An important story you might have missed because of the focus on MAGA-GOP chaos.

We can't ignore MAGA threats but we also need to pay attention to the Biden administration's bold, new approach to foreign policy & global economics.

My weekly show on WCPT-820 AM in Chicago is about politics, about government, about the way we make the decisions that impact our lives. 

For obvious and important reasons, shows like this one have long been dominated by a conversations about the angry, vapid, and dangerous politics of the extremist MAGA republicans led by Donald Trump. Every minute of every show could be filled with examples of the way they insult common decency, sunder the body politic, corrupt the idea of popular sovereignty, lie, cheat, and drag us to the meanest bottom they can fathom before finding a way to go yet lower. 

But to focus only on this crowd and the threat they pose is an abdication of our responsibility as citizens in this democracy. We are not helpless. We have power to act. And we owe to each other to discuss how we want to use our agency for common purposes-- to do our part in building a more perfect union. 

It is, of course, beyond doubt that among the things we must do is to put an end to the insurrection whose most violent day was January 6^th.  The job of lifting us up is just too difficult to sustain while so many are pulling us down. But in this complicated world, we have not the luxury of fighting one battle at a time. 

There are issues that motivate us to action: climate change, reproductive choice, civil rights, gun safety, even common decency. There are other issues that we seldom think about but should. And here, I want to consider a very big one that was in the news this week. 

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan speaking at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. Photo Credit: Brookings Institute

This past Thursday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave a talk at the Brookings Institution. As reported, the speech was an effort to reframe the terms of our relationship with China. He wanted to reassure European governments, American businesses, and even the Chinese, who are wary of our increasingly hawkish policies towards that country. He stressed that we should think about the administration’s efforts as de-risking rather than de-coupling. 

This will be welcome news to our allies, who are worried about their own trade relations and do not want American sanctions further shaking their own fragile economies. Sullivan assured the audience that American sanctions were not broad-based economic pressure tactics, but were instead, targeted national security measures.

But the speech was only partially aimed at addressing immediate concerns about sanctions. It was, more importantly, the articulation of the idea of a new global economic order. 

Sullivan describes four challenges that result from the current global economic order. 

First, he took on economic orthodoxy and said, “in the name of oversimplified market efficiency, entire supply chains of strategic goods- along with the industries and jobs that made them- moved overseas. And the postulate that deep trade liberalization would help America export goods, not jobs and capacity, was a promise made but not kept.” He said this led to the hollowing out of America’s industrial base.

Second, he argued that competition for geopolitical security corrupted the economic order. Market integration was supposed to make us more responsible and open, more peaceful and more cooperative. Sullivan said it did not, and he finds the cause of that failure not in the underlying economic theory, but in the effect of integrating into market-base system an enormous non-market economy. He talked about China’s massive industrial subsidies. He pointedly said that economic integration did not stop China or Russia from expanding military ambitions. And he charged that economic integration had created economic dependencies that had now become a threat. 

Third, he argued that climate change was a call to action, and that it required a new approach to building industries and creating jobs. He argued that entirely market-based solutions would further export these industries and jobs, weakening true market economies and putting us at further geopolitical risk.

Finally, he focused on the challenge that inequality poses to democracies here and abroad. He said that the drivers of inequality are many and complex, but then singled out “decades of trickle-down economic policies- policies like regressive tax cuts, deep cuts to public investment, unchecked corporate concentration, and active measures to undermine that labor movement.”

Sullivan says all this amounts to a new foreign policy, what he calls “a foreign policy for the middle class.”

I wanted to share this with you because it demonstrates a few things. First, the biggest challenges we face, not just in America but across the globe, are not beyond our power to address. We have the courage and the imagination to think and to act boldly and to transform even the biggest systems that define how we shall live. Second, this administration is not only up to the governing task, but also up to the political one. The idea that this enormous new approach to economics is spelled out not by an economic advisor, not by someone at the Fed, not in a speech to the Chamber of Commerce, but by the National Security Advisor in the context of assuring our European partners is not accidental. 

Meanwhile, the best the Republicans can do is to threaten global economic chaos by defaulting on the debt if they don’t get their way on a range of small minded and mean legislation- like making student debt forgiveness illegal. 

Let’s now say the quiet part out loud: Serious people are not Republicans. Not any more.