Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Jason Miks.

July 25, 2018

President Trump's "Fixes" Are Starting to Sound Familiar

President Trump's joint statement Wednesday with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker declaring victory on trade had a familiar ring to it, writes Aaron Blake for The Washington Post. That's not a good thing.

"From a political standpoint, the strategy makes sense. Diplomacy is complicated and extremely difficult for your average American to understand, as is trade. Trump has also shown he's not particularly worried about the media and experts parsing his comments and casting doubt on his victories, as long as he can sell them to a base that has stood by Trump through thick and thin and almost always seen his exploits in the best possible light," Blake writes.

"If your only goal is to appeal to voters who already mistrust what the media and experts are telling them and you have little regard for specifics, it becomes easier to manufacture crises and then claim you have used them to obtain concessions. As long as the EU imports more soybeans, Trump has something specific he can point to as a deliverable from his trade war strategy. And people who want to believe Trump will believe he just stuck it to the EU and bent it to his will."

Team Trump to Farmers: A "Band-Aid" for Your Gushing Wound

The United States might have the upper hand in any trade war with China. But that doesn't extend to America's farmers, suggests Andrew Egger in The Weekly Standard. And the Trump administration's $12 billion "B and-Aid " of a bailout isn't going to save them.

"Although the United States buys more products overall from China than it sells to the Chinese, the opposite is true of [agricultural] commodities. China, by far the world's largest agricultural importer, has in recent decades grown into a crucial market for US farmers, particularly soybean growers…But as trade tensions have grown, China has deliberately begun to wean itself from US farm markets, instituting retaliatory tariffs that have made Brazilian soybeans—or even beans grown domestically in China—more attractive to Chinese buyers," Egger writes.

"International trade markets are not easy to rebuild. Once the Chinese give up US agriculture, there's no telling how long it will take for them to return to our markets—if they ever return at all. This would leave the Trump administration with two unsavory options: Provide huge agriculture bailouts year over year indefinitely, or allow thousands of US farms to go belly-up as a direct result of its trade policies."

NATO: Military Alliance Or…Summer Camp?

President Trump was wrong to raise doubts about whether the United States would come to the defense of smaller NATO nations like Montenegro, writes Michael Brendan Dougherty for National Review. That doesn't disguise an uncomfortable truth: The ever-expanding alliance is making itself ever weaker.

"NATO lately makes decisions on military matters for non-military reasons. The US State Department recently protested Poland's recent law on Holocaust scholarship by threatening to redeploy NATO troops and resources outside of Poland. Why? Either the troops had a strategic reason to be stationed in Poland, or they did not. NATO is either a military alliance to deter Russia, or it is a political project to deter Central European populists," he says.

Expansionists have made NATO "into a political summer camp for laggard European nations, have used it to try to punish democratically elected political parties that 'Atlanticists' dislike within the West, and have made the US security guarantee more questionable by adding nations we are not in position to protect at all."

China's Big Brother: Coming to a Country Near You?

In its race to conquer artificial intelligence, China is looking to Africa to broaden the racial mix of information it gathers for its facial recognition systems, writes Amy Hawkins in Foreign Policy, citing a pending deal between a Chinese tech firm and the Zimbabwean government. That's probably bad news for Africans.

"Other than increased security and surveillance measures, Zimbabweans will not see any return on the research that their personal data has helped accelerate. Acceleration is the whole point because the global AI race is ultimately a race to set standards," Hawkins writes. "The Chinese government defines its ambitions as becoming the country that is 'setting the pace.' As racial upsets in facial recognition have shown, the standards in this field are still to play for. But with unprecedented access to a more diverse range of data, Chinese companies are edging ever closer to this goal—spreading their model of authoritarianism along the way."

Latin America's $4.3 Trillion Dream

Latin America finally appears to be embracing free trade, writes Shannon O'Neil for the Council on Foreign Relations. Don't expect America to benefit.

"In normal times [Latin American nations] might have turned to the US, a top investor and trading partner for most every nation. Yet Trump's obstinacy throughout the NAFTA negotiations suggests few deals are to be had to the north. As a result, a marked shift is now underway," she writes.

And while the European Union and Asia have been favored partners, the region is thinking big by looking inward.

"The main Latin American economies are also moving to make real the long elusive dream of regional economic integration — in which it lags every region but Africa. This week, leaders of the Pacific Alliance, a comprehensive free-trade agreement begun by Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile, will meet their Mercosur counterparts in Puerto Vallarta to discuss collaboration and even a potential merger. An agreement would bring together 80 percent of the region's gross domestic product, creating a $4.3 trillion dollar market."

Meanwhile, in Venezuela…The IMF has revised its prediction for the annualized inflation rate in the country to 1 million percent by the end of the year, writes Anthony Faiola in The Washington Post.

"According to a study by Steve H. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, Venezuela's inflationary spiral as of May ranked as the 23rd highest ever recorded. The worst case on file remains Hungary after World War II, when inflation ran so rampant that prices doubled every 15 hours."

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