The Mar-a-Lago Accord

Adam Tooze has a very good article today on the Mar-a-Lago Accord.

What is the Mar-a-Lago accord, you may ask. Here’s how Torsten Slock characterizes it, from Tooze’s article.

According to Gillian Tett in an interview with Ezra Klein, it’s not really a thing, isn’t written down. But an enterprising young economist by the name of Stephen Miran, now chair of Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors, wrote a paper about it last year.

Is the MAL Accord simply a way to justify Trump’s pre-existing prejudices? Opinions differ! Ezra asks Tett that very thing, and she assures him no, of course, Miran’s paper is from before the election! Tooze also brings it up as one possibility.

I strongly recommend reading the Tooze paper. I think it is available through that link. I’ve been writing this post for the past several days, and it addresses the questions that I’ve had as I’ve been writing and thinking about it. Foremost is “What problem do the proposed actions address?”

The Biden administration built a very good economy in many aspect. Does the MAL Accord address voter dissatisfaction on the economy? I take the answer to that as being no, from my reading of the Tooze article and the Tett interview. The MAL Accord does address Trump’s desire for tribute from other nations, his love of bullying, and general admiration for having his name, or a related one, on something international. It also plays to his love of tariffs, although tariffs play a contradictory role in the accord.

Klein notes that Miran identified a “narrow path” in which the US puts tariffs on commerce with other countries. The plan assumes that they do not retaliate. So that’s out the window. Part of Miran’s argument is the order in which things are done, and putting tariffs on other countries and pissing them off was not supposed to be the first step.

Then, as Ezra says, something-something-something, and they won’t retaliate because we can bully them by threatening to withdraw our defense umbrella. Trump has done this, too, and the result is that other countries are rebalancing to meet the threat of a hostile United States allied with Russia.

As usual, Trump’s courtiers and would-be courtiers give up their intellectual integrity to sanewash his ignorance and prejudice, and Trump says “No, I’ll do it my way.” We see Trump’s Commerce and Finance Secretaries telling us yes, this is the way and Trump is playing 11^th dimensional chess. Another paper from Stephen Miran is in order.