Dialectical Reflections--Shift: "The European Commission’s ‘Omnibus Simplification Proposal’: Shift’s Preliminary Reflections"

 

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 By now virtually everyone with an interest in a number of related fields--business and human rights, supply chains, surveillance, systems theory and regulatory governance, national security, data and tech, and macro-economic policy within national and international domains--has heard of and probably tried to digest the European Commission's innocuous sounding "Omnibus Simplification Proposal." (for official explanations and justifications, built around a "competitiveness compass" produced to facilitate those ends, see, Commission proposes to cut red tape and simplify business environment; Questions and answers on simplification omnibus I and II; Simplifying EU rules and boosting competitiveness – Omnibus I; InvestEU - European Union – Omnibus II; Clean Industrial Deal; Press release: Commission simplifies rules on sustainability and EU investments, delivering over €6 billion in administrative relief). Omnibus I was released (after the usual leakage common to hot-house self-reflective techno-bureaucratic cultures and serving as an instrument of its internal politics) on 25 February 2025 and had in its cross hairs the essence of the global business and human rights regulatory project hubbed in Europe: the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (“CSRD”), the Taxonomy Regulation,  the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (“CSDDD”), and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (“CBAM”) (text may be accessed here).

On its face, an effort to simplify (and sold that way for as long as possible), the project has always been about reformulating the years long regulatory projects that had been enacted over the last decade or so. Yet, perhaps, the easiest way to understand the path from regulatory cages developing over the last quarter century (including its increasingly orthodox academic theorization to enhance both authority and legitimacy within Europe) to retrenchment is fear. What sort of fear? The fear expressed by EU Commission President von der Leyen in her speech at Davo (considered here) that flowed from the (official) warning in the Draghi Report, “The Future of European Competitiveness," a 400 or so page document detailing what might be understood as a notice of a potential hard turn in the regulatory project of Europe, and thus in the template for the construction of the structures of a policy driven regulatory governance of economic activity more broadly). It was a fear that was the grandchild of the fear of  Europe in 1945, stuck between largely intact powers with an appetite for consuming lesser states within new structures of dependence and inter-connection. It was a fear, as well, of the long term relevance of Europe as a near apex power within whatever was emerging as the post-global global order. And it was a fear that in an environment in which Europe would be shrinking the resulting political. social, ethnic and religious instabilities  would increase in prominence in ways that could spiral out of control in the absence of foreign intervention of some sort of other.

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The result, when the actual nature of the effort was unmasked, was to be expected--especially by those groups and actors who would rightly feel betrayed both by the discourse of simplification and especially by the project itself (detailed here in a useful timeline).  These were projects a long time in coming. They were meant to cement the leadership role of adherents to a certain orthodoxy of view about markets, human rights, economic policy, the role of the state sector, and the modalities of surveillance and control in an environment in which markets and private actions were to increasingly express the objectives and aspirations of public policy in its apex ideological forms--human rights, sustainability and through them (appropriate) development. And they were meant to do this without challenging the pricing model of economic activity under which business activity was otherwise regulated. In a sense, these regulatory structures were built alongside that of  the classical model grounded in the ideologies of finance and value the essence of which was that everything can be priced and that the state facilitated the assignment of cost and risk (premises anathema in many respects to those who, following the international model, grounded regulatory approaches on the fundamental idea that human rights, including sustainability, are universal, indivisible and interdependent and thus could neither be priced nor negotiated away). In the end, and in its most extreme manifestation of the thrust of the emerging orthodoxy, markets were to be subsumed within and serve as part of a seamless techno-bureaucracy overseeing all aspects of human relations within the framework of a proactive liberal democratic apparatus in which guided masses could be enlightened into exercising voting authority in the appropriate ways. That was the project that was worth saving, and one that was at the core of the threat posed by what otherwise might be understood as either innocuous bureaucratic and regulatory simplification, covering what civil society feared was a deregulation effort undoing the regulatory advances that were the object of Omnibus (eg here).

It is with this in mind that one might read the extremely useful analysis of The European Commission’s ‘Omnibus Simplification Proposal’: Shift’s Preliminary Reflections, prepared by Shift--an organization that John Ruggie helped create and that has remained an influential voice in the evolution and adaptation of the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights in an altering environment (certainly an environment which is in some respects has been radically altered from that taken for granted during the rime of the development of the UNGP). The analysis follows below and may be accessed online. A few brief analytical points worth considering perhaps.   

Pix Credit Tomb of Sancho Sánchez Carillo (Burgos, 1295) Catalan Museum

1. Timelines matter. Radical change  generally is undertaken gradually. That had been the approach advocated by John Ruggie and embedded in the UNGP)--principled pragmatism. But impatience can be a potent political force. Radical change, then, also might be undertaken swiftly. Yet that requires a sufficient enough control of the power apparatus to enforce radical change; and the ruthlessness to let nothing stand in the way of change. The European seeking accelerated change chose a middle ground--moderate speed and the suffocation of regulatory compliance that might have been complex enough to effectively shift discretionary authority either from the private to the public sector, or to transfer it to interlocking compliance bureaucracies in public and private entities to which overall decision making authority would be vested. One speaks, of course, of political risk in framing regulatory objectives.  It was a pity, ironically of course, that those responsible for the cluster of measures now in the cross hairs of simplification that no one bothered to undertake the sort of risk-based due diligence with respect to regulatory reform strategies the implementation of which is the critical at-risk element of the simplified regulations. Perhaps they did; in that case the suggestion that risk based assessments are neither perfoect nor can they avoid catastrophe is made clearer.   

2. Complexity as a political instrument. It might follow, then, that regulatory complexity is not a "thing" in itself but rather a means to an ends. One might, then, wish to consider the value of complexity--layered regulations that might or might not align, traps for the unwary, shift of operationalization from regulatory text to officials and decision making bodies, assessment and sanctions schemes that  mask shifts in authority and risk allocation, and the like.  In this sense the debate about complexity may actually be a debate about something quite different--a debate about the face of power and the means of its assertion in the service of higher objectives. In addition, time as a function of measurement also represents a political choice when reduced to regulation. This mirrors the challenge in the field of corporate governance through the nudging of financial reporting rules. Focusing on immediate effect and immediate right in relation to a narrowly defined event will produce quite distinct consequential risk avoidance behaviors, and value assessment, than one in which the focus is on middle to long term risk effects across a broader scope against which effects are measured. 

3. Risk is not a single layered concept. The object of the regulatory projects now subject to simplification was, as Shift correctly notes, was straightforward and in its own way quite simple--to manage risk-based due diligence. That is true enough. Nonetheless thee are a number of risk distinctions that merit some consideration. One touches on the assignment of risk bearing and risk controlling functions. To some extent, the business and human rights project sought an alignment between risk bearing and risk controlling, placing both within an entity engaged in economic activity. The alignment, of course, could not be perfect, but it might be workable in markers. The alignment becomes mroe complex where the state tales to itself a measure of risk control functions.  And that risk control function becomes more difficult still where what is controlled is both the nature of risk controlling decisions and the quantum of tolerable risk that may be taken. From an international human rights environment, especially one in which one starts from the premise that the risk negative human rights impacts must be prevented in the ideal state, the trajectories are toward risk avoidance cultures. That produces a conflict with risk taking cultures sometimes necessary for (1) innovation and (2) development. To sort that out a more nuanced se o distinctions between tolerable and less tolerable risks is required, but more importantly, the acceptance of the idea that one sort of negative human rights impact (short term, specifically contextual, etc.) might be balanced against positive human rights impacts (the argument of some in the "development first" camp). The idea here isn't to argue among these but rather to suggest that "risk-based" measures cover a substantial amount of ground. Indeed that is the essence of the dialectic between the Draghi Report, on the one hand, and the vision of human rights and sustainability organization, on the other. They necessarily talk past each other because they have not yet been able to align their language, objectives, goals, and the way in which "things," events, actions, consequences, are identified (much less measured). But this disjunction is as old as the Norms project on the ashes of which John Ruggie sought to find a bridge.

4. Outcomes are also not a single layered concept.  The idea here mimics that of risk. It is true enough that if the sole or paramount objective was risk based due diligence measured against reductions in negative impacts (in whatever form agreement about the meaning of all of these terms is achieved, and further assuming agreement on the allocation of authority to define and to apply those meanings), then the idea of simplification ought to be equally straightforward. The difficulty here is the lack of alignment between the objectives against which measurement is possible.  The case of the oppositional nature (sometimes) between a more absolutist human rights impacts objectives measured in the short or long term) and a more development oriented approaches are clear. Yet simplification in this case also suggests that the binary--positive/negative human rights impacts--is itself deeply complicated by the environment in which it is meant to have an effect. 

5. At the end of any simplification process lies complexity. That is not because simplification is impossible; the challenge is that even simplification, in context, is complex and produces complexity. That is the case even when one starts from the proposition that simplification requires or is a process of shedding. Shedding might be understood as an exercise in essentialization and reduction. That produces either less detail, or a narrowing of scope. With less detail there is a shift from rules based to discretionary decision making (as well as interpretation). In either case, shedding also requires a delegation of authority to create and interpret between the elements retained. And delegation itself produces what appears be be order at the level of simplification and a devolution of complexity down (or aside) to those spaces in which what has been shed now appears. The complexity of simplicity is as much an issue in the evolution of virtual governance tools as it is in the organization of human to human regulatory structures (eg Hermann Kopetz, Simplicity is Complex (2019)).

6. What next? Shift, like many organizations committed to an architecture of business sustainability/ human rights focus on saving what they can, pushing back, arguing from logic, history or values--the values and narratives of which would appeal more to them than to their opponents. In that respect Shift offers an excellent set of ideas. Perhaps there is a little room for bargaining; that will depend less on the power of their logic than on the reality and risk of the circumstances in which Europe now finds itself.  Events have overtaken, to some extent, that long and steady human rights project which needed as a base, a stable global system. It also requires a willingness to confront the larger issues within which this regulatory framework is bit a part--the question of the forms, ideologies, purposes, and manifestations of regulation (and with it the relationship between a regulatory state and autonomous individuals whose autonomy is exercised in economic, social, cultural, religious, and political market places (platforms today). I can only hoe there is a space within which both important social objectives might be aligned within a European normative space. 

 

Volume 34, Issue 152, March 2025 issue of The Journal of Contemporary China (JCC) is now published

Suisheng Zhao (赵穗生), Professor and Editor, Journal of Contemporary China (JCC) has announced the publication of Volume 34, Issue 152, March 2025 issue of The Journal of Contemporary China (JCC) is now published available online. For your convenience, below is the Table of Contents of the March 2025 issue of The Journal of Contemporary China.

The Suspension of Tariffs Against Mexico-- A Mexican Perspective ("México fue tratado con mucho respeto y llegamos a este acuerdo” [“Mexico was treated with great respect and we reached this agreement”]")

 

 

It was announced that after a meeting between the presidents of the United States and Mexico, the United States side suspended imposition of tariffs for a month. The U.S. side of this communication and its consequences were well described in the (English speaking) press.  As interesting, perhaps, was the characterization of the event from the Mexican side. To that end, the press release issued by the Office of the President of Mexico might be a good starting point.  

The Press Relse follows below:  “México fue tratado con mucho respeto y llegamos a este acuerdo”: Presidenta; no se pagarán aranceles en productos dentro del T-MEC; “Llegamos a este acuerdo que realmente beneficia a ambas naciones, seguir colaborando, cooperando en distintos temas y al mismo tiempo en el marco del respeto”, destacó [“Mexico was treated with great respect and we reached this agreement”: President; no tariffs will be paid on products within the T-MEC “We reached this agreement that really benefits both nations, continuing to collaborate, cooperate on different issues and at the same time within the framework of respect,” she stressed].

It goes without saying that the contrast between this and the meeting with the President of Ukraine is quite telling in virtually every respect, bus suggests the parameters of the new protocols and expectations  when dealing with U.S. leadership.  This is something the press is both picking up and distributing in their role as agent of capacity building among other foreign officials (eg,  How Mexico’s Leader Is Rewriting the Rules for Handling Trump: President Claudia Sheinbaum impressed Trump by sticking to her guns without antagonizing him). What President Sheinbaum adds is the internal narrative necessary to translate the protocols and performance roles for US relations with the national expectations of the local elites and electorate. In that context the festival idea might well be a master stroke, at least within the parameters of Mexican politics:

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is planning a festival on Sunday in the capital’s historic main square facing the National Palace, after President Trump suspended tariffs on Mexican exports until April 2. Sheinbaum had initially called Mexicans to a mass rally at the Zócalo, the capital city’s main square, as an act of unity to announce retaliatory measures had Trump followed through with his tariff threat. But now, there was no need, she said on Thursday. Sheinbaum said Sunday’s mass gathering would go on, but with a radically different tone: it would now be a party to celebrate the suspension of the tariffs. “We will have a festival and invite musical groups,” she said. (Mexico’s Sheinbaum to Hold ‘Festival’ Sunday as Trump Pauses Tariffs).

Pix credit Wall Street Jourrnal Print edition 7 March 2025, p. A1

 

The Phenomenology of America First and its New World Ordering of Merchants in this New Era of Global Historical Development: President Trump's Address to Congress--Text and Brief Reflections

 

Pix Credit White House Web Page

 Mr. Trump delivered an address to Congress on 4 March 2025.  The White House sounded positive about the address.  See President Trump’s Historic Address Captivates America (Articles March 5, 2025); What They Are Saying: President Trump’s Masterclass Before Congress  (Articles March 5, 2025); Democrats Showed Whose Side They’re On — And it’s Not the American People (Briefings & Statements March 5, 2025). And so on.

Pix credit New York Times

The text of the address to Congress follows below along with a very brief set of reflections.  The text is drawn from a transcript published by the New York Times and available HERE. The New York Times trumpeted the speech, or at least its essence in the following way: "In a speech to Congress in his first weeks in office, the president laid out his vision to remake U.S. policy on the military, trade, immigration and foreign aid." (Ibid.). One would have to agree that there were many facts and accomplishments described, which together might suggest a vision; and there were many sentiments expressed, which might provide a framework for the ideology of that vision. That is all quite welcome; it is just not as clear that the vision and its experience is quite fully developed yet. What is clear, though, is that this President, unlike many of his predecessors of the last century is more a creature of phenomenological envisioning, than a conceptual one. That is, that whatever will pass for the vision-ideology of this administration, its phenomenology will be far more important, and telling, than any sort of conceptual or ideological textual  summarizing. To be clear, the reference to the phenomenological points to the style of this administration to develop its self-conception from an iterative and dynamic flow of actions that are both iterative and which expand to reach the outer boundaries of the "vision space" intended; in this case by reoriented the political lebenswelt of the Republic, one which might require an epoché or suspension of judgment. Only what is what is directly given in experience serves as the basis for deriving the essence of that thing President Trump and his supporters share (or impose) within a community seeking common meaning. 

To understand Mr. Trump and America First, one must avoid listening to words and pay close attention to actions. This is in effect a strongly phenomenological presidency of the 21st century in which ideology is action, and action is distilled in text.    

1. Historical processes are perhaps driven by and as economics but they are driven by and appear in the form of cultural infinitive to the conceptualization of leadership.  In human history there appears to be a movement between priests, warriors, bureaucrats, merchants, peasants and undesirable in the constitution of the class of social sub-collectives that a culture designates as the source and form of its leadership. Modernity might have been understood as the passing of the mantle of collective leadership from priest to warrior. That passed, in turn from warrior to  bureaucrats (from noblesse d'epée to noblesse de robe), and then, from bureaucrats to merchants and peasants. That appears to be the age in which one continues to operate. In the United States, merchant elites rather than peasant elites appear to have reclaimed the authority to populate the ruling apparatus. They have taken it form the bureaucrats. To understand that is to understand both the phenomenology of the actio0ns that merchant leaders take, and the signification of the world around them,. It also suggests the ways in which conflict and stability can be imagined between merchant, warrior, bureaucrat, priestly, and peasant leadership collectives. To understand the new ordering and its revolutionary potential in the United States under President Trump, one must understand first the conceptual cages of merchant leadership--their lebenswelt--as well as the way in which they process conceptualization, their phenomenology of leadership. Both were well illustrated in the speech, 

2. God is mentioned five times in the address.  The first is with reference to a "National Wildlife Refuge, a pristine, peaceful 34,000-acre sanctuary for all of God’s creatures on the edge of the Gulf of America.". The second is in reference to the baseline referent for biological construction of humans: "And our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you." The third was with respect to the manifestation of a Divine will for a Divine purpose: "I believe that my life was saved that day in Butler for a very good reason. I was saved by God to Make America Great Again." The fourth was as a traditional invocation of Divine assistance in an earthly task which is itself a human effort to understand and implement the Divine will: "This will be our greatest era; with God’s help over the next four years, we are going to lead this nation even higher, and we are going to forge the freest, most advanced, most dynamic and most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this Earth." And the last was to extend the blessings of the Divine to the audience and the Nation: "Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America." No invocation of Biblical wisdom, just the alignment of God, the natural order, and the Divine--this is a phenomenological God, known by Divine action rather than the (Greek) malaise of philosophizing one's way to enlightenment). It is in things and action, rather in concepts and presumptions, that concepts and presumptions are manifested, understood, and most importantly where conception and action become one.  One appears to have returned to the alignment of the natural and the divine, each a reflection of the other, or perhaps better put, the perception of the natural is the means by one can discern the eternal and unchanging cognitive orderings of the divine; or perhaps, the face of God is manifested in the objects and relations among the Divine creation. And so on.  Anything beyond that might be best left to religious institutionalists  and their justifications.

3. Like many of his predecessors, this speech was marked by the "I."  The United States, like many many other places, has a long way on a pathway of the personal and the therapeutic.  Nothing makes sense unless it relates to the person who is attempting to make sense of things; and things make sense only as a function of the person seeking to rationalize thew world around them.  It is from this kernel of insight that the rest follows. This is neither critique nor particularly a habit of Mt. Trump--Mr. Trump in this sense is merely an outsized expression of a cultural affection which is deeply embedded not just in politics but in business.  Perhaps a distortion of the heroic vision, which them amalgamated with the self actualization mania of the last century. When then tied to hierarchies and notions of merit and authority, it can produce a toxic mixture in which  everything is personalized, and the personal is judged in relation to others. But that is a general problem , though one also on display here. Perhaps there is no help for this among the current generation; and while it may be tolerable among merchants, its transposition to the operations of a democratic republic may require some refinement.  Certainly merchants have long thought in the "I"--but not just merchants.   That I manifests, even as the "we" is sometimes substituted (consciously and deliberately) in textual tropes within the speech.

4.  One might, then,  be excused for wondering, then, whether the  fundamental operating assumptions of the "coding" for representative democracy within a federal system are aligned with any plausible version of its theory. If elective office is a prize attained by individuals for their greater glory (or at least the greater glory of what they think best), then every election that produces a winner also produces a mandate to go along with it--a mandate for the winner to exercise imperium at least during the length of their term in office. Imperium is personal and subject only to withdrawal of that mandate in a subsequent election. That appears to mark the thinking of enough "thought leaders" (whether their leadership derives from economic, social, cultural, religious, or other collective source) to merit some consideration.  As President Trump declared (but in a manner that mimics similar declaration from other leaders  over the long history of the Republic): "The presidential election of Nov. 5 was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades. We won all seven swing states, giving us an Electoral College victory of 312 votes. We won the popular vote by big numbers and won counties in our country." (President Trump Address to Congress). That gets to the essence of the notion of election.

It is, in the end, perhaps as good a way of understanding the nature of republican liberal democracy as any other, at least if it is aligned with the popular tastes for the way in which the masses are content to have themselves governed. And it aligns, in some fashion, with the fundamental notion of delegation--to persons (and now perhaps to process under evolving conceptions  of "rule of law")--grounded on the "personality" of that delegation, to elected officials who act to further their own personal relationship with office, to techno-bureaucrats who do the same within the scope of their mandates, etc. . The issues and approaches are quite similar to a sort f coded debate along the same lines within Marxist-Leninist circles.  And it is that convergence, quite apparent since 2013, which ought to be worthy of even greater consideration. For it might seem to some that while global economic convergence has been fracturing unmistakably since 2008 or so, the forms of governance appears to be more amenable to global convergence, even across political-economic models that on their face appear  incompatible. 

5. Also notable was the descent of political speech making into a sort of routinized bricolage that is the essence of the phenomenological turn in political visioning.  Certainly, it is likely that large language models can now, after digesting the speeches of leaders in liberal democratic states, effectively write (in a descriptive and predictive way) any political speech at any point in time as long as the model has been able to digest the latest facts and assess them on the basis of the ordering resumptions ("make America great", "protect democracy," return to a golden age" in this era, and their analogs during the leadership of people from opposing parties.  It doesn't really matter for the model. What matters id the trope--from "facts"s to vision, structured on what would be the liberal democratic form of the contemporary "basic line" which itself is a set of markers that define the form of policy objectives to meet the challenge of the current general social contradiction facing the nation.  President Trump's speech provides an excellent example of the type. And that, as a function of an expectation of listeners (who matter) provides  the essential modalities f the dialectics between speaker and audience which enhances their relationship--but which is an essential ingredient for the development of the position of the opposition (also using the same tropes but to different ends and with a variation on the "basic line", the policy articulations that collectively point to the underlying vision).

6. The essence of the current vision, in the style of a "silver age", appears focused on a return to a prior state rather than on the attainment of a more developed state.  The path forward, like all silver age civilizations, lies in the past. One REcreates; one REbuilds; one REturns; one COMES BACK.

I return to this chamber tonight to report that America’s momentum is back. Our spirit is back. Our pride is back. Our confidence is back. And the American dream is surging — bigger and better than ever before. The American dream is unstoppable, and our country is on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again. Never been anything like it. (President Trump Address to Congress)

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None of this is either good or bad on its own.  It is.  But what exactly is it? In one sense, the notion of REturn is as old as the American revolution, where part of the object was to REturn to a state of government rejecting newfangled experiments in Parliamentary supremacy being trotted out in the U.K. metropolis. Part of it is an expression of even more ancient notions of the protection of the customs and traditions of polity that might go back certainly to Aristotle (with respect to laws and governance). Another part, of course involves the tropes of returning to a golden era state as a means of interpretation of while it looks back discursively actually propels the society forward. There is something to be said of the tactic for leaders of fundamentally conservative social orders when they mean to transform them or their fundamental understanding of who they are and what is expected of them. It embraces the insight that for some the only way to walk forward is by looking backwards. A collective sometime ave to have the comfort of believing it is going back to a comfortable (at least in its ideal form) past while being managed forward, That, in part, requires the invocation of older imagery and discourses the meaning and fulfillment of which has been filled with what may be something new.

7. There is a bit if internal mimesis that reminds us that what appears new, in the style of this Presidency, is  to some degree (I leave the measurement of that degree to others) an imitation of the apocalytic and "othering" style of its predecessor.  President Biden spent much of his discursive moments, through the end of his leadership, developing the notion of threat to the essential nature of the Republic by Mr. Trump and his supporters. That was meant to pay political dividends, one can suppose, but also was thought to resonate with a divided electorate. Now that sensibility (if not that sense) is replicated, but in the ridiculing style of the current leader.

Pix credit here

This is my fifth such speech to Congress, and, once again, I look at the Democrats in front of me and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud. Nothing I can do. I could find a cure to the most devastating disease, a disease that would wipe out entire nations or announce the answers to greatest economy in history or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever recorded, and these people sitting right here will not clap, will not stand, and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements. They won’t do it no matter what. Five, five times I’ve been up here. It’s very sad. And it just shouldn’t be this way. So, Democrats sitting before me, for just this one night, why not join us in celebrating so many incredible wins for America? For the good of our nation, let’s work together and let’s truly make America great again. (President Trump Address to Congress)

What may be amazing is not that this has become a sort of "go to style" in the nature of political speech across divides (real or manufactured), but that those who use the tool appear to be amazed and surprised when their opponents use it--though that, too, might be the other critical element of this dialectical discourse. It does, though, seem to amuse the electorate, or at least those who signal to the electorate how they ought to respond to this show. . 

8. And what is the essence of the vision, the phenomenology of which occupied much of the space of the speech? It was to clean up. The lyrics of Betty Wright's famous "Clean Up Woman" comes to mind:

A clean up woman is a woman who
Gets all the love we girls leave behind
The reason I know so much about her
Is because she picked up a man of mine
Jumpin' slick was my ruin
'Cause I found out all I was doin'
Was makin' it easy for the clean up woman
To get my man's love, oh yeah
Just makin' it easy for the clean up woman
To get my baby's love, uh-huh, mm-hm

President Trump is, discursively, the Clean Up Woman who gets all of the Republic's love by giving it what it wants--that is the discourse of action on offer. Mr. Trump suggests, in effect, that Mr. Biden made it easy to get the love he was fussing about with. 

Upon taking office, I imposed an immediate freeze on all federal hiring, a freeze on all new federal regulations and a freeze on all foreign aid. I terminated the ridiculous “green new scam.” I withdrew from the unfair Paris climate accord, which was costing us trillions of dollars that other countries were not paying. I withdrew from the corrupt World Health Organization. And I also withdrew from the anti-American U.N. Human Rights Council. We ended all of Biden’s environmental restrictions that were making our country far less safe and totally unaffordable. And importantly, we ended the last administration’s insane electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto workers and companies from economic destruction.(President Trump Address to Congress)

And so on.  And, discursively, at least, and before Congress, President Trump got all the lovin'.

9. That gets one, at last, to the nature of the presidential vision in a phenomenological age.  In 2016 I suggested its parameters ( "Let's Make a Deal" as Economic Policy). The context was the withdrawal of the United States from the Trans Pacific Partnership that it has carefully nurtured (as a sort of new and improved Free Trade of the Americas v. 20). I had suggested then that the withdrawal appeared to mark the abandonment of a multinational American project to build global systems. While the focus was on economics, the reach was fairly comprehensive.  That movement, which was among President Trump first actions as President, and which was then was characterized as from systems to serendipity, provided the clue to its maturing form in President Trump's 2nd Administration. What might have been understood as serendipity when evaluated against a half  a century of systems building in 2016, now is better understood as action sequences, the accumulation of which reveals vision, and in the process, a system building of a vastly different sort. That system is more closely aligned to the inductive, mimetic, and iterative systems of virtual analytics than it was to the old fashioned functionally differentiated bureaucratic systems on which the post-1945 global order was built.  

President Trump's speech may reveal in clearer form that it is perhaps more accurate to speak not of action but of transaction as the experiential basis of inductive vision and systems building. That is, of course, the fundamental premise that marks the phenomenology of the merchant (rather than of the warrior, the priest, the official-bureaucrat or the peasant). It is dialectical and iterative (and in this sense repetitive), the template for which are transactions (results rather than objectives), the accumulation of which reveals--post facto--objective as the expression of transaction. And what result? Perhaps that was best gleaned from President Trump's offer to the people of Greenland: "We will keep you safe. We will make you rich. And together, we will take Greenland to heights like you have never thought possible before. It’s a very small population but very, very large piece of land and very, very important for military security." (President Trump Address to Congress). Within that, round and round one goes because in this model the objectives, the vision, is not stationary but effectively the product of that iterative accumulation of results built around naturalized premises about how the world (and its objects) ought to be working from the centering perspective of the deal makers. There is no end goal here--other than the capacity to continuously engage in transactions that produce results that may be assessed as value positive in accordance with whatever measure proves to be useful at the time.

This is not invented out of thin air; it is the essence of an idealized late twentieth century American corporate model (the essence of which emerged in the 1980s) operating in markets.  These actors are internally authoritarian--complete with market versions of democratic centralism, democratic dictatorship and mass line elements--but externally democratic in the sense of developing relations through constant bargaining for positive impacts (the America Fist variation of the Chinese win-win). Among corporate hierarchs there is bargaining; within the structures of the body corporate, internal relationships will be different. This is the way in which merchants build systems; officials-bureaucrats build the sort of system that for a short while appeared to be strong enough to last a long time; priests build altogether different forms of systems with quite different ways of valuing interactions; ad warriors build the much more old fashioned systems that sometimes in league with priestly and official-bureaucratic elements, framed much of the world  before modernity (eg "And any federal bureaucrat who resists this change will be removed from office immediately. Because we are draining the swamp. It’s very simple. And the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over." (President Trump Address to Congress)). Things are messier and more complicated, more nuanced, and less "pure" in reality than any of this. But starting points, orienting points help understand the conceptual cage that drives thinking and explains the manifestation of that thinking in the approach to governance.  One ought to be grateful, in that respect, to the transparency into the thinking of the current American leadership, that President Trumps remarks make possible.

Text of Interview with Payman Yazdani for Tabnak News Service (Iran): "US interests shift makes changes to NATO structure and goals necessary "

 

Pix Credit here

 

I was delighted to have been able to sit for an online interview with Payman Yazdani for the Tabnak News Service (Iran).  The interview revolved around five questions:

1. Zelenskyy visit to White House was very controversial. Regardless of this fact, it seems that Europe has lost its strategic importance for the US. What do you think of this?

2. Recent US approach towards Europe indicates that Washington is siding with Russia in face of the EU, because in the new world order based on Great Power Competitions the Russia and the China cooperation is more important for the US and the US is trying to weaken the two countries cooperation by increasing its engagement with Moscow. What is your assessment?

3. Will Russia accept the European peacekeepers presence in Ukraine in case of reaching a peace agreement?

4. It seems that now even NATO has to maintain its missions based on US interests like opening its office in Japan. Do you think that NATO has to maintain its missions in line with US Indo-Pacific strategy?

5. Generally, which parts of Europe are still important for the US?

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The answers required one to try to consider the emerging U.S. position from the inside, its challenges (from the perspective of that vision and from an outside perspective), and to tease out its logic and potential consequences. Of course it is impossible to get into the mind of another, but it is perfectly fair to try to understand that other from the evidence of thoughts and premises that are evidenced by their own statements, performances, and actions. The answers left judgment about whether all of this is good, bad or otherwise to the reader. Nonetheless, for all of us, the challenge is to pull together the vision behind the actions, performances, and text. That will likely have to wait until, by an accumulation of these actions, text, etc. what will be the articulation of that vision emerges. My friend, Graeme Johnston, noted the parallels to the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, the consequences of which lasted well over a century. And, indeed, perhaps, that is the historical shadow the insights one can extract from which might be useful as human collectives move forward along paths that are only now becoming slightly more clear.

The interview may be found online (in English) HERE. It also follows below.

St Mary's Law Launching its 1st Annual BHR Scholars-in-Residence Pipeline Program

 

 

 

 I am happy to pass along the announcement of my friends and colleagues  Tara Van Ho (Essex) and Jena Martin (St Mary's) of the first annual Business and Human Rights Scholars-in-Residence Pipeline Program to be held at St Mary's University, San Antonio, Texas. 

 More information follows below.

 

Brief Thoughts on the Trump Administration Pausing Support for Ukraine

 

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Fresh from his meeting with European Leaders in London, after a far more tumultuous meeting with the U.S. President and the President's team in the White House President Zelenskyy sought to sound a positive note and signal his own view of the state of the pathways forward--and the distance that still must be traveled on this road:

A deal to end the war between Ukraine and Russia “is still very, very far away,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, adding that he believed Ukraine’s long-term partnership with the U.S. was strong enough that American support would continue despite recent fraught relations with U.S. President Donald Trump. I think our relationship (with the U.S.) will continue, because it’s more than an occasional relationship,” Zelenskyy said late Sunday, referring to Washington’s support for the past three years of war. “I believe that Ukraine has a strong enough partnership with the United States of America” to keep aid flowing, he said at a briefing in Ukrainian before leaving London. (Ukraine’s Zelenskyy says end of war with Russia is ‘very, very far away’)

Nothing here is new.  Even at Davos in February, President Zelenskyy had already signaled his sense that the Americans were tilting away from Europe and the other, drastic transformation would be required to save the project of Ukrainian defense against  Russian territorial ambitions from 2014. (See President Zelenskyy's Reponse to Vice President Vance at the Munich Security Conference: Text of Remarks--"I Really Believe That Time Has Come: The Armed Forces of Europe Must Be Create). After those remarks, the clash between President Zelenskyy and the U.S. President and Vice President was almost inevitable. It is not just that President Trump and his team have or likely have ever shared that view. The threat came from the suggestion that the war would be of long duration-that suggestion, and the request for support to make it happen, might well be taken as a direct challenge to the core of President Trump's own agenda on Ukraine--to bargain one's way to the cessation of live fire hostilities now.  That has been clear in the relentless stream of narrative pouring out of the White House since the the meeting of Presidents Trump and Zelenskyy: here, here, here, and here. 

Almost immediately after this assessment, the Americans responded, not with more narrative (in the European manner), but with an order from the White House directing a pause in aid to Ukraine.

The decision to suspend aid came out of meetings at the White House on Monday between Mr. Trump and his senior national security aides, according to senior administration and military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. It appears aimed at forcing Mr. Zelensky to agree to a cease-fire on terms Mr. Trump dictates, or condemns the country to larger battlefield losses. The officials said the directive would be in effect until Mr. Trump determined that Ukraine had demonstrated a good-faith commitment to peace negotiations with Russia. It was not immediately clear what that might look like or how long the suspension will last. For now, it will be up to Kyiv and its European allies to try to keep Ukraine’s guns firing. (Why Is Trump Pausing Aid to Ukraine? What to Know)

 But this point none of this should surprise.

Pix credit NYT

First, the United States has used weapons and support to subaltern states as an important "soft power" element of its control and guidance mechanisms for a long time.  It is just that the tastes of different Administrations, and their objectives, vary, sometimes successfully. Mr. Biden and his friends in Europe were quite adept at drip feeding the Ukrainians when it suited them and for the same reasons trotted out by the Mr. Trump and his people--fear or Russia and willingness to compromise the territory of subalterns in return for more advantageous relations with superior (even if dependent) powers. The same applied to other conflicts--the intravenous supply of aid to Israel during the recent wars that exploded after October 2023 offer another window.  Mr. Trump tends to perform these actions in a very different style than Mr. Biden--but stylistic differences merely mask continuity.  This conflict is different in scale, but more importantly in place--usually there is little difficulty with these sorts of decisions and attitudes on the periphery and with respect to old imperial mandates or holdings. But this time the conflict is bound up with core issues of European identity and the normative cage within the relationship between the United States and its ancient (as these things are counted in human terms) alliance between the US and Europe is to be understood.

Second,  even when it seems otherwise, justification is oftentimes merely an element of managing propaganda. Certainly universities worldwide have become quire adept at training clever people in the arts of persuasion and justification, and modernity has provided more than substantial techniques to those ends. It is important for the masses (most of whom are the risk bearers of these state activities) to believe that action follows justification. It promotes solidarity, creates and reinforces the narrative and ideological basis for the political-economic system of the state and provides a means of authority through the mechanics of  transposing justification from an endogenous to an exogenous (and thus superior because it appears to apply to but not be sourced within humanity) organ of foundational principles--whether they be Marxist-Leninist, religious, moral-ethical, liberal-democratic and the like. At the level of operation, of course, the dialectic between exogenously oriented justification rationalizing premises and action produces a constant  dynamic interaction between them, and the conflict and interaction between justification systems has a similar effect. 

Third, almost invariably in the case of the United States the result are halfway measures that suggest both risk aversion and hedging behaviors.  It is clear, for example, the the thrust of policy now is to transform the fundamental basis for U.S. European relations from one founded on NATO to one grounded in a close operating relationship between the U.S. and Russia through which relations with Europe may be reordered to their mutual liking. Yet such a tilt cannot be realized immediately, and thus the risk of full tilting cannot be undertaken in a riskless environment for a number of reasons. One, the masses have not been entirely prepared for the tilt--that requires a substantial investment in the sort of narrative weaving, one that in another age might have been undertaken more efficiently by the priestly caste of a society. Two, such a reorientation requires both the initial decision but then a substantial amount of clean-up--in this case negotiating the Russian detachment from China, the re-attachment of India, and the disentanglement of current relationship that run quite deep and might, in the short run be impossible to entirely untangle. Three, it is not yet clear that the Americans know exactly what they want--they know that they do not want the status quo.  But do they know what they want inst4ead?  That extraordinary inability to think past the initial impulse (even if it is warranted) substantially increases risk (to the United States) and the consequences of  passively waiting for consequences (on virtually everyone else). The vision of America First provides a little help, but certainly not in the quite skeletal form in which it is now presented.  Certainly at the moment there are hardly enough bones to chew on much less meat. That has to be attended to quickly or this whole tilt thing will have profound disastrous effects for a hegemon that now cannot either go back or move forward. Note I make no judgment about the tilt itself--elected officials have the power to make that determination and also must bear the consequences--entirely. and without impunity.

Fourth, there is much discursive material already to be worked with.  If one considers words to be textual vessels that may be emptied filled and refilled to suit its producer and consumer, than one has already begun to see is the transformation of meaning (in context) of key terms: peace, security, sovereignty, insult, negotiation, cease fire and the like. Not that any of this is new, Quite the contrary.  But,sometimes one can discern a signaling of change by efforts, usually not transparent of changes in meaning of well worn discursive tropes. That is very much on offer now in the speeches and communications of all leading stakeholders in this contest.

Fifth, the sort of limboland tactics of merchants can carry the preset Administration's actions so far, but not far enough for it to both obtain its objectives to full measure and to secure them past the useful life of the present cohort of elected and appointed officials and their supporters. That was a lesson that ought to have been quite readily apparent from the ease of the collapse of the principles based building project of the last administration. But these sorts of lessons apparently come hard to officials less mindful of the fact that the time and planning horizons of the nation ought to be considerably longer than the lengths of their political careers, and that this ought to be quire publicly borne in mind; again another lesson ignored of the past administration.  Perhaps it might be useful to use the language of merchants to explain: this ought not to be undertaken, and certainly not understood, as a one off transaction (eg peace for territory from a third  party jobber, Ukraine; and long term supplier of some tolerable (to the current US leadership at least) level of stability, Russia) , but rather as a set of necessarily intertwined long term contracts involving division of territory, output, and quality control, which is to be undertaken alongside the breach of similar long term contracts with a former partner whose new relationship has yet to be determined but with respect to which some sort of output relationship remains essential--if only to block access from competitors (eg China). That is rough, and not quite either complete or accurate but it paints a picture using language and meaning sets that may be more relevant to decision makers. What ought to emerge form all of this is the extent of the risk of negative impact (in terms of effects on access to markets, and production, supply and consumption chains) it might have on the entirety of the objectives of America First--which appears to be the core enterprise of the American body corporate at the moment. Thus, it is not enough to extract some gain from any peace process: "In a fulsome statement issued a day after Trump halted military aid to Ukraine, Zelenskiy said he was ready to sign a deal giving the United States access to Ukrainian minerals, which he had left on the table when he abandoned a visit to Washington after an Oval Office argument with Trump on Friday." (Zelenskiy calls Trump clash regrettable: 'it's time to make things right'). It will be necessary to protect that supply chain as well.

Sixth,  despite all of this analytical hand wringing, what appears as clear now as it was under the quite different conceptual cage within which the Biden Administration labored from the 24 February 2022 start of the second phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (both ironically enough undertaken during the administration of Democratic Party Presidents), is the reality that superior powers have always been willing to negotiate their way out of this conflict; that the superior power will likely drive and shape the negotiations, that the inferior power has relatively little but the power of old and powerful discursive tropes (war crimes, human rights, human dignity, the territorial integrity of states, honor, etc.) on which to fall back on (which Mr Zelenskyy has ably done). But it may not be enough as this discursive rug may be yanked out from under the Ukrainians. And the Ukrainians now appear poised to lose it all: territory, NATO membership, and try into the EU. That would amount to a spectacular failure (under the old alliance systems) and a mark of the breadth of the transformation (under the potentially new or emerging power framework in or between Russia and the US in Europe. Too early to tell but the Europeans' most potent weapon to date have been their discourse, principles and vision; but that no longer seems sufficient and they may be unable to substitute themselves for the Americans in time. 

 Seventh, and of course there is also a hidden prize the attainment of which will horrify many and satisfy others.  A new arrangement, however unequal, between the U.S. and Russia, with or without some tacit agreement of the Chinese might be a useful means of effectively substantially reducing the power and authority (in fact if not in form) of the ICC apparatus. That would be the golden ring on this carousel of change.

 Eighth, the level of Ukrainian desperation now evidences both the powerlessness of Europe to deliver more than the most principled sentiments, and the extraordinary financial and military power of the United States in its Ukrainian investment. "

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposed a new framework for a partial ceasefire with Russia on Tuesday, posting on X that Kyiv would be willing to release prisoners and agree to a truce that would ban long range attacks on civilian and energy infrastructure. The offer came after the Trump administration declared that Zelensky was not ready for peace and froze the U.S. military assistance that Ukraine has been relying on to battle the Russian invasion. (Zelensky Offers Partial Ceasefire With Russia To Restart Peace Talks)

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Building a U.S. A.I. Action Plan in this New Era of U.S.Historical Development: "Public Comment Invited on Artificial Intelligence Action Plan"

 

Generated by ChatGPT

 Artificial Intelligence policy has been an elite sport almost from its inception.  Either techno-bureaucracies in the public or private sectors, investment entities, or political or media leaders  tend to dominate not just discussion but actin on A.I. policy that is then fed--along with the soothing discursive tropes of leadership assurances--to the masses. From time to time, those who tend already to have a plan moving forward, and who are invariably already committed to an architecture (a framework) on which new policy and regulation is to be erected, will sometimes nod in the direction of the masses and seek "comment."

This impulse is non-political in the sense that leaders of both Democratic and Republic Parties have indulged this  pattern of inclusion for many years.  While "Town hall" tropes tend to be used post facto, periods of "open to comment" are used before the framework is used to finalize whatever objective is set for that framework.  There are positive benefits to the state of course: (1) the comments will certainly pick up mass sentiment (valued on the basis of the power or authority of mass collectives the comments represent); (2) they may pick up important lapses in form or drafting that need correction; (3) they signal the sort of democratic solidarity which in Marxist Leninist States is subsumed with the broad action habits of the Mass Line, but which in liberal democratic states comes from these sorts of commentary episodes. 

And perhaps, as the A.I. generated image above suggests, these comment sessions may expose some of the contradictions of an A.I. policy that will be generated  for the 21st century filled with 19th century tropes--text in a human language, paper, writing instruments, and building representative of a physical world to which A.I. may have only a tenuous relation. At its base it suggests the fundamental contradiction--for whose benefit is the policy created--is it directed to A.I., is it directed to the state and regulatory organs, is it directed to markets and entrepreneur with money but no expertise other than to grow money, or to A.I. workers (coders, and formulators of analytics, including generative analytics and algorithms. Who knows? Though getting this tight will make the resulting product more interesting, or at least less sloppy (see, generally at at a theoretical level, 'The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, and the “Human” Condition').

It is with this in mind that one might most usefully engage with the announcement of a Public Comment Invited on Artificial Intelligence Action Plan.

President Trump’s recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) Executive Order shows that this Administration is dedicated to America’s global leadership in AI technology innovation. This Order directed the development of an AI Action Plan to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance. Today, the American people are encouraged to share their policy ideas for the AI Action Plan by responding to a Request for Information (RFI), available on the Federal Register’s website through March 15. (Ibid.).

The request for comments is undertaken in furtherance of the objectives specified in President Trump's Executive Order 14179 of January 23, 2025 ("Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence"). This effort is meant to redirect U.S. A.I. policy away from the basis for A.I. policy that was to be developed in  the Administration of President Biden in 2023 (see "Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence" Text and Brief Reflections). 

It might be worth noting that the Commentary is directed toward the construction of an Action Plan. That is, that the focus of commentary that might resonate with those responsible for sifting through them, evaluating their value to the project and either summarizing them correctly or passing them on (the gatekeeper role in comment gathering exercises is itself worthy of analysis--in this case there is no indication of the methodology to be employed to make the aggregation of commentary "useful." Sometimes all comments are posted to a website for greater popular engagement; sometimes they are retained but otherwise unavailable to the public; usually they are sorted (and evaluated for usefulness in the process), summarized, packaged and then delivered to those who might digest the summary in their journey from idea to action planning. It is not clear how the process will work in this case--tough that is not unusual. Nonetheless, the emphasis on action rather than theory or principle ought to serve as a guide to commentary (including commentary in opposition to the approach--for what it will be worth). And that action, to appears, seems to favor those that enhance innovation--new or high quality development--of benefit to the nation, its markets and people. That may focus both on actions in furtherance of efficiency in financing, in protection of innovation for exploitation, in the availability of markets for development, financing and product distribution, in the development of data and product markets, and in the facilitation and construction of the infrastructures necessary to make all this possible--power (electricity) generation perhaps dedicated to this industry, protection against corruption or threats of espionage, and the enhancement of the ability of actors to profit from all of this in ways that creates what might be thought to be an enhanced innovation environment. Some of this enhancement, of course, might be lubricated by a focus on sharing the profits of exploitation to labor, communities and other suppliers of productive forces necessary for the development of robust A.I. ecologies in physical space by enhancing the market power of these participants in the project (or at east not inhibiting their  market power). Lots of moving parts here with a large space for national regulation with respect to market integrity, financial transparency, and national security. What it is likely not to include will be those principles that have marked the forms of European A.I. regulatory efforts nor anything  of a similar sort  that served as the basis of the A.I. policy that had been in development during the Biden Administration. The only principle at work here is one that privileges the effective development of A.I. high quality productive forces. Still the A.I.Plan will have to deal with the development path of A.I. regulations  that are popular elsewhere.

Information relevant to the development of this new A.I. Plan is being directed through the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) National Coordination Office (NCO), National Science Foundation.

This Plan, as directed by a Presidential Executive Order on January 23, 2025, will define the priority policy actions needed to sustain and enhance America's AI dominance, and to ensure that unnecessarily burdensome requirements do not hamper private sector AI innovation. Through this Request for Information (RFI), OSTP and NITRD NCO seek input from the public, including from academia, industry groups, private sector organizations, state, local, and tribal governments, and any other interested parties, on priority actions that should be included in the Plan. (Request for Information on the Development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Plan; Notice by the National Science Foundation on 02/06/2025 ).

For anyone otherwise not invited or engaged in the formulation of national policy on AI. with an interest in contributing (at least via text and only within the fora opened for that purpose) to its development, this may be an opportune time to contribute comment.  To leverage comment, of course, those would have to be distributed elsewhere--through collective efforts, on social media, with campaigns to lobby the elected political branches, with pressure on involved thought leaders etc. But that is the subject of a quite different post. 

The text of Public Comment Invited on Artificial Intelligence Action Plan follows along with the 23 January Executive Order, and the Request for Comments. Comments can be submitted online and will be accepted until 11:59PM on March 15, 2025. 

 

Hiking the "Fentanyl Tariff" Imposed on China: Mr. Trump Issues Executive Order: " Further Amendment to Duties Addressing the Synthetic Opioid Supply Chain in the People’s Republic of China"

 

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Tariffs have always been a multi-use tool. From the beginning of the 2nd Trump Administration, tariffs have been used increasingly as an instrument of economic pressure to achieve foreign policy ends. That, anyway, is the substance of the formal and textual  justifications for their use in some cases.

Prominent among these has been the use of tariffs as a formal countermeasure against, and as a nudging instrument directed to, China. The initial action was taken in a 1 February 2025 Executive Order (Executive Order 14195) in which it was declared that China "has subsidized and otherwise incentivized PRC chemical companies to export fentanyl and related precursor chemicals that are used to produce synthetic opioids sold illicitly in the United States." In addition, it was declared, that "the PRC provides support to and safe haven for PRC-origin transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) that launder the revenues from the production, shipment, and sale of illicit synthetic opioids. These PRC-origin TCOs coordinate and communicate using PRC social media software applications in the conduct of their business." Moreover, it was further declared, that "[m]any PRC-based chemical companies also go to great lengths to evade law enforcement and hide illicit substances in the flow of legitimate commerce. Some of the techniques employed by these PRC-based companies to conceal the true contents of the parcels and the identity of the distributors include the use of re-shippers in the United States, false invoices, fraudulent postage, and deceptive packaging." These and related findings provided a basis for the declaration of national emergency, one that was exacerbated because,despite bilateral talks, "PRC officials have failed to follow through with the decisive actions needed to stem the flow of precursor chemicals to known criminal cartels and shut down the money laundering TCOs."

On that basis the President invoked statutory authority to impose countermeasures to meet the threat described in the Executive Order. Those countermeasures consisted on an imposition of a general tariff of 10% on all Chinese goods (§2).

One month later, roughly, the President again invoked his authority to declare that no adequate progress appeared to have been made on the Chinese side to reduce the flow of illicit substances described in Executive Order 14195). On 3 March 2025, the President issued an Executive Order: Further Amendment to Duties Addressing the Synthetic Opioid Supply Chain in the People’s Republic of China, the purpose of which was to increase the rate of the general tariff to 20%. 

One might think more broadly about the effects and structuring of tariff nudges. Not in the sense that they are wrongheaded, but rather in the sense that they are merely an initial step in what might be a longer term structural strategy for behavior changing.

In designing nudges, the focus should shift toward helping individuals follow through with their decisions, complementing nudges with strategies that promote sustained engagement and behavior change. For instance, people get more motivated for tasks when you turn the jobs into games and let them share their achievements on leaderboards. (Think of the popularity of Wordle.) * * * In the end, though, the main takeaway from our research is that nudges may be a great first step. But that’s all they are: a first step. Much of the hard work is what comes next. (The Problem With Behavioral Nudges; Wall Street Journal 2024)

That is, tariffs might well be a useful initial nudging instrument.  But of course, tariff instruments have no ideology. And the Chinese, prepared for this it seems, have adopted retaliatory tariffs of their own. "China’s finance ministry announced 15 percent tariffs on imports of chicken, wheat, corn and cotton from the United States, as well as 10 percent tariffs on imports of sorghum, soybeans, pork, beef, aquatic products, fruits, vegetables and dairy products." (New York Times)

Nonetheless, without a longer term strategy that enhances or is otherwise aligned with America First objectives and also with Chinese win-win strategies, long term behavior changes will be a more challenging goal to reach.  That will require action no just by the Chinese to clean up their house but also some action by the United States to see to the messiness in its own. It is possible, under that framework, for a mutually beneficial pathway may be opened up that might reset the forms and rules of trade in pharma between the states, but also aid in mutually reinforcing anti-corruption and anti-crime measures. In that context both states ill have to exhibit levels of resolve (and trust) that may not be achievable currently but for which initial steps may be taken along that path. Trust between hegemons is essential for a stable global system that each appears to want.

The action was not isolated but, as was the case with the initial tariff decisions, was made in tandem with those applied to Canada and Mexico respecting actions which the White House has declared, adversely affect the territorial integrity of the United States and the stability of its political-social order. (See Amendment to Duties to Address the Situation at our Southern Border (March 2, 2025); Amendment to Duties to Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs across our Northern Border (March 2, 2025)).

The text of both the 1 February and the 3 March Executive Orders on China are set forth below. The Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Proceeds with Tariffs on Imports from Canada and Mexico also follows below.