| | | | Democrats Go Small on Impeachment | | Now that the House has delivered just two articles of impeachment against President Trump—fewer than Andrew Johnson's 11, Richard Nixon's three, and Bill Clinton's two with 11 total subparts—Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who testified before the House Judiciary Committee last week, argues in favor of keeping it simple.
House Democrats have chosen an impeachment strategy that will extend beyond impeachment, Feldman writes in a Bloomberg column: They determined "not that Trump hadn't committed more impeachable acts, but that the public would be able to understand and focus on these two charges in particular," Feldman argues. "Whether that strategy works should not only be judged by the outcome in the Senate, but also by the judgment of history, and by the results of the 2020 election." | | More than 1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty in recent decades—a UN report noted that the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day had fallen from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million by 2015—but will poverty end? Maybe not, Nobel laureates Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo write in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Given that so much of that global improvement has happened in large, developing countries like China and India, it's noteworthy that their eras of rapid economic growth appear to be over.
Developing economies have already overcome their inefficiencies: Misallocated resources, broadly, have been put to their best uses, and there's not much more room for improvement. Despite intensive study, Banerjee and Duflo write, experts still don't know exactly what causes economic growth; so, they recommend, it might be better to drop the focus on growth and instead strive to address things like education and health care. "In the absence of a magic potion for development, the best way to profoundly transform millions of lives is not to try in vain to boost growth," they write. "It is to focus squarely on the thing that growth is supposed to improve: the well-being of the poor." | | At the UN, China Grows More Assertive | | Analysts have noted China's growing diplomatic heft (two recent essays in Foreign Affairs made the point), and now The Economist writes that Beijing is becoming particularly assertive at the UN. After the UK circulated a statement in October calling for UN access to Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, a "diplomatic brawl ensued," with China reportedly pushing some countries not to sign and persuading dozens to sign a counter-statement.
It continues a trend, the magazine writes, in which Chinese diplomats have sought jobs in "mostly boring … institutions that few countries care about," slowly enhancing China's presence to match its status as an emerging power. China has successfully inserted "catchphrases" into UN documents—"such as 'win-win co-operation' and 'a community with a shared future for mankind' (keep your hands off China, is the underlying sentiment)"—and, evidently, it enjoys enough clout to push back forcefully against human-rights criticism. | | Trump Trade Is Swinging Wildly | | President Trump took office promising to disrupt trade and secure better deals, and today, he's hitting both notes: The World Trade Organization will grind to a partial halt, thanks to Trump's obstruction, while his NAFTA replacement won the approval of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Tallying the winners and losers of the USMCA deal with Canada and Mexico, The Washington Post's Heather Long counts Trump and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer among the winners, predicting momentum for their agenda. (Mexico will lose out, Long advises, as the deal focuses on preventing relocations there.)
But as Kimberly Ann Elliott writes for the World Politics Review, that agenda is already moving at a breakneck pace, after Trump suddenly announced steel and aluminum tariffs early this month on Brazil and Argentina (despite their agreement to export limits last year) based on claims of currency manipulation to cheat US farmers (which neither country is doing). The Economist writes that a proposal to punish French wine and cheese imports, released by Lighthizer's office on the same day, followed a detailed investigation; that made for a stark contrast between Trump's vagaries and Lighthizer's steady pace, while amounting to a crescendo of possible tariffs suggested all at once. The unpredictability and seeming lack of coordination might be why a China deal remains elusive, the magazine suggests. | | | | | | |
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