> It gets a lot less contradictory when you realize the principles are window dressing for the interests.
I don't think this is the epiphany you think it represents. The whole point of laws and regulations is to protect interests.
Do you think that any regime passes and enforces laws that are detrimental to their best interests?
In free market economies, laws and regulations are put in place to foster competition, and antitrust legislation is in place to prevent anticompetitive practices. However, laws and regulations are also in place to prevent strategic interests from being captured or even threatened. The motivation is rather obvious and to the point. Where is this window dressing you speak of?
> Nation states will use whatever words are necessary to justify their actions, but the game is and always has been power, leverage, and interest.
Your post shows some degree of confusion, specially by the way you imply inconsistencies. There are none, and the whole point is rather on the nose. Internal competition and level playing fields are promoted as they pressure companies to improve their competitiveness. "Competitiveness" is the operating principle. Having a rival third-party perform an action that threatens your competitiveness is obviously not acceptable.
You're not saying "governments have interests" (which we can agree is obvious), youre saying the public principles invoked are contingent on whether they advance those interests and get swapped out the moment they don't. That's not a banal "laws protect interests", it's a claim about which interests and when the rhetoric changes.
"Window dressing" from the cited comment isn't about the existence of law, it's about the story told to legitimate a choice already made on interest grounds.
When a principle helps the home coalition's position, it's foregrounded, when it threatens it, it's narrowed, reinterpreted, suspended etc. The principle is the sales pitch and the selection and timing are about power.
Countries push openness most intensely in sectors where their firms can penetrate foreign markets (finance in the 1990s, software/IP heavy goods in the 2000s etc). Because openness abroad protects their capital, openness at home is celebrated until it starts eroding strategic capacity. Then come security reviews, export controls, local content rules, subsidies etc and everything is wrapped in principled language.
> Internal competition and level playing fields are promoted as they pressure companies to improve their competitiveness.
Until internal competition threatens a national champion in a strategic race. Then we let consolidation happen (or subsidize it) and call it "industrial policy". We laud the disciplining function of foreign competition until the foreign rival is big enough to discipline us, then it's "unfair trade", "security risk", "systemic rivalry" etc
For decades, openness to China was "win win globalization". As China's capability rose, the same flows (capital, tech, data etc) got relabeled as channels of leverage. Now we create controls, seizures/forced restructurings and targeted decoupling justified by a different principle than yesterday's.
So basically your "policy serves interests" is a truism that ignores the commenter's claim about how principles are instrumentalized. I mean free markets, antitrust, IP, security, sovereignty etc aren't a tight contradiction free doctrine. States pick the item that best advances leverage at that moment and explain it with whatever noble language fits. It's a realistic description of how advanced economies behave when the balance of advantage shifts.
There used to be a concept of enlightened self interest, in which countries agreed to play by universal rules that they benefit from in the long run, but which might not be in their favor in every particular case.
Now, we're in an era of petty self interest, in which no one trusts anyone else, international institutions and laws carry no weight, and everyone is poorer and less safe in the long run.
However, laws and regulations are also in place to prevent strategic interests from being captured or even threatened. The motivation is rather obvious and to the point. Where is this window dressing you speak of?
And yet the sale was allowed - 7 years ago - and only voided now under cloak and dagger, via a never-before used law. The window dressing is the entire "international rules based order" we hear so much about. If it's all just interests, then you can't complain about Russia invading Ukraine, Israel annexing land from various neighbors, China taking Taiwan and seizing TSMC, etc.
Having a rival third-party perform an action that threatens your competitiveness is obviously not acceptable.
And yet that being acceptable is the entire basis of the free market system. So yes I'm just whistling past the graveyard, but the hypocrisy is real and there should be no crying about principles later. The embrace of "the strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must" - just as the west's relative strength is at its lowest ebb in perhaps hundreds of years - is at the the very least a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off.
I don't think this is the epiphany you think it represents. The whole point of laws and regulations is to protect interests.
Do you think that any regime passes and enforces laws that are detrimental to their best interests?
In free market economies, laws and regulations are put in place to foster competition, and antitrust legislation is in place to prevent anticompetitive practices. However, laws and regulations are also in place to prevent strategic interests from being captured or even threatened. The motivation is rather obvious and to the point. Where is this window dressing you speak of?
> Nation states will use whatever words are necessary to justify their actions, but the game is and always has been power, leverage, and interest.
Your post shows some degree of confusion, specially by the way you imply inconsistencies. There are none, and the whole point is rather on the nose. Internal competition and level playing fields are promoted as they pressure companies to improve their competitiveness. "Competitiveness" is the operating principle. Having a rival third-party perform an action that threatens your competitiveness is obviously not acceptable.