{"id":106991,"date":"2017-06-06T10:23:15","date_gmt":"2017-06-06T14:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/?p=106991"},"modified":"2017-06-06T10:23:15","modified_gmt":"2017-06-06T14:23:15","slug":"regime-change-in-the-trump-white-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/2017\/06\/regime-change-in-the-trump-white-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Regime Change in the Trump White House?"},"content":{"rendered":"
June 6, 2017<\/div>
\r\n<\/div><\/div>

By Dan Steinbock<\/strong><\/p>\n

No U.S. postwar president has managed to reset relations with Russia. Now the Trump administration must cope with a special counsel\u2019s investigation. In the past, US efforts at regime change targeted foreign countries; today, the White House. How will it impact Trump\u2019s stalled policy agenda?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I argued in spring 2016 (TWFR, April 25, 2016<\/a>), US election is a global risk and it would continue to be fought after the Trump election win. But recently, these political struggles moved to an entirely new phase.<\/p>\n

First, the Department of Justice (DOJ) dismissed James Comey, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), reportedly only days after his request for increased resources to investigate Russia\u2019s alleged interference in the election. Barely a week later, DOJ appointed Robert Mueller, former director of the FBI (2001-13) as special counsel overseeing the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.<\/p>\n

There is little doubt about the political outcome of the Mueller investigation. Just as he loyally served under President George W. Bush, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney\u2019s neoconservatives, he is unlikely to treat any Russian initiative \u2013 whether planned, unintended, alleged, or misrepresented \u2013 with silk gloves. So from the White House\u2019s perspective, the end result is known. Consequently, it is the process that has potential to undermine the effective presidency.<\/p>\n

In order to assess the probable impact of the investigation on Trump’s stalled policy agenda, it is important to understand what is actually new in his trade, political and military stances.<\/p>

\r\n
\r\n

Free Reports:<\/p><\/div>\r\n

\r\n

<\/a>\r\n\t Get Our Free Metatrader 4 Indicators<\/u><\/b><\/a> - Put Our Free MetaTrader 4 Custom Indicators on your charts when you join our Weekly Newsletter<\/p>

\r\n
\r\n
\r\n

<\/a>\r\n\t Get our Weekly Commitment of Traders Reports<\/u><\/b><\/a> - See where the biggest traders (Hedge Funds and Commercial Hedgers) are positioned in the futures markets on a weekly basis.<\/p>

\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n
<\/div>\n

Obama-Bernanke origins of Trump\u2019s anti-EU rhetoric<\/strong><\/p>\n

During a bruising series of meetings in the NATO summit in Belgium and at the G-7 gathering in Italy, President Trump was quoted as calling Germany \u201cvery, very bad\u201d on trade, which the White House denied, however. That was followed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s speech, which was perceived as historical in Europe, and in which she said that \u201cthe times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Merkel\u2019s Atlanticist supporters saw the speech as signaling the end of the postwar Western consensus, it was also geared to Merkel\u2019s domestic constituencies to pave way for victory in the German federal election in September 2017. Also, Trump\u2019s accusations of excessive German trade deficits and Western Europe\u2019s free-ride at NATO are hardly new. He has made them repeatedly in the past two years. And truth to be told, so did President Obama.<\/p>\n

Trump is neither the first nor unique in his criticism of Europe. Following the end of the Cold War, every US president, in one way or another, has engaged in similar criticism. The notion that Europeans are \u201cfree riders,\u201d enjoying the benefits of an international order safeguarded by the U.S. without contributing much to it, is an old one in Washington. Soon after he received his Nobel Peace Prize, Obama began to complain about those NATO members who do not pay their \u201cfair share\u201d in global\u00a0affairs. In particular, he launched an \u201canti-free rider campaign\u201d in which, among other things, he pushed his European allies to lead the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011\u2014\u201cto prevent the Europeans and the Arab states from holding our coats while we did all the fighting.\u201d<\/p>\n

What about deficit criticism? That\u2019s not unique to Trump either. Following the global financial crisis, both Obama and former Fed chief Ben Bernanke often argued that \u201cGermany\u2019s trade surplus is a problem.\u201d Unlike China, which has been working to reduce its dependence on exports since the early 2010s, Germany has not. As a result, Obama and Bernanke often pleased Chancellor Merkel to launch Keynesian investment initiatives and promote German consumption so that European recovery could happen faster, but without success. To Obama and Bernanke, that was frustrating; to Trump, hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s new in the current Atlanticist friction, however, is Trump’s willingness to push both NATO payments and trade distortions in parallel, as well as Chancellor Merkel’s shrewd timing in using anti-Trump sentiments to foster pan-European unity. Until recently, her center-right Christian-Democrats (CDU) were struggling against Social-Democrats (SDP) and the radical right (Alternative for Germany AfD). But when Trump began his efforts to divide Europe before election season, Merkel started her attempt to rally Germans behind CDU and united Europe, taking advantage of anti-Trump sentiments in the Old Continent. Thereafter CDU\u2019s polls began to rise again.<\/p>\n

While Trump\u2019s policy agenda is not entirely new, it is tougher, broader and less politically correct than its precursors in decades. However, Mueller\u2019s investigation will cast a dark shadow over the White House\u2019s policy agenda.<\/p>\n

Deferred trade friction<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the 2016 campaign, Trump threatened to use\u00a0high import tariffs against nations that have a significant trade surplus with the US.\u00a0In 2016, the deficit list was topped by China ($347 billion), Japan ($69 billion), Germany ($65 billion), Mexico ($63 billion), and Canada ($11 billion). On a per capita basis, Germany is the leading \u201cdeficit offender.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his campaign, President Trump promised to renegotiate America’s key free trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Right after his inauguration, he used executive order to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was seen as President Obama\u2019s legacy deal. In turn, NAFTA renegotiations are set to start soon. However, according to the positive spin of US Trade Representative Robert Lighthize the Trump administration will seek to \u201cexpand\u201d NAFTA trade rather than to \u201coverturn\u201d it.<\/p>\n

As the talks are to begin after mid-August, they will be followed closely by other bilateral trade talks (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan), including allegations on \u201ccurrency manipulation.\u201d Since these negotiations are likely to endure through the fall, major trade friction may not be likely until 2018.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s tone about China has also softened following an internal struggle between Trump’s trade hawks (head of the National Trade Council Peter Navarro, and trade advisor and former CEO of steel giant Nuctor, Dan DiMicco), and their more moderate opponents (Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and chief of National Economic Council Gary Cohn). After the two-day summit at Mar-a-Lago,\u00a0President Trump and President Xi Jinping announced a 100-day plan to improve strained trade ties and boost cooperation between two nations.<\/p>\n

However, unless the plan can offer major breakthroughs after the summer, trade haws may return later and deficit rhetoric may escalate toward the year-end.<\/p>\n

Since sanctions fall under executive actions, Trump tends to have more strategic maneuverability in these areas. Then again, both Republican neoconservatives and Democratic liberal internationalists support sanctions against North Korea, Russia and, with some qualifications, Iran.<\/p>\n

Headwinds against tax reforms<\/strong><\/p>\n

Until recently, progressive taxation has played a critical role in all advanced economies. In America, that model has been under a siege since the Reagan years. Today, US personal income tax rate is one of the lowest among the G20 economies, whereas US corporate tax rates are high internationally. As a result, US companies have parked more than $1 trillion worth of cash abroad.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Mueller\u2019s investigation is likely to overshadow Trump efforts at tax overhaul, which depends on legislative support for success.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration hopes to simplify the number of individual income tax brackets. It would like to reduce the tax rate on capital gains, non-corporate business taxes and those in the highest bracket, repeal the alternative minimum tax and the Affordable Care Act (the \u201cObamacare\u201d) surtax, and the estate tax. Critics expect the total costs of the plan to soar to $5 trillion over a decade. While Republicans are ready to move ahead with a repeal bill, it has been diluted but still divides Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suspects that the new bill will not pass through the Senate.<\/p>\n

The Trump corporate tax plan is seen as even more controversial. In 2016, these rates were around 30-35% in major advanced economies (France, Japan, Germany), except for the UK (19%). The US rate (39%) is the highest among all G20 economies. Trump\u2019s plan would almost halve rates to just 15 percent, which would put America ahead even of low-tax city paradises, Singapore (17%) and Hong Kong (16.5%). With reduced rates and one-time and one-time repatriation tax rate stashed, the White House hopes that US companies’ overseas profits and corporate operations would return home. In reality, such expectations are inflated.<\/p>\n

There has been no major outflux of foreign firms from large emerging economies, which offer growth that is 3-4 times faster than in the US or Europe. Since the 1970s, US trade deficits have been a regional issue mainly with Asia. As costs are rising in China, emerging Asia will take the mantle but US trade deficits will prevail. And even when relocation offers some benefits, US and other multinationals may prove reluctant to move their core operations because an increasing number of these companies rely on emerging-economy middle classes and new innovation hubs for their profitability.<\/p>\n

While the Trump administration will try to push its stalled policy agenda, it must now do so with the White House in shackles. Intriguingly, despite their global might, all US postwar presidents have failed to reset relations with Russia.<\/p>\n

Four presidents, four Russia resets, four failures<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, relations between Russia and the US remained generally warm between the Bush and Clinton administrations, and President Boris Yeltsin until the US-inspired \u201cshock therapy\u201d caused Russia an economic nightmare that proved far worse than the Great Depression in the U.S. That is when three former Soviet satellites \u2013 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic \u2013 were invited to join the NATO. By mid-90s, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states were also ushered into NATO \u2013 against the angry but ultimately futile protests by presidents Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev.<\/p>\n

In 2001, President George W. Bush wanted to reset US Russia relations. But after the White House was swept by 9\/11 and neoconservatives\u2019 increasingly unilateral foreign policy, it began incursions into Afghanistan, withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and invaded Iraq. As NATO began looking even further eastward to Ukraine and Georgia, Russian protests turned angrier and more aggressive. Most Russians saw the Rose Revolution in Georgia 2003, and US effort to build an anti-ballistic missile defense installation in Poland with a radar station in the Czech Republic, as intrusions into its sphere of interest, along with US efforts to gain access to Central Asian oil and natural gas.<\/p>\n

Like Clinton and Bush initially, President Obama wanted to reset US-Russia relations and by March 2010 both countries agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals. Yet, the reset was not supported by Obama\u2019s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and US ambassador to Russia John Beyrle. Subsequently, rising tensions in Crimea were seized to bury the effort.<\/p>\n

In the campaign trail, Trump lauded President Putin as a strong leader, arguing in favor of friendlier relations. Meanwhile, FBI began investigating alleged connections between Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, foreign policy adviser Carter Page and pro-Russian interests. In January 2017, Trump and President Putin began phone conferences as the White House still mulled lifting economic sanctions to reset relations with Russia. But in February, Trump\u2019s security adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign. As the Empire stroke back, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said only two months later that US-Russia relations were at a new low point. And by May, Mueller was appointed to head the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections.<\/p>\n

The Wolfowitz doctrine had prevailed \u2013 against four US presidents.<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf-owitz Doctrine<\/strong><\/p>\n

Historically Washington has been involved in dozens of overt and covert actions aimed at regime change in other countries. The postwar list of covert involvement alone features some two dozen overseas attempts at regime change in overseas. Ironically, the list begins and ends with Syria (Figure).<\/p>\n

Now a regime effort is targeting the White House, say the Trump supporters. That effort relies on the Wolfowitz Doctrine, a highly controversial policy blueprint developed amid the end of the Cold War by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, the prophet of the Bush neoconservatives, and his deputy Scooter Libby, later an adviser to Vice President Cheney until his indictment for leaking the covert identity of a major CIA officer.<\/p>\n

The Doctrine announced the U.S\u2019s status as the world\u2019s only remaining superpower and proclaimed its main objective to be retaining that status. Its first objective thus was \u201cto prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.\u201d<\/p>\n

In December 1989, Soviet President Gorbachev and US President George H. W. Bush declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit. In February 1990, then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested that, in exchange for cooperation on Germany, U.S. could make \u201ciron-clad guarantees\u201d that NATO would not expand \u201cone inch eastward.\u201d Gorbachev acceded to Germany\u2019s Western alignment on the condition that the U.S. would limit NATO\u2019s expansion. But behind the fa\u00e7ade, Baker\u2019s own top officials and Wolfowitz at the Pentagon began to push Eastern Europe in the U.S. orbit inspiring \u201ca call for 21st\u00a0century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept,\u201d as Senator Edward M. Kennedy once put it.<\/p>\n

It was the same Wolfowitz Doctrine that inspired the neoconservatives to initiate multiple wars in the Middle East following September 11, 2001; and that undermined the efforts of four post-Cold War presidents to reset relations with Russia. In each case, the \u201cmilitary-industrial complex\u201d \u2013 about which President Eisenhower, a five-star general, had warned already in 1961 \u2013\u2013 played a critical but low-profile role behind the scenes. President Clinton did not oppose the military interests, as long as they supported U.S. economic interests; Bush\u2019s inner circle comprised Pentagon\u2019s ultimate insiders; Obama talked against the military and security complex but became its cheerleader. In contrast, Trump fought efforts to kill the reset of Russia relations \u2013 until Mueller\u2019s appointment.<\/p>\n

The Mueller investigation does not indicate that the role of the U.S. as the major global risk has now faded away. These investigations can lead anywhere, as President Clinton discovered after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In the process, they can create great collateral damage, both at home and abroad.<\/p>\n

The role of the U.S. as a global risk is only about to begin.<\/p>\n

This commentary was released by The World Financial Review on June 2, 2017. The online version will be followed by a print version (July-August 2017).<\/p>\n

About the Author\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Dr.\u00a0Dan Steinbock\u00a0is an internationally recognized expert of the nascent multipolar world. In early 2016, he predicted that the United States had become a global risk; that the Clinton campaign, the perceived winner, suffered from gross corruption, including collusion with leading US media, and that there was a significant potential for a Trump upset in the 2016 election. In late summer, he forecast that the struggle for the US presidency would intensify after the election.Dr Steinbock is the founder of DifferenceGroup. He has served as Research Director of International Business at India China and America Institute (USA) and Visiting Fellow at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, please see www.differencegroup.net\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Figure Covert United States involvement in postwar regime change<\/strong><\/p>\n

1949 Syrian coup d’\u00e9tat<\/p>\n

1949\u20131953 Albania<\/p>\n

1951\u201356 Tibet<\/p>\n

1953 Iranian coup d’\u00e9tat<\/p>\n

1954 Guatemalan coup d’\u00e9tat<\/p>\n

1956\u201357 Syria crisis<\/p>\n

1957\u201358 Indonesian coup d’\u00e9tat<\/p>\n

1960 Cuba, Bay of Pigs Invasion<\/p>\n

1961 Dominican Republic<\/p>\n

1963 South Vietnamese coup<\/p>\n

1964 Bolivian coup d’\u00e9tat<\/p>\n

1964 Brazilian coup d’\u00e9tat<\/p>\n

1966 Ghana coup d’\u00e9tat<\/p>\n

1971 Bolivian coup d’\u00e9tat<\/p>\n

1970\u201373 Chile<\/p>\n

1980 Turkish coup d’\u00e9tat<\/p>\n

1979\u201389 Afghanistan, Operation Cyclone<\/p>\n

1981\u201387 Nicaragua, Contras<\/p>\n

1996 Iraq coup attempt<\/p>\n

2001 Afghanistan<\/p>\n

2011 Libyan civil war<\/p>\n

2011\u2013today \u00a0 Syria<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source: Creative Commons<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dan Steinbock No U.S. postwar president has managed to reset relations with Russia. Now the Trump administration must cope with a special counsel\u2019s investigation. In the past, US efforts at regime change targeted foreign countries; today, the White House. How will it impact Trump\u2019s stalled policy agenda? As I argued in spring 2016 (TWFR, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","no-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106992,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106991\/revisions\/106992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}