Economics: Reverend Mother Rana Foroohar sees much less creative tension and much more destructive tension within the Biden Administration than I do. Treasury and the Pentagon always are and should be at loggerheads on many, many issues. The key thing about policymaking during the Biden Administration is that Xi Jinping’s “No Limits” partnership with Vladimir Putin followed by his Muscovite invasion of Ukraine created a large potential national security threat in which the NSC rules on policy, for now. The Treasury’s role is limited to trying to help the NSC and the Pentagon be wiser—to not be as profoundly stupid as their Nixon-Ford counterparts in the Kissinger Days were, whose reaction to the tripling of world oil prices in the fall of 1973 was: “This is great! Now the Shah of Iran can buy his own weapons to annoy the USSR on its southern border! We don’t have to provide subsidies!”
Commerce vs. USTR is more worrisome on the institutional front: they really should be on the same page, and it is not clear to me where they are not, or why they are not if they are not. If they are not, someone in the White House who should be enforcing harmony is really falling down on the job:
Rana Foroohar: America (still) has no industrial policy: ‘Subsidies, tariffs and good intentions don’t add up to what is needed…. At an intellectual level, it’s quite clear that there’s a big pendulum shift happening on the political left in America, and to a certain extent on the right…. But industrial policy is about accomplishing certain things in the real world…. To do that, you need real connections between the stakeholders…. America… is so massive, complex, diversified and self-interested that it’s difficult for it to work effectively or productively. Operations are siloed. Rent-seeking is rife. Divisions can’t work together…. Public and private… exist in largely separate spheres…. Within those spheres the right people are often not in the same room…. The Biden administration is one of the most collaborative I’ve seen in my 33 years of journalism. But even there you’ll see big gaps… between, say, the Department of Commerce and the Office of the US Trade Representative or the Pentagon and Treasury. That’s an issue when you are trying to change the entire nature of the American economy… <ft.com/content/6c72cfe0…>
