 1p/100ml; Tesco Everyday Value Still Water 2L, 1p/100ml. Subject to availability. Selected stores only. For more information write to us at Sainsbury’s Customer Services, Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd, 33 Holborn, London, EC1N
2HT. You can live well for less than you thought at Sainsbury’s. Based on price perception data August 2013. For more information go to Sainsburys.co.uk/livewellforless
Some of the values artists value. Croudsourced values, part of *For the Love of it*, Artquest, London 2013
Everything I think seems to have a little strain of chaos, that buzzing happening of a brain that won't give itself a break. It keeps me thinking that I've done too much, even if there's not much truth in the matter. I'm the wrong one to ask about how to relax, you'll find me running on a tightrope and talking up the meditative value. Always about what's next, what's now, intensely impatient to reach it. If I ever seem calm, it's because I've found a fever pitch at its greatest, and stood still on a precarious peak before tumbling. Steadily swaying sort of sickly, thoughts that call me craving speaking, nothing I tend to keep inside for long. When I'm about to fall asleep, I know how much I need the rest.
May 14, 2022
Beaconsfield, Nova Scotia
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My students were using 10-longs and unit cubes to create numbers using a place value mat. This student created the number 15 using 1 ten and 5 ones (10 + 5 = 15)
Continuing to create a sample board of value and key-stoning for my online workshop - to be filmed next month.
Podium at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC.
Please attribute to Gage Skidmore if used elsewhere.
Some unloved cans of Tesco's budget bitter, stranded in Victoria station. There's a lot of emotions there (mainly along the lines of, seriously, Tesco do a value bitter? And also, that alcohol percentage, who is their target market for this?)
It was 5.23 pm on 21st august 2004 when Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina was wrapping up a rally protesting Sylhet blasts. A wave of grenade attacks on her left at least 16 people killed and left around 200 persons critically injured including top Awami League leaders Abdur Razzak, Amir Hossain Amu, Suranjit Sengupta, Ivy Rahman and Kazi Zafarullah.
The party secretary on Women affairs Ivy Rahman died in the Hospital later in the day. The unknown assailants fired seven bullets at the bulletproof SUV that Hasina boarded immediately after the blast.
The unusually poor deployment of police at the rally and the absence of forces on nearby building rooftops are a remarkable deviation from the usual practice.
Motaher Hossain, general secretary of AL Krishak League said some people on the roof of Ramna hotel and adjacent building were throwing bombs. At least 13 grenades exploded one after another, and also who were present on the spot told a white Microbus carried of some injured person who were among the assailant and were wounded by their own bomb.
Blame game started at the very moment Hasina spoke out loud about government’s conspiracy to kill the remaining member of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujiber Rahman’s remaining family members, BNP leaders hold back and Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan commented that they have blamed the government out of emotion. But soon BNP leaders changed their tone and started to blame AL for attacking their own rally, they argued AL had done it to destabilize the country and discredit the government only to grab the power.
Fiction and conspiracy theories were put forward by various columnists in the media. Pro Awami columnists blamed the fundamentalist forces and the right wing coalition government for this attack while pro BNP columnists blamed AL and pointed finger towards the country’s biggest neighbor India.
However most columnists inclined towards Awami league and left parties and leaders and activists of these parties discovered a pattern in the bomb blasts. In most cases secular forces and those who believe in culture, tradition and democratic values had been the target. The same group was behind the attack on Hasina’s rally.
Those pro BNP columnists pick up the same incident and argued Hasina was not the target of those assailants, if she were their target then why none of those grenades fall on the truck and also wrote thousand pages about AL’s possible motive behind this?
Some suspected it as a plot by international Muslim extremist groups; some pointed towards the association of ISI (Inter Services Intelligence); while Jamaat leader Matiur Rahman Nizami believes it is the work of “well known enemies of Islam” who masterminded, through various covert organizations, to carry out such brutal murders.
It became increasingly hard to dig out the truth from these fictions. With conspiracy theories you can use any piece of evidence to either prove or disprove your opinion and you can pick up any particular incident to strengthen your position. Truth has many faces but with conspiracy theory all you can achieve is a thousand shade of the truth and all these are equally probable and could be equally false.
In this present regime we have finally a charge sheet that clearly indicates Awami Leagues position is correct in this issue, RAB and other government intelligence agency finally concluded that Islamic militants are behind this attack and also a small fraction of BNP activists patronized this attack.
But is it the whole truth or only a facade? Lets look at the proceedings of the investigations.
To investigate 21st August 2004 bomb blast then BNP government first employed metropolitan police’s detective branch to investigate this incident, then this case was handed over to the criminal investigation department of Bangladesh Police. Five investigating officer under 3 officers in charge investigated this incident for over 4 years and they had submitted two charge sheet contradicting each other.
What is the progress in this case? When ever you ask this question to a law enforcement officer, a certain reply will be that “we are still investigating this matter. We had some lead but for the sake of this on going investigation we can not tell you anything.” Even after submitting charge sheet against 22 person in June 11, 2008 and acquitting all other person found guilty (on the first charge sheet presented by the CID), still the investigation has not been closed. So far we have 2 persons who claimed that they had actively participated in this failed assassination. On 26th June, 2005 Joj Miah from Noakhali confessed to police that for 5000 taka he carried out this attack under the order of Subrata Bain, a top terrorist. Subrata Bain and his group had close ties with some notorious AL leaders and they fled to India after alliance government took over the state in October 2001. He confessed to a magistrate that he had never seen any grenade before but Subrata Bain, Joy, Molla Masud ordered him to participate in this assassination. ASP of Police [CID] Abdur Rashid was the investigation officer then.
But the government were not satisfied with this finding so led by Munsi Atikur Rahman the investigation continued. The investigation found a paved path established by the coalition government.
So far we have two investigation reports, one of them was by Justice Jaynul Abedin, chairman of the one man investigation committee formed by the government to investigate 21st august grenade attack on Awami leagues rally. Awami League has rejected this report claiming it lacks neutrality. And another one was submitted by the Supreme Court Bar Association. According to Moudud Ahmed, who was Law minister at that time, claimed that this inquiry committee is illegal.
Jaynul Abedin’s investigation report:
Justice Jaynul Abedin had submitted his 162 pages manuscript of coalition governments collective story on 2nd October 2004. He was the member and chairman of one man inquiry committee formed by the government to investigate the grenade attack on Awami League rally on 21st august. On the eve of this submission those authorities in concern had invited journalist to give some insight of the report.
After scrutiny, critical and painstaking analysis, Jaynul Abedin did omit the possibility that coalition government and his ally, some extremist religious group and a part of Awami League was behind this heinous attack on Awami League activists.
But he did claim with certainty that a foreign intelligence agency actively participated in this event. They trained those assailants and equipped them with necessary ammunitions. He described this event on that informal press conference, “this incident is a naked attack on the independence and sovereignty of the country.”
Because Jaynul Abedin was a BNP activist in the past, Awami League questioned the neutrality of the investigation committee. Even though 123 people given their statement to this committee but that does not include Sheikh Hasina, who was the prime target of this massacre. Sheikh Hasina rejected the call for her statement.
In that one and half hour informal briefing on the report prior to its submission Jaynul concluded “the commission may not have received cooperation from all, which may have somewhat hindered the investigation, but the inquiry is in no way incomplete.”
Like any other investigation report submitted by any government formed investigation committee it also embraced the fate to remain unpublished till-to-date.
The Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) inquiry committee report:
On 22nd august, 2004, immediately after the grenade attack, The Supreme Court Bar Association formed an inquiry committee. Barrister Kamal Hossain was elected as the chairman of that committee and the other members of this committee were Rokonuddin Mahmud, Abdul Malek, Amir-ul-Islam, M Zahir and Muhammad Ayenuddin.
While Hasina wrapped up the rally, at that very moment a grenade went off loud and it was followed by at least 10 such explosions. Awami League leaders formed a human shield to cover Hasina from the splinter, they were injured in this process and soon after they escorted Hasina to her bullet proof SUV and Hasina left for Sudha Sadan, while on the move that SUV was attacked by bullets. Witnesses on their statement confirmed the SCBA inquiry committee that they had not seen any member of the law enforcing agency in action there.
After inspecting the place of occurrence on 27th august 2004 they went to Sudha Sadan, where Hasina assured the committee her full cooperation to find out the truth. Hasina’s security personal and her driver gave their statement to this committee and this committee also inspected the SUV.
Driver on his statement told the committee that he drove towards the east, then took a left turn and then he drove towards Sudha Sadan through zero point. But police officers deployed at the rally on 21st August on their statement said to inquiry committee, SUV carrying Sheikh Hasina away from that place drove westward, took a right turn, and then went to Sudha Sadan through zero point.
On 16th, 17th, 18th September the committee watched the video tape recorded by ATN, Channel I and NTV. On ATN video tape they saw a young man purposefully looking towards the multi storied Dhaka City Bhaban. Apart from this, on Channel I and NTV footage some suspicious incidents were seen by the committee members.
The inquiry committee sent two letters to Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, requesting her to extend cooperation for the inquiry and to direct the law enforcing agency to cooperate with them in interest of its work.
A letter was sent from the inquiry committee to IGP Shahudul Huq on 29 August 2004 requesting him to direct the police authorities to inform the inquiry committee of the number of persons who were deployed for maintaining the law and order in the public meeting on 21st August 2004 with the descriptions of their duties and locations.
After 3 weeks another letter was sent to him, requesting for his interview. The inquiry committee requested state minister of home affairs, but all of them turned down their request further more the law minister Moudud Ahmed on several occasion said that this inquiry committee had no legal basis and any report of any such illegal committee should not be recognized.
But the government did inform the SCBA inquiry committee that they had done every thing that is possible for them and sent a copy of the statement made by the State Minister for Home Affairs in the Parliament. In that speech the State Minister mentioned that the police made all out efforts to identify the culprits immediately after the incident and within 24 hours a Judicial Inquiry Commission was constituted with a judge of the Supreme Court as the sole Member. He also mentioned that the Government also arranged for an “international” inquiry into the 21st August incident side by side with Bangladesh police investigation and in response to the Government invitation 3 (three) teams from Interpol visited Bangladesh and helped the inquiry. Besides this, the government had also taken cooperation of FBI of USA.
The SCBA inquiry committee made repeated requests at the highest levels of the government for obtaining copies of reports of earlier bomb-blasts, the report of the ‘judicial inquiry’ into the 21 August, 2004 constituted by the Government, and other documents and information, but such requests have till-to-date were turned down.
The Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) inquiry committee concluded it was a pre-planned attack, carried out on the basis of a carefully prepared plan, targeting Sheikh Hasina and other leaders and persons attending the rally. The firing of the bullets and grenades on the vehicle by which she was leaving the place of occurrence, confirms that she was the target.
The committee urged government to publish all reports of investigation within one month or else public may lead to believe attempt on Sheikh Hasina’s life was to some extent was patronized by this government.
The alleged HUJI rage against Awami League:
Some columnists claimed in the media that the AL government, after assuming power in 1996 barred Islamic scholars from issuing fatwa’s through a High Court order. The government also came on strong against the right wing protesters and arrested hundreds across the country. This had angered HUJI.
Mufti Abdul Hannan, the operative commander of the banned Harkatul Jihad-al-Islami revealed on 19th November 2006.
“I masterminded all grenade attacks across the country excepting the August 21, 2004 gruesome attack on the AL rally, and three people financed the outfit for carrying out the attacks”
Hannan gave another detailed statement on 1st November 2007:
“Kajol was given the responsibility to collect funds and grenades for the attack. They decided that 12 persons would carry out the attack and Kajol and Abu Jandal would select the commanders of the operation. It was decided that Kajol and Jandal brief the attackers about their positions and Jandal would throw the first grenade after getting instruction from Sayeed. The others would throw their grenades at around the same time. Hannan said the attackers targeted the truck and left the spot individually after the operation.”
However question remains as why HUJI chose to attack Hasina after all those years and during the period when there was a row of political killings of Awami League leaders (Kibria, Ahsan Master etc.) were happening. HUJI members were used but who masterminded the attack?
The BNP connection:
In January 2008, former deputy minister for information of the BNP government Abdus Salam Pintu was arrested for his involvement with the grenade attacks on Awami League rally on August 21 in 2004. He was arrested on the basis of confessional statement made earlier by detained Mufti Hannan who claimed that the attack on the AL rally was planned at the official residence of the former Deputy Minister. Hannan said that Pintu was present at the meeting and later supplied the grenades.
He made startling disclosure to interrogators about the involvement of former State Minister of Home Lutfuzzaman Babar and ‘Hawa Bhaban’ in the grenade attacks. From The New Nation:
“The CID officer said they were certain after the arrest of Mufti Hannan and Pintu that the attack on the AL rally had been aided and abetted by Lutfuzzaman Babar and the Hawa Bhaban.
“To hide the truth, former investigation officer Ruhul Amin, a CID officer, had gone to Pintu’s house several times,” he said, and added, “former State Minister of Home Babar was involved in the entire process and Pintu would regularly inquire with him about the progress.”
Pintu’s counsel Advocate Sanaullah Mia, however, told : “He was implicated only because his cousin Maulana Tajul Islam, a militant leader and an accused in the grenade attack case, had visited his house when Pintu was a Minister,”
HUJI is the culprit but who used them and why?
On June 11, 2008 charges were finally made against 22 persons including top Harkat-ul-Jihad (Huji) leader Mufti Abdul Hannan and BNP leader and former deputy minister Abdus Salam Pintu. Newspaper reports say:
“CID Chief Additional Inspector General Jabed Patwari said HUJI top leaders planned and carried out the attacks to kill Hasina as a few arrested attackers said in their confessional statements that Hasina would harm Islam if she was alive and came to power again.
BNP leader Pintu is not involved with Huji but he has been charged since the attackers had held two meetings at his residence to take decision about the attack.”
But the question remains whether HUJI tried to kill Hasina on their own or it was a political assassination plot linked by BNP to take out the opposition. Like every other political massacre the 21st August grenade attack on Hasina has no clear motive whatsoever and after 4 years of investigation we are not certain whether those who were behind this ghastly attack have finally been exposed. Will we be able to know the truth?
tnsr.org/2022/10/fixing-the-current-system-or-moving-towa...
Fixing the Current System or Moving Toward a Value-Based Globalization
Mathew Burrows, Robert A. Manning, Aaron L. Friedberg
In this issue’s correspondence section, Mathew Burrows and Robert Manning respond to Aaron Friedberg’s article on the future of globalization, published in Vol 5, Iss 1 of TNSR. Friedberg, in turn, offers his own rebuttal.
Taking Exception: The Problems with a “Partial Liberal” Order
Mathew Burrows and Robert A. Manning
Aaron Friedberg recently published an important, thought-provoking article in these pages that examines the evolution of the international economy over the last two centuries and possible scenarios for how the current era of globalization may fail or be reconstructed.¹ We commend the analysis of past phases of globalization but take issue with the likelihood and desirability of his proposed “value-based” free world trade bloc, which he calls “Globalization 2.5.” Friedberg dismisses the possibility of repairing and updating the current international system to reflect the redistribution of wealth and power from West to East and North to South. While he discusses a region-centric global economic order, his preferred outcome is a U.S.-led “partial liberal” order. However, such a framework would institutionalize a fragmented, conflict-prone world based more on power and less on rules.
The notion of a “democracies only” world order reflects the logic of the Biden administration’s “democracy vs. autocracy” strategy, but with respect to it fashioning a stable and prosperous world, it is a dubious proposition. For starters, China is the world’s largest trading power (its total export-imports were $4.2 trillion in 2021), the leading trade partner of U.S. allies and partners in Europe and Asia, and a major exporter of capital.² Moreover, the neutral response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by most of the world — including democracies such as India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and Turkey — shows that these countries are more motivated by interests than by democratic values. Beyond fashioning legal and institutional frameworks for global trade and investment to operate in, the administration’s requirement now is to make sure that such trade and investment favor U.S. interests. The Biden administration, for example, wants to prevent any new trade regimes from hurting the middle class, even though there are inevitably going to be some losers when openings in trade are made.
The United States could do better by closing the skills-job opening gap and helping the American middle class compete by providing improved retraining and more life-long learning opportunities, as well as a stronger social safety net, including portable healthcare, universal daycare, and more generous unemployment insurance linked to retraining. Of course, trade politics include a significant amount of market intervention and managed trade — imposing quotas and voluntary export restraints, or putting in place tariffs when another’s trade practices are deemed to be unfair or in order to protect strategic industries — and demonstrate clear results from such measures.³ Yet, there seems to be an increasing temptation among foreign policy strategists to believe that China will either acquiesce to perpetual U.S. primacy or that it can simply be isolated from U.S.-led political and economic structures. This implies that the United States and its allies can redesign the world to please their preferences for democratic liberalism without regard for other countries. But when, over the past several centuries, has there been a stable world order absent the inclusion or a considered balance of the major economic and military powers, particularly China and Russia?
Technology, Economics, and Politics
To our minds, the proposal for a “partial liberal trading system,” is inconsistent with Friedberg’s elegant summary analysis of how periods of globalization over the past 200 years have come about and operated: namely that economics, in terms of market trends and other forces such as technology, has historically been the driver of globalization. Politics, on the other hand, may have established a favorable framework for globalization, but it has been unable to orchestrate it fully.
We take the point in Robert Gilpin’s prescient assessment, cited by Friedberg, regarding the reciprocal relationship between politics and economics, wherein economics redistributes wealth and power, which leads to political changes and reordered politico-economic relationships. But this model overstates the role of politics and underestimates the role of technology. Politics does create the framework in which economics operates, but within that framework — the enabling security structures and sets of rules and regulations — economics is driven by its own imperatives that redistribute wealth and power. In Britain in the 19th century and the United States in the 20th century, economic expansion led to the development of external markets for Western exports and imports of commodities and other essential goods. These economic exchanges helped America’s trading partners — including China — to grow and compete. Some forecasts anticipate that China will outgrow the United States as measured in market exchange terms by the early 2030s.⁴ China’s stunning ascendency since 1978 is testimony to how economic growth upsets power balances,⁵ in this case triggering a U.S. backlash and a corresponding shift of U.S. views of China that Friedberg ably chronicles.
Economics has also driven calls in the United States and, to a degree, other Western countries, for changing how globalization operates in order to better protect their interests. In a sense, having pressed liberalization on everyone else and then lost the agency to run the global economy after World War II, Washington wants to re-work who’s in and who’s out to ensure continued hegemony. Friedberg’s solution to the problems with the current trading system would be a “world in which the advanced industrial democracies of Europe, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere band together to form a free trade area and perhaps a full economic bloc.” This is wishful thinking. Such an alternative to the current global economy is unrealistic and would be disruptive, ultimately undermining U.S. and Western prosperity and potentially increasing the risk of great-power conflict — a risk that is already unacceptably high.
The historical cases that Friedberg supplies illustrate the importance of economics and technology over politics. This is strengthened if one considers the first cycle of economic globalization that took place more than two millennia ago under the Han dynasty, a case that Friedberg omitted: the Silk Road, which connected Asia and the Middle East to Europe with variations (e.g., Venice’s maritime empire) until roughly 1500.⁶ There were minimal rules in this system, and it was driven mainly by power, ambition, and the desire for profit. Friedberg’s “Globalization 1.0,” (1815–1914), facilitated as much by rapid technological change (the telegraph, railroads, steam engines) as by a post-Napoleonic political framework, was largely based on Britain’s and other Western countries’ comparative advantage and thirst for the raw materials that were provided by Europe’s colonies in Africa, Asia, Caribbean, and other regions. It was the politics of nationalism and anti-colonialism more than redistributed wealth that produced World War I, thus ending that period of globalization.
The post-World War II Bretton Woods system was a wildly successful partial-liberal order centered in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. The crafters of this system were intent on learning from the mistakes of hyper-nationalism and protectionism that characterized the inter-war period. The system had a rules-based architecture that was open and mutually beneficial and that worked to no small degree because of relatively open U.S. markets and a hegemonic enforcer that underpinned the system. The self-imposed separation by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries helped set its limits. As John Ruggie argues (which Friedberg cites), one reason for the post-Cold War resilience of the Bretton Woods system, current problems notwithstanding, is that even absent a hegemon, if there is a sense of common purpose and shared interests, a multilateral structure can still function.⁷ Bretton Woods partners felt they were receiving enough mutual benefit to sustain the system, regardless of whether a hegemon was involved. But as Europe and Japan rebuilt and became industrial competitors by the 1980s, the generosity of America’s relatively open markets became increasingly problematic for Americans who saw those whom they had defeated gaining economically on the United States. Washington struck back, as showcased in the 1980s U.S.-Japanese trade wars in which Japanese auto companies were pressured into investing their profits in building new factories in America.
As globalization took off at the end of the Cold War, the Bretton Woods trade and financial system, fueled by the IT revolution and global supply chains, expanded exponentially to former Warsaw Pact nations and to emerging economies like Brazil, India, and East Asia writ large, as well as China and even Russia itself. The result was a new global middle class, but also new vulnerabilities that manifested in financial crises in Latin America (most pronounced in the 1980s but episodic and ongoing in Argentina and several other countries), the 1998 Asian financial crisis, and eventually the meltdown of the whole system in the 2008 Western financial crisis.⁸ All of this affirms Gilpin’s point about trade redistributing wealth and, in turn, leading to changes in political fortunes, such as America’s relative decline. While it is still a work in progress, we have seen some change in the character and scope of globalization. Capital controls are one such shift, as well as a proliferation of regional and extra-regional trade arrangements. A polycentric world also faces unprecedented uncertainty about the future of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) role as the arbiter of global trade, as the failure of the Doha Round of global trade liberalization underscored.⁹
At present, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and rapid digitization have shown that economics tends to race ahead of governance. This was illustrated by China’s unprecedented economic success in recent decades, outgrowing the political framework of the trading system, going from $150 billion in GDP in 1978 to $18 trillion in 2021 with an average 10 percent annual growth from 1978 to 2021.¹⁰ China’s gaming of the system led to a shattering of U.S. myths that economic reform leads to wider liberalization and a realization that China’s state-centric model was a different type of capitalism, something that President Donald Trump called out.¹¹
Repairing the Current System
Instead of proposing an improbable strategy for a return to a partial globalization centered on the “free world,” Friedberg may have done better to show that the current, flawed system of globalization can be repaired. This would preserve, if not boost, current benefits for the United States and the rest of the world. In Friedberg’s account of the breakdown of “Globalization 2.0,” China is largely at fault. Nobody denies that China has never fulfilled the promises it made to liberalize its internal market at the time of its 2001 accession to the WTO. Beijing is also, as Friedberg charges, engaged in rampant intellectual theft to help it become a tech giant, but this is not the most important factor in its rapid technological ascent. Missing in Friedberg’s analysis are U.S. causes for America’s disenchantment with globalization. As Adam Posen has argued in a recent Foreign Affairs article, the “United States has, on balance, been withdrawing from the international economy for the past two decades.”¹² The jobs lost to Chinese competition have, in fact, been relatively small — namely, two million jobs lost between 2000 and 2015 out of a workforce of 150 million, or roughly 130,000 workers a year.¹³
So why the public backlash against globalization and China? Part of the reason, Posen argues, concerns the “fetishization of manufacturing jobs.” The United States has been steadily losing manufacturing jobs, with many of the losses coming from electorally important states, giving the issue more prominence. But why shift all the blame onto China? While Beijing bears much of the blame, the United States has been woefully remiss in helping redundant workers find new employment through retraining. Policies encouraging U.S. offshore investment in global supply chains until very recently also contributed to the problem. According to a 2021 study by the American Enterprise Institute, U.S. “federal spending on worker training has fallen over the past few decades as a share of GDP.”¹⁴ U.S. states have traditionally played an important role in trade adjustment, but in the aggregate, there has also been a decline in trade funding assistance since the 1980s. Other advanced economies do much better in terms of funding both social safety nets and skills training: The United States is second to last in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s ranking of countries that provide public spending to support job readiness and matching skills to jobs.¹⁵ Fashioning a more robust social safety net and better equipping the workforce with the skills needed to advance in a rapidly changing 21st-century workplace might restore trust in freer trade.
It is not only on trade that the United States has turned against the rest of the world. Anti-immigrant feeling has also exploded, although there is little evidence that unskilled immigrants are going to take away highly paid jobs.¹⁶ In fact, the U.S. economy can’t run without immigrants. The turn inward and opposition to globalization is as much cultural and psychological as it is based on rational interests. Disregarding history and the distributive effects of trade, Americans always tended to assume that their country would be an outright winner of globalization.
European countries have been much less enamored with globalization, fearing that their industries would lose out. As Friedberg points out, globalization was sold in the mid-1990s by President Bill Clinton as the motor for achieving the “end of history.” But there was little understanding of how globalization leads to more — not less — strategic competition. One reason for this may be that America’s rise to become one of the great economic powers by the end of the 19th century came about because of Britain’s embrace of free trade and its support for globalization. A better appreciation at the outset of the challenges of economic competition might have pushed the United States toward a Sputnik-like “self-improvement” program, rendering it better prepared for the inevitable competition from China and other emerging markets.
Instead of throwing the globalization baby out with the bath water, America can still try to repair the flaws in globalization’s workings. What’s wrong with putting pressure on China by rounding up allies to force Beijing to mend its ways on IP theft and lack of market access or risk losing global markets? China’s growth remains dependent on trade, and China is the biggest trading partner of many U.S. allies.
Sacrificing Globalization 2.0 and trying to build a partial replacement anchored in the “free world” carries a number of risks. For starters, it is not a given that the United States can harmonize its views on trade and regulation with those of the European Union, which has been integrating its trade with Asia and Latin America. Globalization 2.0 has also been the vehicle for many developing countries to enrich themselves, reduce poverty, and build middle classes, which, over time, can bolster the chances of democratization and liberal market reforms. A partial liberal trade system that leaves out a good part of the world would increase the chances of conflict and make authoritarianism more likely, leaving the developing world more dependent on China.
In all of this, there needs to be a better understanding of the limits of America’s power to impose its will. It may have worked for Dean Acheson, but that time is long past. It is U.S. hubris and concern over America’s unreliability that has prompted Europe and much of Asia to hedge against the United States. Look at E.U. trade and investment deals with Japan, China, and other Asian and Latin American states,¹⁷ and consider Asia, with its new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership accord,¹⁸ which does not include America. Though Friedberg minimizes the effort required to achieve consensus, he is right about the importance of mobilizing democracies and other like-minded states to forge a common position on trade issues, but that should not be an end in itself. Precisely because of the limits of U.S. agency, working with allies and partners makes sense in order to maximize America’s leverage to shape global rules and norms, but it should not be a substitute for global rules.
With only 18 percent of the world economy, is it not possible that China would alter its policies to sustain access to global markets,¹⁹ particularly now, as it faces unprecedented challenges due to a state-centric, investment-driven economic model that no longer works?²⁰ The same Chinese Communist Party of the Great Leap Forward disaster and the maniacal cultural revolution self-corrected by enacting Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. It is worth exhausting diplomacy to test this idea before concluding that there is no difference between China’s grandiose ambitions and what it is willing to accept. That’s where coordination among democracies and the like-minded can build leverage to test the proposition. Friedberg is too quick to eliminate any role for the United States and its partners working together to update global trade and tech rules, as well as the WTO. At present, however, the mutual demonization between China and the United States, and America’s assumption that China can’t change, render such an effort difficult.
Domestic Obstacles to a Value-Based Globalization
Friedberg also ignores the growing domestic obstacles when he calls for a return to a partial, value-based globalization. President Joe Biden may have eased Trump-era steel and aluminum sanctions against European allies, but he angered those allies with his Buy American rule, using federal procurement to support American manufacturing. Biden also dismayed America’s United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement partners, when he proposed electric car subsidies for unionized U.S. carmakers,²¹ although it’s unclear how the subsidies will be implemented in the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act. The episode has left a bad taste in the mouths of America’s closest trade partners, such as South Korea and Japan, who have been encouraged to build auto factories in the United States, and it reinforces the impression that the United States is becoming more protectionist, even with its allies.
Moreover, the Biden administration is so divided it is hard for it to make any move on trade. A recent Politico article describes the difficulty plaguing administration efforts to develop a trade strategy with Asian countries, despite the eagerness of America’s Asian allies and partners for the United States to take a more active role in trade.²² In one corner of the three-way administration division are the trade expansionists who want to tie Asian nations closer to the United States with trade deals. Then there’s the more labor-friendly faction, which wants to use tariffs and quotas to protect U.S. workers. The third camp worries that scrapping with China economically could undermine administration priorities to ease inflation and decrease supply chain bottlenecks. Even smaller trade deal ideas, such as a digital trade agreement, have met with opposition. A U.S. Trade Representative plan to launch a trade case against China’s use of industrial subsidies has also been dropped.
Then there’s Congress, which is increasingly anti-trade. Trumpist Republicans and progressive Democrats oppose any effort to resurrect the Trans-Pacific Partnership and would block America’s entry into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Both parties are fighting the last war, blaming foreign trade as the main cause of the decline of union workers and the loss of manufacturing jobs, when technological change is a major driver of job gains and losses. The problem is more the mismatch of skills to labor, one reason why the United States has some 10 million unfilled jobs.²³
Administration paralysis in moving forward with any trade initiative combined with growing protectionism make it hard to envisage a “free world” free trade agreement being workable. While such an accord would seem to be in line with the administration’s anti-China and pro-democracy focus and popular with the growing anti-China congressional consensus, it would mean crafting a trade agreement that is larger than any of the administration’s smaller initiatives. Friedberg has rightly focused on the problems that China poses to the functioning of the world trading system. Yet, the current political disorder at home is as much the issue when it comes to remaking the global trading system. The fundamental problem with Friedberg’s advocacy for a free world trading system is that we cannot just wipe the slate clean and start anew.
Conclusion
There is much uncertainty about the future of the global trading system, and Friedberg nicely sketches possible alternative futures. The WTO’s role will almost certainly be diminished. There may be sector-specific global trade liberalization to come, but most likely no future global trade rounds. Trade liberalization has become more region-centric and trans-region centric, such as is the case with the U.S.-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement.²⁴ Nonetheless, because of its near universal membership (it covers 96 percent of global trade), and its role as the only over-arching dispute settlement mechanism, the WTO remains critical to maintaining a rules-based trade regime, although both aspects of the organization are in need of major reform if the WTO is to remain relevant.²⁵
Recent trends of regional trade clusters and the reorganization of supply chains suggest that the most probable scenario is one in which the WTO and U.N. standard-setting bodies create a loose global umbrella over regional accords. But continued trade and financial fragmentation cannot be dismissed. Protectionism — managed trade in key sectors like steel and aluminum — is on the rise. For the very reason that Friedberg highlights via Gilpin — that economics alters politics — we cannot rule out that today’s authoritarians could become tomorrow’s market-oriented democracies, as internal forces, such as growing middle classes, push for more political participation and liberalization over time.
Apart from the inertia of U.S. trade policy, market forces pose a strong obstacle to any effort to reorder trade along ideological lines that cuts out the world’s largest market and trading power. We are already seeing hints of a prospective mirror-image response to “democracies only” efforts in the February joint statement from Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, promising closer affiliation between Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and China’s Belt and Road Initiative.²⁶ Similarly, Beijing has proposed a new Global Security Initiative.²⁷
There is a complex network of trade and investment with China. U.S. corn and wheat farmers are attracted to the Chinese market, and shale producers welcome selling to the Chinese liquefied natural gas market. Boeing enjoys the Chinese commercial airline market, and Qualcomm and others like selling low-end chips for Chinese cellphones. None of this necessarily poses national security risks. A circumscribed, partial liberal trade order would defy market forces that benefit American businesses and consumers.
Strategic competition is leading to decoupling by both the United States and China where national security interests are deemed at risk, particularly in the tech sector. Fixing a global system that economics has overtaken, however problematic, still seems the most sensible strategy. Finally, with regard to the broader systemic consequences, it is worth recalling a recent cautionary note from Henry Kissinger: “Differences in ideology should not be the main issue of confrontation, unless we are prepared to make regime change the principal goal of our policy.”²⁸
Dr. Mathew Burrows serves as director of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub and is a distinguished fellow in the Reimagining Grand Strategy program and Red Cell project at the Stimson Center. He retired in 2013 from a 28-year career at the CIA, serving the last 10 years as counselor at the National Intelligence Council.
Robert A. Manning is a distinguished fellow in the Reimagining Grand Strategy program and the Red Cell project at the Stimson Center. He was a senior counselor to the undersecretary of state for global affairs from 2001 to 2004, a member of the U.S. Department of State policy planning staff from 2004 to 2008, and a member of the National Intelligence Council strategic futures group from 2008 to 2012. Follow him on Twitter @Rmanning4.
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Collection: Icelandic and Faroese Photographs of Frederick W.W. Howell, Cornell University Library
Title: Litli Botn, and Hvalfell. Hvalfjörður.
Date: ca. 1900
Place: Hvalfell (Iceland)
Medium: collodion print
Repository: Fiske Icelandic Collection, Rare & Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library
Accession: 1923.5.07
URL: http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/howell/intro.asp
Persistent URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/6299
There are no known U.S. copyright restrictions on this image. The digital file is owned by the Cornell Univeristy Library which is making it freely available with the request that, when possible, the Library be credited as its source.
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The son - the future defender.
This is part of photo-set "
Family values".
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Family: Taho - father - Soom Heliot
Misteria - mother - Soom Nephelin
Aminael - daughter - Soom Kivi
Roland - son - Soom Trond
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Mike Cohen