Ian Welsh – Page 62 – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

So, Trump sent a bunch of demands to Harvard, which basically amounted to “we run this university now.” In the wake of his demand that Columbia submit to a consent decree, Harvard decided to fight and is trying to rally other universities.

This isn’t about free speech or any civil liberties values. Harvard was happily crushing Palestinian protestors. The issue is power: Trump wants to take power away from the people who run it now, and they aren’t willing to give it up.

This comes back to the simplest problem in negotiating with Trump: you can’t actually cut a deal, because he’ll always come back for more. American elites are beginning to realize that they can’t conditionally surrender: they can’t give Trump some stuff and expect to be otherwise left alone.

I think the odds of significant elite opposition are high. They don’t want to, but Trump has backed them into a corner. It’s fight or exit the elites.

This is going to be a nasty fight. Trump’s weaponization of the immigration system and presidential orders, especially dubious presidential control over spending means he has powerful weapons, including the threat of deporting citizens to prison camps for life.

But Trump has moved into “beyond a fuck-up” territory. He’s moved too fast and made too many enemies too fast, both domestically and internationally. He’s turned allies against him, and made everyone scared.

That’s not smart. The rule of purges is to do them fast, yes, but that once you’re done, you’re done. And when you make deals you need to keep them. No one feels safe, but they haven’t given up their power yet.

Worse, Trump is almost certain to lose Congress in the mid-terms. I’ve never seen a President more likely to be impeached, because he has made it “me or you”. Non-Trump aligned elites will go for his throat as soon as they can, and he’s turning a lot of elites who were pro-Trump against him with his “trade” policies.

American elites wanted to give in to Trump, but he’s forced them into a corner, and like the rats they are, they will fight when threatened with loss of their own power.

So buckle in and buckle up, sunshine. It ain’t over till it’s over, and it’s far from over yet.

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No Food Has Entered Gaza In Fourty-Four Days

By Ian Welsh

On April 16, 2025

13 Comments

I keep seeing headlines about “food insecurity.”

SHUT UP

The word is “starvation”. Starvation. You media weasels.

Now despite what a lot of people think, starvation isn’t fast, and there were some stores, but those stores have run out.

So Israel is deliberately starving something like 1.7 million people, to death.

Meanwhile the only nation in the world trying to stop this is Ansar-Allah (the Houthis). And what is America doing? Sponsoring a ground invasion by the “official government” of Yemen.

The Houthis had no blockade during the ceasefire. When the Israelis announced they would cut off all aid to Gaza, the Houthis said they’d give them two days, then start up the blockade again. Which they did. (Note also that America offered Ansar-Allah an end to all sanctions, recognition and rolling the official government into them if they’d stop the blockade. So the Houthis are doing this at GREAT cost.)

People roll their eyes when Iranians and whatnot call America “the Great Satan” but… seems pretty accurate to me. Helping a genocide, and attacking the only nation in the world trying to stop the genocide.

One can always be “more evil’, but the US is pushing the boundaries here. Israel, of course, has been evil for every second of its existence and the national sport is “how can we be even more evil, while screaming “never again?”

The only good news is that America is speed-running imperial collapse. But even so, it’s likely to come too late for the Palestinians.

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“The Chief Justice Has Made His Ruling Now Let Him Enforce It”

By Ian Welsh

On April 14, 2025

37 Comments

So, basically, the Supremes ruled 9-0 that Trump had to obey a lower court when they court said to return Abrego Garcia, whom Trump sent to prison in El-Salvador, who is not a gang member as Trump claimed.

This case is wrong in every way:

It’s not legal to send someone to another country’s prison;
The ICE agent who said the hairdresser was a gang member was kicked off the cops for dishonesty, then got a job with ICE;
There was no due process before the hairdresser or any of the other kidnapping victims were sent overseas, many of them are clearly not gang members;
ICE is making arrests wearing masks, not showing ID and grabbing people off the street into unmarked vans. Straight up Gestapo shit.

But what’s particularly offensive is that Trump is saying “I can’t get him back” at the same time as El Salvador’s President is claiming “I don’t have the power to return him.”

This is “I’m telling the sun is pink, with blue polka-dots” level bullshit. Everyone knows they’re lying. This, alone, should lead to impeachment, the sheer fucking insult of such an obvious lie. And every newspaper and news show should be leading with “President Lies.”

Next is the simple fact that legality aside, even Trump has admitted the guy is not a gang member and that they made a mistake. Anyone with even the faintest scintilla of decency would arrange for his return.

Assuming there is a “plan” here, and that’s always questionable when dealing with Trump it is obviously to put the President entirely above the law: what he’s doing is illegal, he’s lying to everyone’s face, the Supremes have ruled against him 9-0, and everyone knows he’s punishing an innocent man. His administration has said they want to start deporting citizens in the same way.

“I can do anything I want and you can’t stop me.”

The obvious next play from the judiciary would be contempt rulings and to start locking up administration members for perjury, which would cause an obvious constitutional crisis, but the US is already not a Constitutional Republic at this point. I can’t even count the number of actions Trump has taken which should lead to impeachment. Due process and the first amendment are clearly dead-letter, he’s violating separation of powers repeatedly and his unilateral shutdowns of Congressionally mandated departments and programs are 100% un-Constitutional. He doesn’t have the right to change Congress’s spending decisions that way. Oh, and he’s publicly blackmailing law firms and universities “do what I say or I’ll hurt you.” Publicly bragging about it.

His tariffs are all based on “national security” clauses allowing the President to declare tariffs, which is, again, obviously bullshit, though it’s also true that Congress is entirely complicit, since they could take that power back. (It shouldn’t be possible for one branch to delegate powers to another branch. The founders never intended for the President to be able to declare war, for example.)

But really, it’s the “sky is not blue” lying that is most offensive to me.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

– George Orwell, 1984

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 13, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On April 13, 2025

1 Comment

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges

[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]

Team Trump Is Gaming Out How to Ship U.S. Citizens to El Salvador

Nikki McCann Ramirez, Asawin Suebsaeng, Andrew Perez, April 12, 2025 [Rolling Stone]

Trump said last weekend he would “love” to send American criminals there — and would even be “honored” to, depending on “what the law says.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed this week that the president has discussed this idea privately, too, adding he would only do this “if it’s legal.” ….

The Trump administration is indeed discussing this idea behind the scenes, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to Rolling Stone. In their most serious form, these conversations have revolved around attempting to denaturalize American citizens and deport them to other countries, including El Salvador….

Shortly after stepping back into office, Trump personally directed at least one lawyer working in his administration to look into deporting American citizens via denaturalization processes, telling aides that it is a “good idea” for certain cases, according to one of the sources, who is a Trump appointee. In one of his many Day One executive orders, Trump instructed his administration to move on cases described in a federal statute regarding “revocation of naturalization.”….

Several of Trump’s most important advisers, including White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, continue to internally advocate for mass-denaturalization initiatives that they believe were squandered in Trump’s first stint in the Oval Office.

For instance, the sources add, Trump administration officials have discussed possibly denaturalizing and deporting activists and other individuals whom they label as having committed so-called “fraud” on their applications for citizenship by subsequently supporting what Team Trump decides are “pro-terrorist” causes or groups — similar to the specious arguments they’ve made to justify stripping pro-Palestine student activists of their green cards or visas.

According to these sources, Trump administration attorneys and some senior appointees have also discussed potential legal justifications and technicalities they can exploit for denaturalizing citizens who are accused or convicted of certain crimes, especially if the Justice Department or other offices deems their offenses to be gang-related….

Mike Davis, a close Trump ally and a fixture among the MAGA legal elite, tells Rolling Stone, “I have advocated very publicly that if you are a current Hamas supporter and you were naturalized within the last 10 years, the Justice Department should move forward with denaturalization proceedings to get them the hell out of our country. Denaturalization has been on the books for a very long time. If you lie on your citizenship application, denaturalization is a consequence.”

When asked if there is any precedent in the last several decades for this kind of crackdown effort, he replies: “I hope this is groundbreaking. I hope Trump and his team are trail blazers on this. Hamas supporters can go to hell and in the meantime they need to get the hell out of our country.”

Trump’s Horrifying Removal of Man in “Error” Takes an Even Darker Turn

Greg Sargent, April 12, 2025 [The New Republic]

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a simple directive to the U.S. government. Or it would have been simple, anyway, if President Donald Trump weren’t engaged in such rampant lawlessness. The high court said the administration should be prepared to say what steps it has taken to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the Maryland man whom the government itself admits was deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in “error.”

The government still hasn’t answered that basic question. On Friday, the administration refused to honor a judicial order—delivered by a lower court in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling—to provide a response to it….

All along, the administration has had the option of moving to return Abrego Garcia to the United States and then trying again to deport him via conventional legal processes—which, ironically enough, could result in his removal anyway, in a more lawful manner.

Why hasn’t the government taken that simple step? That question is the bigger, darker one underlying this whole saga….

It’s not hard to guess at the administration’s motives here. Bringing Abrego Garcia back to U.S. soil—and then arguing he should again be removed to El Salvador—is a case the administration might lose. Or if the administration sought to remove him to a third country, that would allow Abrego Garcia to challenge that effort.

Either path would unleash an even bigger media spectacle. It would mean more coverage of Abrego Garcia’s marriage to a U.S. citizen and the couple’s autistic child. It would mean more attention to his longtime ties to a local Maryland community—he’s lived there 14 years, after initially entering illegally in 2011—even as the administration redoubled removal efforts.

It would also mean more pressure on the administration to present actual evidence of the claim that he’s a gang member. Vice President JD Vance and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have worked themselves up into paroxysms of phony outrage in making this charge. Why don’t they want it reexamined within lawful channels?

There Are Only Two Ways To Handle Trump’s Threats

By Ian Welsh

On April 11, 2025

22 Comments

Trump operates on two simple rules:

For me to win, someone else has to lose; and,
If someone capitulates to my demands, I can still get more.

If you give in to Trump, he will be back. The latest “victim” is Colombia University. They’ve given in to Trump (and Biden) repeatedly, crushing anti-Palestinian protestors, adopting an extreme definition of anti-semitism, kicking multiple students out, executed a partial ban on wearing masks, and are to have security with arrest rights so they can crack down further on students who protest genocide.

After all that:

The Trump administration is considering placing Columbia University under a consent decree, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, a dramatic escalation in the federal government’s crackdown on the Ivy League institution…

…The university has already accepted a series of changes demanded by the administration as a precondition for restoring $400m in federal grants and contracts the government suspended last month over allegations that the school failed to protect students from antisemitism on campus.

Needless to say, Trump hasn’t restored that 400 million.

If you give in to Trump without fighting, he assumes that there’s more left on the table. And since you’ve proven you won’t fight, he expects you won’t fight next time. He’ll keep doing this until you do fight, because that tells him how much you really have to give.

Trump’s been going after both Big Law and the Ivies, and so far most, though not all, have given in. Four major “white shoe” law firms have offered 340 million in pro bono work for Trump’s causes and promised not to oppose him.

All of them are idiots. Trump is a bully and a blackmailer. You can never “pay off” a blackmailer. They will always come back to the well for more.

You have only two choices if Trump comes after you:

If Domestic, fight.
If foreign, and he’s only threatening, tell him to pound sand and ignore him. If he does something, retaliate.

Trump’s not all powerful. The Supreme Court just ruled 9-0 that he has to return someone they sent to prison in El-Salvador. He’s reaching as far as he can to see how much he can get, that’s all. If you give in, “how much Trump can get” will be as much as he can take. If you fight, he’ll often just go find someone easier to take on and if he does choose to throw down, you stand a good chance of winning because he’s a bully, and at heart he’s a coward. He has no real plan, no real beliefs: there’s nothing he’s willing to go to the wall for except, perhaps, to remove people close to him who fail in their primary duty as a sycophant.

This is especially pathetic in the case of Big Law and Ivies with massive endowments. They can fight and doing so will be good for them in the long run. For law firms it shows that they have guts and no one wants a gutless lawyer. For Ivies it shows that they actually believe all that crap they spew about academic freedom.

Bear in mind that Trump’s power is a fleeting thing. He’s very likely going to lose the House and probably the Senate in 2 years and he’s done in four. There’s a small chance of him managing a coup, and a good chance he’ll try, but his antics are making him noxious not just to the citizenry but to huge chunks of powerful financial and industrial elites. Odds are he’s got his one term, and his health is bad enough that he may not even make that, though I suspect Vance would in many ways be worse.

But, again, if you give in to Trump without a fight, you’re telling there’s more he can get from you.

So fight.

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America Is Trying To Form An Anti-China Trade Bloc

By Ian Welsh

On April 10, 2025

23 Comments

Trump backed off on most of his tariffs after Japan sold a ton of bonds and he panicked. He replaced most of the tariffs with a blanket 10%, and kept tariffs on China and Canada (because those countries had counter-tariffed the US, supposedly.) Now the report is that what US negotiators are demanding is that in exchange for avoiding US tariffs, other countries tariff China.

It should be noted, first, that China will not back down. The way Trump is framing this is “China will come to us” and sub-voce “beg” and that’s not happening, it would be a massive loss of face for Xi and for China and China is a “face” society. So massive tariffs on both sides will continue unless the US makes the first overtures and in a face saving way. The US rates on China are 125% and the Chinese rates on America are 85%.

These are nuclear levels and are going to bring trade damn-near to a halt. China has also put export bans on a number of companies for “dual use” techs: in practice, they’ve hit Lockheed and Boeing (big military aviation companies) so hard that I’m not sure those companies will be able to build planes, the supply chain is that China-centric and there are no alternatives.

(Aside: the criminally minded will be scrambling to smuggle into the US, and fortunes will be made, as they were during Prohibition. Those who wish to reduce criminal risks can just import Chinese goods to Canada and Mexico and sell them to whomever. “I don’t know officer, I don’t ask them why they want all those machine parts. Not my business.”)

It’s hard to say how this will play out, because:

Lots of western countries have a hate-on for China. European and Canadian politicians, early on in Trump’s regime, had suggested “why tariff us, let’s go after China together!”
But… that was then, and this is now. A lot has changed in three months. No one trusts Trump to keep deals any more and China is looking mighty stable. Even if you’d really rather do business with the US, like Europe, can you expect any deal to be kept?

I’m genuinely unsure how this will play out. My personal preference would be to tell the US and Trump to pound sand: they don’t keep their deals, so you just can’t do business with them no matter what the theoretical case is. (That case is mostly that it’s hard to compete with China, their goods are so cheap, whereas the US is sclerotic so you can sell them stuff, especially if they’re in a trade war with China and can’t buy cheap: charge them 2x as much and still come in under!)

If Trump had gone for this as the start, he would have gotten it. Canada and Europe would have fallen over themselves to join in. Now? Not so sure.

There’s a lot of “Trump is a genius and there is a PLAN” going around in MAGA circles. Bullshit. If this was Trump’s actual goal, what he did made it harder to achieve rather than easier. What actually happened is that Japan jerked the bond market’s chain and Trump backed down and is trying to pivot.

It’s not a completely stupid pivot, the West isn’t competitive against Chinese manufacturing, and one way to deal with that (a bad way, but still a way) is to just cut China out of Western markets and sell over-priced goods to each other.

Years ago I said that the way geopolitics were playing out was leading to a “New Cold War” — there’s an entire category on this blog, just on that.

Crunch time has come and we’ll see if it happens, and who’s on each side. Trump’s made America’s chances of putting together a strong coalition far weaker than they should have been, but anti-China fear and a refusal to end rentierism in the West mean that we can’t, actually, compete against China, so there’s still a strong temptation to form that anti-China bloc.

If so, we’ll be the weaker side, as the USSR/Warsaw Pact was last time and we will lose the new Cold war, falling further and further behind technologically and watching as the Chinese enjoy goods we can barely even dream of, just as was true of the late Soviet Union.

Everything, and I mean everything, will be sacrificed to keep the oligarchs in power, keep making them richer and keep the flow of unearned cash pouring into every rich person’s orifices.

Update: Seems that the EU and China are in talks to end EU tariffs on electric vehicles. That sound you hear is Elon Musk puckering up to kiss his ass goodbye.

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China Cuts The Legs Out Underneath The US LNG Industry

By Ian Welsh

On April 9, 2025

19 Comments

I didn’t see this coming:

In a move that stunned traders, analysts and policymakers alike, China has just announced a complete halt on all liquefied natural gas imports from the United States. A decision made abruptly with no prior indication, no phased reduction and no explanation beyond a terse statement from Beijing…

…China was one of the fastest growing markets for American LNG, importing more than four million tons annually. Cutting that overnight is more than symbolic, it’s surgical.

Early reactions have been nothing short of panic. Energy markets were jolted, LNG prices in Europe and Asia swung wildly and US energy firms reported immediate financial hits…

…Overnight, the US was eliminated from one of the world’s most lucrative gas markets worth more than US$2.4 billion a year. Let that number sink in. More than 4.4 million tons of American LNG every single year now suddenly has nowhere to go.

Ports along the Gulf Coast are already feeling the shock. Massive LNG tankers are sitting idle with nowhere to dock, no buyers to receive them. Terminal operators are scrambling to reroute shipments, but the damage is done. Revenue streams are drying up. American energy firms are haemorrhaging cash: millions of dollars in losses each day…

…

China has begun rerouting LNG cargoes originally meant for East Asia straight into Europe’s energy-hungry markets. The message is clear: If the US wants to weaponise trade, China will weaponise its energy strategy.

Why Europe? Because it’s vulnerable and China knows it. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the European Union has been scrambling to find a replacement for Russian gas. For the past two years, the US had been the emergency supplier, shipping LNG across the Atlantic to prevent blackouts and political chaos in capitals from Berlin to Warsaw. But that relationship, built out of necessity, was never guaranteed.

And China just exposed that fragility. By stepping in with competitive LG offers at lower prices, China is capitalising on a moment of weakness. European energy firms, already strained by inflation and political pressure, are welcoming any chance to secure stable and affordable supply.

One of the major stories of the Ukraine war is how the US took advantage of the pipeline sabotage and sanctions to sell Europe natural gas. Expensive natural gas. This increased the energy cost of heavy industry and led to a lot of European, especially German factories, shuttering and moving to the US.

Win/Win. For America.

China isn’t itself an LNG exporter, but it controls a lot of the market thru long term contracts. It has an excess of what it needs, and it just signed a new contract with Australia for long term supply:

In March 2025, Australia’s energy giant Woodside Energy inked a game-changing 15-year contract with China Resources Gas, one of Beijing’s top natural gas distributors.

Under the deal, Australia will begin supplying 600,000 tons of LNG per year, starting in 2027. While the volume might not seem earth-shattering on paper, the symbolism behind the agreement is monumental…

… Australian LNG is currently 20% cheaper than US shipments largely due to proximity and lower transportation costs. It takes roughly 10 fewer days for Australian cargo to reach Chinese ports, compared to those from the US.

Australia, of course, has been rather anti-China and a big US ally, BUT cold hard cash, err, trumps that.

What’s becoming clear about this trade war is that China has gamed it out. They thought ahead, having learned lessons during the first Trump administration: they were ready. They’ve massively reduced their vulnerabilities and carefully examined America’s weaknesses, and now they’re hitting them. Hard.

This realigns American allies in Europe and Australia more towards China, it hurts the US, and it highlights the benefits of doing business with China.

Xi Jingping

Xi, as we discussed in our last article, has been planning for this, not just since Trump, but since he took power. He’s locked and loaded and he’s firing his guns. The more Trump doubles down, the more America will be hurt, because China needs America less than America needs China. In many cases America firms have no choice but to buy from China, there is nowhere else to get what they need, while China either has alternatives or has already written off buying from the US, as is the case with chips. To China, America is a lost cause: it can’t be relied on either as a supplier or a buyer.

If America’s effectively a write-off, well, treat it like a write-off. And that’s what China is doing.

Trump and many Americans thought that China was the vulnerable one, that China was in a weaker position than them (they made the same mistake with Canada). It isn’t. Now Europe and Japan are holding weaker hands than the US in a trade war, but here’s China actually strengthening Europe.

It is to laugh. Trump’s fundamentally incompetent, a D- player and he’s going up against Xi, who’s arguably a great statesman, and so far, Xi is ripping him a new one.

This is what actual planning and actual competence looks like: see threats in the future and get ready for them. When someone declares you their enemy, as the US has repeatedly, take them seriously.

We haven’t seen that in any Western country in at least two generations.

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Understanding Xi JIngping

By Ian Welsh

On April 8, 2025

17 Comments

What I always remember about Xi is something the founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yee wrote—that he had only met two people in his life who never let anyone else influence their emotions: Nelson Mandela and Xi Jingping.

Xi took over the CCP at a time it was completely ridden with corruption, to the point where regular citizens regularly mocked and complained about it. There were major factions, centering around the two previous leaders and the party had lost much of its ideological orientation. Citizens were happy with economic progress, but there was a sense that there was too much inequality, young people couldn’t afford homes and there was flirting with western ideas of democracy.

China has had three great CCP leaders. The first was Mao, and despite his bad reputation in the West the fact is that Mao massively improved primary education, dropped the mortality rate thru the floor, increased Chinese lifespans, and one famine aside, made sure everyone was fed. Mao tilled the ground, making China’s later rapid modernization possible, using essentially the same model as Japan: start with primary education, then secondary and concentrate on improvements in health.

Mao’s party was very ideological. Deng changed that. The Dengist paradigm was “modernize as fast as possible and be pragmatic: whatever works, works.” This was very successful, but it lead to corruption, to the formation of power centers outside the party, especially among the very rich non-party members and to the formation of cliques within the party. It also gutted the party’s ideology.

In addition Deng’s method of modernization was export driven (this is reasonable, almost everyone did it this way) and had left China very dependent on external trade, especially with America, its primary geopolitical foe.

Xi set a bunch of goals, as part of Xi Jingping Thought:

Get rid of most of the corruption;
Break the factions and center the party around him;
Create an ideological party with unanimity on goals and how to achieve them;
Break power centers outside the party;
Spread the wealth to more people and make everyone at least moderately prosperous;
Listen more to the people;
Make it so that China is no longer vulnerable to foreign trade disruptions;
Make China the world leader in technology and science;
Orient China’s trade towards the developing world more than to the West;
Place China in a position to rewrite the world’s economic system;
Strengthen the army and make sure it is loyal to the party.

The bottom line here is that Xi has accomplished most of his goals and those he has yet to accomplish, like #10, are well underway. China is the world’s tech leader, the factions are broken, all corruption isn’t gone but its way down, billionaires are dropping like flies; the housing market has become cheaper and the government is taking it over and plans to build most housing going forwards, the party is unified in what it does and how it does to a remarkable degree, and America’s trade war is not a threat to China, but an opportunity to increase China’s world influence.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Xi is probably the world’s most successful leader: he leads the most powerful economic nation in the world and he’s accomplished almost all the goals he set for himself. China’s response to Trump’s tariffs “this is stupid, but OK, bring it on” is just the latest sign of China’s strength and Xi success. More and more nations come to China with their problems: when Saudi Arabia and Iran wanted to make peace, China brokered the talks. English was not spoken.

Trump and almost all Western leaders are incompetent fools in comparison, who have overseen the decline of their nations, losing the tech and science lead, losing 1st place in trade to China, losing first place in industrial capacity to China and losing their proxy war against Russia to China, without whom Russia could not have withstood western sanctions.

Xi is the world’s most important leader, only Trump comes close, and Trump is important because he’s accelerating the end of the America Empire: because he’s a fool and and an idiot.

Xi sets goals, figures out how to achieve them, and does so. Trump and most Western leaders flail around, doing nothing but speeding up their countries decline and minting more rich people.

It isn’t even a competition any more, it’s a rout.

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