Category Archives: United States

Puerto Rico, United States

Could Puerto Rico really become the 51st U.S. state?

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In addition to the defeat of Puerto Rico’s budget-cutting governor Luis Fortuño in yesterday’s gubernatorial election, Puerto Ricans have also voted in a two-question referendum in opposition to its current commonwealth status, marking the worst result for the status quo in four such referenda in half a century. 

That doesn’t mean Puerto Rico is exactly on the fast track to become the 51st state of the United States.

There are reasons to believe that the path to statehood would encounter obstacles both from U.S. legislators in Washington, D.C. as well as difficulties in San Juan — not least of which due to the fact that Puerto Rico’s newly elected governor, Alejandro García Padilla, opposes Puerto Rican statehood and is likely to prioritize creating jobs and reducing crime over constitutional status issues.

The island is currently a U.S. territory, and since 1952, its constitutional status has been as a ‘commonwealth’ of the United States.  More on that below.

Tuesday’s referendum

First, let’s examine the actual referendum and the result.

The referendum itself was a complex two-question vote.  Puerto Ricans were first asked whether the commonwealth should continue to have its present form of territorial status.  Puerto Ricans were also asked which non-territorial option they prefer among three options: becoming a U.S. state, becoming independent, or becoming a ‘free associated state’ — think of the latter option as ‘independence light‘ akin to the relationship that Palau and the Marshall Islands have to the United States or like the relationship the Cook Islands have with New Zealand.

See the second prong of the ballot question:

Puerto Ricans could vote on the second question regardless of their position on the first question, so voters who support the current commonwealth status could nonetheless vote for their preferred non-commonwealth status as well.

Around 1.82 million voters participated in the referendum.  On the first question, 53.99% of voters voted that Puerto Rico should not continue to have its present form of territorial status, and 46.01% supported the current status.  In four referenda since 1967, that’s clearly the strongest vote against Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status.

On the second question, though, the headline statistic that most U.S. media are reporting is that 61.15% of Puerto Rican voters supported statehood (with 33.31% supporting a ‘free associated state’ and just 5.53% supporting full independence).

But that overstates the case, because over 486,000 voters cast either invalid or blank votes on the second question.  When you take those into consideration, statehood won just 44.62% of total votes, blank and invalid votes ‘won’ 27.04%, the ‘free associated state’ option won 24.31%, and full independence won 4.04%.

So while statehood seems to be the preferred alternative, not even a majority of the voters who took part in the referendum actually cast a vote for statehood.  Furthermore, we don’t know how ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters actually voted on the second question, so there’s no way to know, what the anti-commonwealth voters, as a group, actually prefer.

Accordingly, the result isn’t a clear victory for much of anything, let alone statehood.  That may be fine — it’s just a non-binding referendum anyway.  As noted above, García Padilla and his Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico (the PPD, Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico) is opposed to statehood, so it seems less likely that Puerto Rico will aggressively pursue statehood than if the incumbent, Luis Fortuño of the pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progresista de Puerto Rico (the PNP, New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico) had won reelection.

Notably, however, Puerto Rico’s ‘resident commissioner,’ its non-voting representative to the U.S. House of Representatives, has the chief responsibility of introducing legislation to admit Puerto Rico as the 51st state. Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, Pedro Pierluisi — who was only narrowly reelected on Tuesday with a 1% margin — belongs to the pro-statehood PNP.  Pierluisi, indeed, has indicated that he favors introducing such legislation.  We’ll find out, I guess.

Proponents of statehood chafe at the idea that Puerto Rico is somehow less equal, that it’s a colonial remnant from the imperial era.  Other supporters believe that full statehood would help lift Puerto Rico’s economic status by creating more links to the mainstream U.S. economy — the island’s GDP per capita of just $24,000 is almost half of GDP per capita on the mainland, the island has been stuck in a recession for the past six years and poverty, crime and unemployment are much higher there than on the mainland.

Opponents argue that statehood would not deliver many more benefits than Puerto Ricans currently enjoy, while subjecting it to less autonomy and more responsibility for U.S. federal taxes.  Furthermore, opponents worry that statehood could endanger the unique ‘boricua’ culture of the predominantly Spanish-speaking territory.  Needless to say, if you’ve ever been to San Juan, you realize quickly that it’s a world away from even heavily Latino U.S. cities like Miami, Los Angeles or New York. Nonetheless, Puerto Ricans are already well assimilated into U.S. culture and life — indeed, there are more mainland citizens of Puerto Rican descent in United States than on the island, and Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland share a rich cultural heritage, especially within the ‘Nuyorican’ diaspora that emerged in New York in the 20th century.

Since 1952, independence has remained a fairly unpopular option, although if Puerto Rico were a sovereign nation, it would be the Caribbean’s fourth most-populous country, after Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  Its $96.26 billion economy would become the largest economy in the Caribbean, dwarfing not just the Cuban ($60.8 billion) or Dominican ($55.6 billion) economies, but also Central American ones, such as Panamá’s ($30.7 billion) and Costa Rica’s ($41.0 billion).

Puerto Rico’s status in context

Tuesday’s vote was the just the most recent of four increasingly complex referenda on Puerto Rico’s status since becoming a commonwealth in 1952.  Continue reading Could Puerto Rico really become the 51st U.S. state? →

Puerto Rico, United States

Who is Alejandro García Padilla?

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Although voters in the United States chose to retain a Republican House of Representatives, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president in Barack Obama, it wasn’t as good a night for incumbents in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Alejandro García Padilla (pictured above), a Puerto Rican senator, narrowly defeated Puerto Rico’s governor Luis Fortuño in Tuesday’s Puerto Rican gubernatorial election and Fortuño conceded the race earlier this afternoon — with over 96% of the votes counted, García Padilla leads with 47.85% to just 47.04% for Fortuño.

The result will cap what was generally a good night for García Padilla’s Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico (the PPD, Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico), which also took back control of Puerto Rico’s Asamblea Legislativa (Legislative Assembly) from Fortuño’s Partido Nuevo Progresista de Puerto Rico (the PNP, New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico), and which also won the mayoral race in San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital and largest city.

So who is García Padilla? And how will García Padilla will his administration differ from Fortuño’s?

García Padilla, age 41, an attorney and former law professor, was elected to Puerto Rico’s Senate in 2008 as the PPD’s most popular vote-winner.  He previously served as the secretary of consumer affairs under former PPD governor Aníbal Acevedo Vilá from 2005 to 2008.

García Padilla’s victory first and foremost likely means an end to the austerity policies of his predecessor.

As governor, Fortuño has essentially eliminated Puerto Rico’s $2 billion budget deficit, but he’s done so by cutting public sector jobs and reducing spending on higher education, even while he reduced taxes 50% for individuals and 30% for business.  The implementation of his economic program has drawn considerable attention in the United States, and Fortuño himself is somewhat of a star within the Republican Party — he and his wife had primetime speaking roles during the Republican National Convention in August.  If Mitt Romney had won Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election, it seemed likely that Fortuño could even be elevated to a cabinet position in a Romney administration.

Fortuño, already on the ropes after losing two referenda earlier in the summer to reduce the number of legislators in Puerto Rico’s legislative assembly and to give judges the right to deny bail in certain murder cases (Puerto Rico, uniquely, entitles everyone to bail regardless of the crime), was never quite a favorite for reelection.

García Padilla ran a stinging campaign against the harshness of Fortuño’s austerity measures in the face of an economic climate even more troubling than on the U.S. mainland — the economy has been in recession for six years, unemployment remains relatively high at 13.6% and the poverty level has reached a staggering 45.6%.  Meanwhile, crime is rising steadily, with over 1,000 murders in 2011 alone.  Puerto Rico’s GDP per capita of just around $24,000, about half that of the United States, makes it already much less prosperous than the mainland.  Continue reading Who is Alejandro García Padilla? →

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What Obama’s reelection means for world politics

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It now appears that U.S. president Barack Obama has been reelected for a second term through January 2017, notwithstanding the highest unemployment rate in a generation, an economy that continues to show sluggish growth and the highest budget deficits since World War II. 

But what does it mean for world politics that Obama — and not his Republican rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney — has won the election?

David Rothkopf had a superb piece in Foreign Policy yesterday listing 12 catastrophes the next president — Obama or Romney — must avoid.  Those catastrophes range from another terrorist attack like the Sept. 11 attacks, a trade war with China, a real war with Iran, regional destabilization in the Middle East, escalating U.S. involvement in north Africa, a fiscal or budgetary crisis, and Japan-style long-term economic stagnation.

In addition, I would add that the U.S.-Mexico relationship is at a critical juncture with the incoming administration of Enrique Peña Nieto and the return of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) to power after 12 years.  That has implications for U.S. drug policy, energy policy and potential foreign development of the Mexican oil industry, border security and immigration reform, trade and other Latin American economic policy.

Sub-Saharan Africa, too, is at a critical point — economic growth is returning and China has moved aggressively to develop the continent’s resources after two decades of conflict and misery.  From Ghana to Kenya, Africa will face a flurry of elections in the months ahead.  Aside from the remaining problems in Mali and Libya, the United States has a keen interest in two additional immediate issues: (i) solidifying the role of Ethiopia as a regional partner in stabilizing the Horn of Africa following the death of longtime leader Meles Zenawi two months ago under newly installed prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn and (ii) ensuring that the newly independent South Sudan doesn’t turn into a failed state and that relations between Sudan and South Sudan over resource allocation don’t ignite a war that could easily inflame much of central Africa.

Of course, with Obama’s reelection, as soon as U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton steps down, her successor will likely be Massachusetts senator John Kerry, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice or national security advisor Thomas Donilon.

But despite the fact that Romney seemed to agree more than disagree with Obama on foreign policy in their final presidential debate back in October, there are real differences between the two.  Here are ten of the most salient consequences of what Obama’s win means for world politics — beyond giving hope to other incumbents that you can win reelection despite a subdued economy:

Continue reading What Obama’s reelection means for world politics →

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Final thoughts (and predictions) for the U.S. presidential election

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The state of the race

Of course, tomorrow’s election, in what’s still arguably the world’s most powerful country, will have huge implications for world politics — U.S. foreign policy obviously runs from the occupant of the Oval Office (more so than domestic policy), and with U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton stepping down in either case, the election result will determine the next top U.S. diplomat.  So it seemed natural to pull together some brief thoughts for Suffragio on election eve.

Nate Silver’s final post at FiveThirtyEight before tomorrow’s U.S. general election gives incumbent Barack Obama (pictured above, below with vice president Joe Biden at left) a 92.2% chance of winning.  I’m not so sure, but InTrade has Obama with 67.2% odds of winning.  National polls are essentially tied, with some giving either Obama a narrow edge or his challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (pictured below), a slight edge.  State polls in swing states give Obama slight edges — the winner must win 270 out of 528 electoral votes (i.e., the presidential election is essentially 50 separate state contests — each state has a number of electoral votes ranging from three (the smallest states) to 55 (California).

Most notably of all, go read Foreign Policy‘s compendium of its best 2012 U.S. presidential election coverage, which is stellar as usual.

In terms of coverage, I’ll list favorite / obligatory pundits below:

  • Follow Slate‘s Dave Weigel here.
  • Follow Time‘s Mark Halperin here.
  • Follow National Review‘s The Corner here.
  • Follow Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog here.
  • Follow Matt Drudge here.
  • Follow Chris Cillizza’s Washington Post blog here.
  • Follow Ezra Klein’s policy blog at the Washington Post here.
Polls close between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET in Ohio, Virginia, Florida and other key states in the Electoral College, so we should have a relatively good idea of who’s won the presidency Tuesday night — unless the contest comes down to one state, likely Ohio, and that state is as close as Florida was in 2000, when we might not know the winner for a month or longer!

Don’t forget Puerto Rico elections

Although it’s a U.S. commonwealth, Puerto Rico will also go to the polls to select a governor, where incumbent Luis Fortuño (a Republican supporter) of the pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progresista de Puerto Rico (the PNP, New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico) narrowly leads Alejandro García Padilla of the pro-commonwealth/status quo Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico (the PPD, Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico).  Fortuño has cut Puerto Rico’s budget since taking office in 2009 and has nearly brought the island from deficit to surplus.  Nonetheless, economic growth has been elusive and while the unemployment rate has fallen, it’s still around 15%.  If Fortuño loses his race, but Romney wins, there’s a strong chance that Fortuño could be asked to take a position — or even a Cabinet-level post — in a Romney administration.

Puerto Rico will also hold yet another referendum on statehood in two parts: whether they are satisfied with Puerto Rico’s current status as a ‘commonwealth,’ and if not, whether they would prefer U.S. statehood, full independence or a confusing ‘sovereign associated state’ status.

With four million people, if Puerto Rico were independent, it would be the fourth-most populous country in the Caribbean, after Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Predictions

So now on to my own prediction.

We know the outcome of most states. Obama will almost certainly win California, New York (29 electoral votes), Illinois (20 electoral votes), New Jersey (14 electoral votes), Washington (12 electoral votes) and Romney’s Massachusetts (11 electoral votes), among others, and he is leading in Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) and Michigan (16 electoral votes), both of which voted for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, despite their loss in the wider Electoral College.

Romney will almost certainly win Texas (38 electoral votes), Georgia (16 electoral votes), and a swath of smaller states in the Old Confederacy South, the Great Plains states, and much of the Mountain West states.

The actual popular vote tally of all 50 states doesn’t matter, so I will whiff and say it’s too close to call — Hurricane Sandy may well depress voter turnout in Delaware, New Jersey and New York, but those states are solidly in favor of Obama.

For the electoral vote, my final prediction is Obama 276, Romney 262: Continue reading Final thoughts (and predictions) for the U.S. presidential election →

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Handicapping the race to become the next top diplomat of the United States

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Regardless of whether U.S. president Barack Obama or former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney wins next Tuesday’s presidential election, the United States — and the world — will nonetheless be preparing for new leadership at Foggy Bottom. 

Although Suffragio focuses on the politics of countries outside the United States, the U.S. secretary of state is the chief U.S. diplomat and historically — from George Marshall to Dean Acheson to Henry Kissinger to Madeleine Albright to Condoleezza Rice — the secretary of state has played a major role in setting U.S. foreign policy.  As such, the decision will have an immeasurable effect on U.S. foreign policy and, accordingly, world politics.

Obama’s current secretary of state, former New York senator Hillary Clinton, a former presidential candidate and wife of former U.S. president Bill Clinton, has said she will step down after four years, even if Obama wins reelection (perhaps in advance of another presidential campaign in 2016), though there’s an unlikely chance she’ll remain at State for a few months longer due to the recent attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

In those four years, the United States withdrew troops from Iraq, set a timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, has engaged an ever-more-powerful China, and adjusted to rapidly changing conditions in the Middle East after the ‘Arab Spring’ tumult, including assisting in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

U.S. senator John Kerry (pictured above, middle) and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice (pictured above, top) are routinely thought to be the top two choices in a second Obama term.  Former World Bank president Robert Zoellick (pictured above, bottom) is likewise the favorite in a Romney administration.  In some ways, Romney will have a broader choice — whether to signal in his secretary of state a more establishment, realist, moderate Republican foreign policy or a more hawkish neoconservative foreign policy.

So who’s likely to get the job under either Obama or Romney?  And more importantly, how would each potential candidate guide foreign policy?

Continue reading Handicapping the race to become the next top diplomat of the United States →

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Two systems, two transitions: China, U.S. face leadership crossroads simultaneously

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Next week, arguably the two most important countries in the world will kick off two very different leadership transitions.

On Tuesday, November 6, the United States of America will hold a general election.  For the 57th time since 1790, Americans will vote for U.S. president, at once the country’s head of state and head of government.  The winner will most certainly be one of two men: the Democratic Party incumbent, former Illinois senator Barack Obama (pictured above, right) or the Republican Party challenger, former Massachusetts governor Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney.  Americans will also determine who will control the both the lower and upper houses of the U.S. legislature.‡  The new Congress will be sworn in early in January 2013 and the president will be inaugurated (or reinaugurated) on January 20.

On Thursday, November 8, the People’s Republic of China will watch as the 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党) gets underway in Beijing, where all but two of the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s foremost governing body, will step down and new members will be appointed in a once-a-decade leadership transition.  China’s ‘paramount leader’ Hu Jintao (pictured above, left), the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and PRC president since 2002, is expected to be replaced by Xi Jinping as general secretary, with the other state offices to follow through early 2013.  China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, is expected to be replaced by Li Keqiang.  Otherwise, the Politburo Standing Committee is expected to be reduced from nine to seven members and will include Xi, Li and five new faces — generally known as the ‘fifth generation’ of China’s leadership.

Despite their vastly different political systems, it’s fitting that the two transitions will coincide so neatly for the two most powerful countries in the world, both so alien culturally and interlinked economically — and there are parallels for both the superpower of the 20th century and a rising superpower of the 21st.  For every ‘5,000 years of history,’ there’s a corresponding ‘shining city on a hill.’  The United States has George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and 1776; China has Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and 1949.

The United States is the world’s third-most populous country with 315 million people, the third-largest country by land area, and the world’s largest economy with a GDP last year of over $15 trillion.  China, meanwhile, is the world’s most populous country with 1.347 billion people, the second-largest country by land area, and the world’s second-largest economy with a GDP last year of $11.3 trillion.

In 2012, if we don’t quite live in a bipolar world, we certainly live in a multipolar world where the United States and China are first among equals, and the U.S.-Chinese relationship will, of course, be a major focus of both governments over the next four years and beyond.

Indeed, Chinese relations have been an issue throughout the U.S. presidential election.

China emerged, if not unscathed, certainly more economically powerful than ever before following the 2008-09 global financial crisis, and China may well have the world’s largest economy within the next decade.  But the juggernaut of its double-digit economic growth, which has been fairly consistent throughout the past 20 years, is showing signs of sputtering, and a Chinese slowdown (or even a recession) would have a major impact upon the global economy.

Romney has vociferously attacked China for manipulating its currency, the renminbi, to keep the cost of its exports low, and Obama’s treasury secretary Timothy Geithner has made similar, if more gentle, criticisms.  Notably, however, the renminbi has appreciated about 8.5% since Obama took office in January 2009, chiefly because the Chinese government has hoped to cool inflationary pressure.

The level of U.S. debt held by the Chinese government has also become an important issue, especially with the U.S. budget deficit at its highest level (as a percentage of GDP) since World War II.  China, however, holds only about $1.132 trillion out of a total of around $15 trillion in U.S. debt, which is down from its high of around $1.17 trillion in 2011 — meanwhile, Japan has accelerated its acquisition of U.S. debt and may soon hold more than China.  The outsourcing of jobs previously filled in the United States has long been an issue across the ideological spectrum of U.S. domestic politics, with respect to China and other Asian countries.

In reality, however, other issues are just as likely to dominate the next generation of Chinese and American leadership.  With both militaries looking to dominate the Pacific (note the growing U.S. naval presence in the Philippines and throughout the Pacific), geopolitical stability throughout the region will be more important than ever — not just the perennial issue of Taiwan, but growing concerns about North Korea’s autarkic regime, tensions between China and Japan over territorial claims or other future hotspots could all spur wider crises.

As China’s middle class grows in size and purchasing power, and as the United States continues to boost its exports, China will become an increasingly important market for U.S. technology, entertainment and energy in the next two decades.  China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its increasing role as a trading partner with the United States mean that trade-related issues — such as the case that the United States brought against China in the WTO last month on cars and auto parts — will only become more important.

But while the U.S. federalist constitutional structure — with its tripartite separation of powers — has been set in place since the adoption of its Constitution in 1787, the Chinese structure is a more recent creation.  The Chinese Communist Party holds a National Congress every five years, with a handover of power every ten years, vesting power in a collaborative Politburo Standing Committee that makes all key policy-making decisions, a process that came into being only really with the passing of Deng Xiaoping in the 1990s.

After Deng, Jiang Zemin and the so-called ‘third generation’ of China’s political leadership essentially regularized the current process, and the ‘fourth generation’ led by Hu and Wen that assumed leadership in 2002 and 2003 is now set to pass leadership on to the ‘fifth generation’ under Xi and Li.

China’s party-state essentially has a dual structure: the state institutions of government (the National People’s Congress and the State Council) and the structure of the Chinese Communist Party are essentially parallel — the same people control both.  So from a wide base of over 2,000 delegates to the National Party Congress, around 200 will form the Party’s Central Committee, just 25 the more important Politburo and, after next week’s transition, merely seven will form the Politburo Standing Committee.  Those seven will also hold the key offices of state — as noted, Li is expected to become China’s premier, the head of the PRC government and Xi, as general secretary of the  Party, will serve as the president of the PRC and the chair of the Central Military Commission, the entity that directs the People’s Liberation Army, China’s main armed forces. Continue reading Two systems, two transitions: China, U.S. face leadership crossroads simultaneously →

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LIVE BLOG: Romney, Obama spar over foreign policy in final U.S. presidential debate

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Welcome to Suffragio‘s live-blog of the final of the three presidential debates between the Democratic incumbent President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, which will feature foreign policy.

Tonight, I hope to provide a world politics context in real-time to the U.S. foreign policy discussion, as well as my analysis of the world politics implications of the foreign policy objectives of each candidate.

* * * *

10:28. Not a single word about the eurozone crisis. Not much, aside from a few references to Mali, about sub-Saharan Africa.  Not much about Latin America, and not a word about Mexico, where the incoming president Enrique Peña Nieto promises quite a change from the past 12 years.  Not a word about India. Basically, 75 minutes of wrangling about Israel, Iran, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan (and maybe Russia) with a perfunctory segment on China that turned into a domestic policy pissing match.

10:25.  Speaking of apology tours, Romney is sounding incredibly defensive about Detroit and his position on the auto bailout.  Of course, Detroit is one of the most important world capitals.

10:23.  Obama is now talking more generally about the Pacific Rim. “America is a Pacific power, we are going to have a presence there.”

The opening of Burma/Myanmar to political and economic liberalization has been, quite rightly, one of the top accomplishments of the State Department under U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton.  But the Philippines and Indonesia are now gathering economic steam at a time when China and Vietnam, long showcased for their engine of economic growth, are slowing.  South Korea will elect a new president in December 2012, and North Korea is adjusting to its own leadership transition from King Jong-Il to Kim Jong Un.

10:22.  Speaking of the Republican presidential debates of the past, I am missing Jon Huntsman, former Utah governor, and Obama’s ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011, and his perfunctory Chinese language sentence.

10:21.  “You invested in companies that sent jobs overseas!” Obama takes the low-hanging fruit here in making a domestic point about Romney’s private equity record.

10:19.  Romney again says he will, on day one, label China a “currency manipulator.” The value of China’s currency, the remimbi, has actually appreciated a bit since 2010, but it probably has more to do with the Chinese wanting to tamp down inflation than anything the Obama administration has done (or, frankly, anything a Romney administration could do) — for the record, it’s up 8.5% since January 2009, marking a value of around $0.159.  It’s still probably overvalued, but maybe less so than it had been previously.

10:18.  “China has not played by the same rules.” But which Chinese jobs, specifically, does Romney want to bring back?

10:17.  Interestingly, Romney says the greatest threat to the United States is a nuclear-armed Iran; Obama says it is the continued threat of terrorist attacks.  I think most Americans agree with Obama here. Kenneth Waltz probably does!

10:16.  So did Schieffer really just give Obama an opportunity to discuss terrorism in the China segment, after 75 minutes of talking about terrorism, in one way or another?

10:15.  Finally, to China. Continue reading LIVE BLOG: Romney, Obama spar over foreign policy in final U.S. presidential debate →

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Live-blogging the U.S. presidential debate on foreign policy

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A note to readers: I’ll be live-blogging tonight’s presidential debate between Democratic candidate, president Barack Obama and Republican candidate, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. 

The idea is to live-blog the debate from a world politics perspective, so I’ll be hoping to provide context, where appropriate, and analysis about U.S. relations with the rest of the world and how the two candidates’ policies on foreign affairs will affect world politics.

Puerto Rico, United States

Who is Luis Fortuño? A primer on Puerto Rico and the Republican Party’s favorite boricua.

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Tonight, at the U.S. Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, the list of primetime speakers will feature the governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Luis Fortuño.

Although Suffragio doesn’t normally wade into U.S. politics, Puerto Rican politics lies fairly far afield from mainstream American politics, notwithstanding the plum role that Fortuño will fill tonight at the convention in his support for U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Fortuño was elected governor of Puerto Rico in 2009, winning 52.8% of the vote to just 41.3% for the incumbent, Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, who had been implicated in a corruption scandal.  As governor, Fortuño immediately embarked upon a relatively unpopular program of cutting $2 billion from Puerto Rico’s budget, resulting in over 12,000 layoffs of state employees.  Fortuño also passed and implemented Law 154, which imposed a temporary excise tax on certain overseas sales, while also cutting taxes 50% for individuals and 30% for businesses.  Ultimately, Fortuño brought the budget deficit from $2 billion in 2009-10 to just $333 million in 2012-13 — his zeal for cutting budgets and for lowering taxes has attracted a significant amount of regard from Republicans on the U.S. mainland, and he was even mentioned as a potential vice presidential candidate for Romney.

Political parties in Puerto Rico, however, aren’t organized along the same ideological lines as on the U.S. mainland — Fortuño belongs to the Partido Nuevo Progresista de Puerto Rico (the PNP, New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico), which is first and foremost a proponent of full statehood for Puerto Rico.  In contrast, the Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico (the PPD, Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico) favors Puerto Rico’s current status as a commonwealth.  A smaller third party, Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rico Independence Party) favors Puerto Rico’s full independence — it looks and feels much like a traditional Latin American populist/leftist party, and it has attracted the support of the likes of high-profile Latin American figures, including author Gabriel García Márquez.

Continue reading Who is Luis Fortuño? A primer on Puerto Rico and the Republican Party’s favorite boricua. →

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U.S. Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s foreign policy views

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If sources are true, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has selected Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, with the formal announcement to come Saturday morning.

Ryan is most well-known for his strong views on budget policy — think of him as the United States’s version of George Osborne.

He’s become something of the intellectual spokesman for the Republican Party on budget matters in the post-Bush era — his proposed budget would cut massive amounts of spending out of the federal government, transform Medicare into a voucher program and render other federal programs virtually unrecognizable from their current form.  To the massive anti-government ‘tea party’ view that has emerged in the U.S. center-right since the bailouts of former U.S. president George W. Bush and former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson and the election of U.S. president Barack Obama, Ryan represents somewhat of a true believer in effecting a reduction in government spending.

In other words, Ryan’s not being picked for his foreign policy bona fides, but rather for other concerns — his Midwestern background, his conservative credentials and his wonky credibility (to the American right, at least) on budget matters.

But what would a Vice President Ryan add to foreign policy?  Given that the vice presidential pick is perhaps the most important decision Romney will make before his (potential) election as U.S. president, given that the pick telescopes Romney’s own worldview to some degree, given the influence of recent former vice presidents Dick Cheney and Joe Biden on foreign policy, and given the reality that Ryan would be a heartbeat away from the presidency, it’s a question worth asking.

Uri Friedman, writing for FP Passport, tried to answer the question back in April in a primer on Ryan’s foreign policy — the consensus is that Ryan prescribes a healthy dose of American exceptionalism, but fundamentally remains a more realist, liberal hawk than a neoconservative crusader.

When it comes to slashing U.S. military spending, however, it seems that the Pentagon is the one area Ryan would spare from his federal budget cuts:

Ryan’s 99-page “Path to Prosperity” plan, released last month, provoked an outcry in calling for boosting military spending while slashing the international affairs budget — funding for entities such as the State Department and USAID — by nearly $5 billion. When Ryan said “we don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice” in reference to the military budget, he was quick to walk back his comments. “I really misspoke,” he explained.

Otherwise, when it comes to foreign policy, Friedman notes, in sum, Ryan’s a blank slate:

Ryan’s worldview, in other words, appears to be a bit of a Rorschach test. And in a general election where appealing solely to the Republican base just won’t cut it, that might be exactly what Romney needs.

The Weekly Standard, marking a key Ryan foreign policy speech in June 2011, applauded his stance in favor of American exceptionalism:

“A world without U.S. leadership will be a more chaotic place,” Ryan said. “A place where we have less influence, and a place where our citizens face more dangers and fewer opportunities. Take a moment and imagine a world led by China and Russia.”

Ryan spoke at length about American exceptionalism as it relates to America’s role in the world. “America is an idea,” he said. “And it was the first nation founded as such. The idea is rather simple. Our rights come to us from God and nature. They occur naturally, before government.”

This belief in the American idea, Ryan said, should inform the nation’s foreign policy. “Now, if you believe these rights are universal human rights, then that clearly forms the basis of your views on foreign policy,” he said. “It leads you to reject moral relativism. It causes you to recoil at the idea of persistent moral indifference toward any nation that stifles and denies liberty, no matter how friendly and accommodating its rules are to American interests.”

 Jonathan Chait, writing for The New Republic in 2011, deemed Ryan’s foreign policy “Norquistian-Churchillian,” pitted the budget-cutting Ryan against the foreign policy version of Ryan:

In reality, Ryan’s budget is unworkable and something would have to give. Many Republicans, and especially the neoconservatives forming the draft-Ryan committee, loath the idea of pressuring the defense budget. Ryan’s forceful endorsement of neoconservative principles, along with his continued opposition to defense spending cuts, reassures his base. In the neoconservative world, mighty declarations of willpower always trump puny arithmetic.

The world press has not spent much time vetting Ryan, for what it’s worth.

For example, Israel’s Haaretz mentions Ryan in an article back in February on the cutting of $6 billion from the U.S. budget on Israeli missile defense.  The United Kingdom’s Guardian features coverage mostly going to Ryan’s role in American politics, not to his view on US-UK relations.

 

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Romney/Cameron tiff showcases often odd relationship between US, UK leaders

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Mitt Romney’s debut on the world stage is off to a bad start.

It’s become a bit of a campaign ritual in the United States for a presidential challenger to go on a mid-summer international trip to showcase the challenger’s ability for diplomacy in anticipation that the challenger may become the president of the United States — as executed ambitiously by Barack Obama’s July 2008 trip to Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, England, France and Germany.  (In Berlin, he even held a huge rally that drew thousands.)

Romney, the Republican nominee for president in the United States now challenging Obama, is currently on a tour to the United Kingdom, Poland and Israel.  The trip to the UK, in particular, as the 2012 Olympic Games open in London, was designed to highlight Romney’s role leading the Winter Olympics in 2002 in Salt Lake City.

He had already annoyed Obama supporters yesterday when his aides awkwardly asserted that Romney’s “Anglo-Saxon heritage” would somehow help him understand better the “special relationship” that both Americans and the British so fondly fete:

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the Telegraph quoted the adviser as saying, “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

Although the Romney camp likely meant to highlight that he would be a more “Atlanticist” president than Obama (whose foreign policy emphasis has been more on China and the Pacific than many of his predecessors), there were no mistaking the awkward racial overtones in the criticism of the United States’s first non-white president.

He then mistakenly referred to Ed Miliband, the leader of the UK’s Labour Party, as “Mr. Leader.”

But the real shocker has come today, when Romney not-so-subtly hinted that the Olympics aren’t assured of success and that some difficulties in preparations had been “disconcerting.”  British prime minister David Cameron, himself beleaguered by a sinking double-dip recession and a phone-hacking scandal that has enveloped some of his closest aides, snarked back:

“We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere,” an allusion to Salt Lake City, which hosted Games that Mr. Romney oversaw.

Ouch! Continue reading Romney/Cameron tiff showcases often odd relationship between US, UK leaders →