The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board supported the Dubai port deal, and isn’t happy about the forces that scuttled the deal — which include a majority of members of Congress and the majority of the American public. Its editorial warned: “What’s especially dangerous here is that we’re seeing the re-emergence of the ‘national security’ protectionists. They were last seen in the late 1980s, when Japan in particular was the target of a political foreign-investment panic. The Japanese were buying Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center, and so America was soon going to be a colony of Tokyo. A Japanese bid for Fairchild Semiconductor of Silicon Valley was seen as a threat to American defense. Those fears seem laughable now. But here we go again, with new targets of anxiety.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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10 Comments
PROTECTIONIST!
The root of that is PROTECTION. The extension IST implies “one who protects”.
These days PROTECTIONIST! is levelled as an attack call and an insult.
People ( incidentally in the majority) who are against the Duabai ports deal are labelled as PROTECTIONISTS! by a minority that seem to have a conflict in logic.
Such folk have little trouble with committing funds and lives to wars abroad to “protect” America. But they get in a tizzy over concerns that America may be selling out its security and safety not on the field of battle but on the plus or minus of the bottom line. I guess the conflict lies in what they choose to “protect”.
I for one am not interested in protecting the bottom line for some mutli national corporation. My concern lies more with the security of Americans and their jobs and their future.
Soldiers sent to fight in wars right or wrong are “protectionist” unions that stand for the rights of their workers are “protectionist”. Parents who worry for their kids futures are “protectionist”
Every single American should be “protectionist” and they best know and love just what it is they protect.
Ah, but Phillip, we’ve spent the last 4 years being conditioned to fear and hate the “Islamo-Facist-Terrorists”. They happen to be Arabs.
Looks like the administration’s preaching worked better than they expected. The Wall Street Journal isn’t happy?
Well Boo Hoo for the Wall Street Journal.
Good morning, JR.
Good morning, JR.
Thanks for posting twice X. lol. Your good morning cmes just as I’m nodding off.
Anything the Wall Street journal is troubled about has gotta be good for those who don’t live or “work”? on Wal Street.
Bad deal aside, the Wall Street Journal does have a point: Foreign investment is critical to the United States: it brings jobs with it.
As the editorial said, Toyota is building a plant that will employ over 2000 people. Those are very well paying jobs. Better here than overseas. I worked for a company whose home office was in Australia. Big deal. They paid well, I had excellent benifits, and good people to work with.
Everytime a company leaves the US, jobs are lost. Everytime a company opens a new plant in the US, jobs are created. Which would you rather have?
The ironic thing is that the Japanese lost money big-time on a lot of their high-profile purchases.
Their herd mentality is even worse than ours . . .
This argument hinges on that old chestnut from 2003: is the threat posed by Islamofascist terrorism to US national security one best handled by police action (protectionism) or military action (global approach)?
These are the things that are, that were anyway, at stake in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why the WAY that President Bush chose to address war with Iraq was the fatal flaw in neoconservative policy: President Bush chose to wage war on Iraq with too few resources and, as a result, the coalition push there was unable to quell an insurrection. The coalition was also heavily damaged by a lack of planning and an inability to recognize the significance of a latent insurgency there.
The WSJ editorial page never quavered in its support of the WAY the Iraq war was waged. Now to decry a reemergence of protectionism as a reaction to the fall of neoconservative foreign policy is the height of incompetence or the height of idiocy. Take your pick, WSJ.
Competency matters, and Americans don’t suffer idiots lightly.
Wavered, not quavered.
*sigh*
See this article for a description of network theory that is being used in the hunt for terrorists:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/magazine/312wwln_essay.html
The process is a _sophisticated_ crime fighting tool. A “war on terror” makes for nice sounding politics, but extremely crappy policy if the goal is even remotely related to thwarting terrorists.