David Henderson has an excellent post on the effect of tariffs on the price level. I agree with his analysis, but here I’ll reframe the debate in a way that I hope will also be helpful. Let’s begin with a few propositions:1. Under the vast majority of policy regimes, the imposition of tariffs leads to a higher price level. These include the Fed’s current (asymmetrical) flexible average inflation targeting (FAIT) regime, but also the gold standard, money supply targeting, and nominal GDP targeting.2. There are a few policy regimes where tariffs are not inflationary, including price level targeting and symmetrical FAIT. I know of no country that uses either regime.3. Tariffs reduce real output. Thus if the monetary authority prevents any rise in the price level, then NGDP would decline. This would cause a rise of unemployment above and beyond any unemployment directly caused by the tariffs.If a politician tells you that his tariff proposal will not cause inflation, and if you believe him (Yes, I know. . . ), then you should be very worried. That would mean that the tariff plan was to be combined with a monetary regime that made the welfare losses even larger than otherwise. Do tariffs cause inflation? Let’s hope so! PS.  The best argument against tariffs is not that they cause inflation, rather it is that tariffs cause lower real output. (0 COMMENTS)

There may be a charitable way to interpret the following Wall Street Journal statement in a report on Mr. Putin’s replacement of his defense minister (“Russia’s Putin Replaces Defense Minister in Security Shake-Up,” May 12, 2014): Military spending, which has surged to over 6% of gross domestic product this year, up from 2.6% before the war, has fueled much of the country’s economic growth, helping it weather the impact of Western sanctions. Factories producing shells and tanks have been working in multiple shifts to cope, boosting employment and wages. The Russian government’s propaganda makes similar claims. Outside of pure propaganda, which of course we cannot suspect the WSJ of, the most obvious interpretation is Keynesianism with a vengeance: increased military expenditures and the destruction of military capital goods (and soldiers) are supposed to fuel economic growth compared to what it would otherwise be. We might wonder, then, why the military expenditures of the North Korean ruler don’t fuel high economic growth there. And suppose that instead of 6% of the Russian GDP, the government had spent 100% of it on military pursuits, that is, had devoted all the resources of the country to war and preparation for war, wouldn’t even more economic growth have resulted? I explored the mystery of this alchemy in another EconLog post, “SGZ as a Recipe for Economic Growth.” That the new Russian defense minister, Andrei Belousov, is presented as an economist adds an ingredient to the alchemical mixture. According to Reuters, Belousov graduated from the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University in 1981. Anyone may claim to be an economist—it is fortunately not a professional title that needs government certification, at least in free countries—but a degree from a Moscow state university in communist times does not constitute the best bona fide proof of mastery of the tools of economic analysis. As I suggested before, an economist who takes economics seriously could not last long in the service of a totalitarian state; and Belousov is a long-serving apparatchik. ******************************************** A caveat on the featured image of this post, the work of DALL-E and your humble blogger: it suggests that economics is a matter of money, which it is not. Government alchemy, by P.L. and DALL-E (3 COMMENTS)

The quantity of rent-controlled apartments demanded thus becomes enormous. In New York City, some old rent-controlled units have become family heirlooms. A woman went viral on TikTok in 2021 after showcasing her redecorated $1,300 a month rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, after inheriting the lease from her parents—a unit that would rent for three to five times as much on the open market. In Stockholm, Sweden, where strict controls have been enforced for decades, the average wait time for a rent-controlled unit was 9 years by 2021 and may now exceed 20 years. The supply-side response is also consistent with economic theory. In 1994, San Francisco expanded rent control to small multifamily housing, which was previously exempt. One study shows that the supply of rental accommodation from affected landlords fell by 15 percent, with the number of renters living in such units falling by a quarter. The lower profitability of rental units saw many landlords sell such units as owner-occupied condos instead. A 2007 study of the Boston metropolitan area by economist David P. Sims found the flip side: ending rent controls increased the supply of rental housing. This is from Jeffrey Miron and Pedro Aldighieri, “Under Rent Controls, Everyone Pays,” in Ryan A. Bourne, ed., The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions About Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy. The book comes out today and you can order it on Amazon. Here’s my blurb for the book: “The War on Prices is a fantastic book. It comprehensively makes the case that price controls do great harm, often to the people they are supposed to help. Particularly good are the chapters on rent controls, price controls on oil and natural gas, and so-called junk fees, which are really fees to solve problems that would exist without them. If the chapter on why we should have a free market in water were taken to heart, my fellow Californians and I would be much better off. Read this book and learn.” — David R. Henderson, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.   (0 COMMENTS)

Don Boudreaux writes: Unlike you who find Duncan Braid’s May 6th harangue against supporters of free trade “devastating,” I find it to be tendentious. Braid writes triumphantly as if he’s caught us free traders in yet another of our Keystone Kops antics – specifically here, our effort to blame tariffs for inflation. Yet no competent economist or advocate of free trade is guilty of this ridiculous charge. If one were, Braid’s evidence of free-traders’ belief that tariffs cause inflation would consist of more than single link to a piece in, of all places, Vox. If inflation means an increase in the money supply, then no, tariffs don’t cause inflation. If inflation means a higher persistent growth rate of the price level, then no, tariffs don’t cause inflation. But if inflation means an increase in the price level, then yes, tariffs do cause inflation. One of the equations I’ve found most useful in understanding macroeconomics is MV = Py. (M is the amount of money, whether M1, M2, or some other M; V is the velocity of money; P is the price level; y is real income.) Adding a tariff makes the economy less efficient, making real income lower than otherwise. Imagine that a lot of tariffs are added and that, as a result, real income is 0.5 percentage points lower than otherwise. That’s a lot, by the way. Then, if M and V are unaffected, the price level, P, will be 0.5 percentage points higher than otherwise. QED. Does this mean that adding tariffs is a major cause of inflation? Of course not. 0.5 percentage points in a given year (the year the tariffs are added) is a small fraction of the 3 or 4 percent inflation rate. 0.5 percentage points, on top of 3 years of inflation averaging more than 4 percent annually, is rounding error.   (0 COMMENTS)

Economist and social critic Glenn Loury talks about his memoir, Late Admissions, with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts. In a wide-ranging and blunt conversation, Loury discusses his childhood, his at-times brilliant academic work, his roller-coaster ideological journey, and his personal flaws as a drug addict and imperfect husband. This is a rich conversation about academic life, race […] The post Glenn Loury Tells All appeared first on Econlib.

Niels Bohr once said:  “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” I say:  Prediction is not about the future, it’s about the present. Now that I’m fairly old, I can look back on a wide range of visions of the 21st century, many of which now seem obsolete.  Here are just a few examples: I recall the 1960s as being a period of techno-optimism.  There were visions of a 21st century filled with space travel, supersonic airliners and flying cars. The mood became more pessimistic during the 1970s.  The famous Club of Rome report warned of overpopulation and resource depletion. In the early 1990s, there was optimism that “The End of History” would usher in an age of peaceful democratic capitalism. Late in the 1990s, worry increased that the 21st century would see dramatically rising global temperatures. In the early 2000s, “The Clash of Civilizations” view became trendy, with a special focus on the clash between the West and the Muslim world. Around 2010, there was an increasing view that this would be the Chinese Century. A few years later, there were increasing fears of secular stagnation. Today, people worry about the rise of nationalism, falling birthrates, and fear of unaligned AI. What do all of these visions have in common?  The only unifying thread that I can see is that they all reflect what was going on at the moment.  That does not mean that they were all incorrect, rather that they correlate much more closely with conditions at the time then they do with conditions today. Consider what was occurring when these predictions were made: The 1960s saw transportation technology advancing dramatically over previous decades.  It was easy (but wrong) to extrapolate those trends into the 21st century.  Technology did continue to advance, but often in unexpected ways (biotech and computer chips.) In the late 1960s, global population growth reached a peak of slightly over 2%/year, a rate that we may never see again.  And the early 1970s saw disruptions in the supply of food and energy. The early 1990s saw the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. By the late 1990s, there was increasing evidence of an upward trend in global temperatures.  (Some cold winters in the 1970s had led to fears of a new Ice Age.) The famous terrorist attacks of 9/11 led to a general view that we would see many more such attacks in the near future.  The public felt quite vulnerable. Expectations of a Chinese century peaked at the end of a multi-decade period of double-digit Chinese economic growth. Fears of secular stagnation developed after a sluggish recovery from the Great Recession and a long period of near zero interest rates.  Even I expected interest rates to stay fairly low. So what’s in the news today?  We see reports of a dramatic fall in fertility.  We see news of a rise in nationalism.  We see warnings that AI poses an existential threat. If there’s a unifying thread in all of these concerns, it might be described as “anxiety over the Great Replacement.”  People worry that sharply declining birthrates in advanced countries will lead to our replacement with cheap labor from poor countries and increasingly sophisticated robots. But how long before these current anxieties are replaced by an entirely new set of worries? I won’t try to predict the future course of the 21st century, but I will try to predict the future course of 21st century predictions.  Ten years from now, I expect the consensus forecast for remainder of the century will largely reflect the headline news stories of the 2030s.  I predict that in the 2040s, forecasts for the remainder of the century will largely reflect the headline news stories of that decade.  Ditto for the 2050s.  What will those news stories be?  I have no idea.  But I strongly believe that predictions of the future will continue to reflect current events, and will mostly not reflect the actual future that plays out over time. In other words, expect the unexpected.  And then expect people to assume that the unexpected will become the new norm, until it is superseded by some other unexpected event. (0 COMMENTS)

First, Happy Mothers’ Day. Trump Promised To ‘Drain the Swamp.’ He Did the Opposite. By John Stossel, Reason, May 8, 2024. Excerpt: In 2020, then-President Trump said he was succeeding: “We’re draining the Washington swamp!” But it’s not true. “He made government bigger,” Economist Ed Stringham says in my new video. ‘That’s going in the wrong direction. Looking through a list of agencies, every single one I could see, there were more employees after his presidency than before.” Trump added almost 2 million jobs to the federal workforce. The most stunning number here is the 2 million jobs number. I haven’t fact-checked it. Is it true? US Is Losing In Ukraine. Blame China, Says Blinken. by John V. Walsh, antiwar.com, May 9, 2024. Excerpt: At the close of his recent trip to China, on April 26 while still in Beijing, Sec. of State, Anthony [sic] Blinken, made an extremely bellicose statement to the press.  Blinken’s words marked a new phase in the narrative to prepare the American and European public for more conflict with China.   As Caitlin Johnstone has reminded us, “Before they drop the bombs, they drop the narrative.”  What, then, is the narrative that Blinken dropped? In his statement, Blinken tells us that the US has “serious concern” over “components” from China that are “powering” Russia’s war with Ukraine.  He goes on to say that China is the top supplier “of dual use items that Moscow is using to ramp up its industrial base, a defense industrial base…”  It is widely accepted that the US is losing its Ukraine proxy war.  Blinken now informs us that the US-installed Ukrainian regime is losing because China is aiding Russia.  Blaming China is nothing new in the argot of the West, but here it is put to a new use, as an excuse for yet another embarrassing defeat for the US. Blinken lists “machine tools, microelectronics, nitrocellulose” as key components that China provides to Russia.  But “dual use items” is an ill-defined and malleable category.  Potentially, every item of trade can be subsumed under the term.  For example, if Russia imports Chinese machine tools to make cars, then it can readily be claimed that they are being used to build tanks.  Or if Russia imports nitrocellulose to make fingernail polish, it can be charged that the chemical is being used for gun powder or explosives.  So, when the US demands that China stop “indirect” support for Russia’s war effort, it is ultimately demanding that China cut off all trade with Russia. Blinken offers no evidence that such “dual use” items are responsible for the drubbing that its Ukraine proxies are taking.  And China has no obligation to curtail its commerce with Russia.  As with India and other genuinely sovereign nations which continue to trade with Russia, China is not bound by the edicts of the United States.   Jones Act Exacerbates US Ferry System Struggles by Colin Grabow, Cato at Liberty, May 7, 2024, Washington responded by rebidding the contract and changing its law so shipyards outside the state could compete to build the vessels. That, however, has meant delays in the acquisition process, mounting frustration among ferry users, and the ongoing exchange of barbs over the new propulsion system. But this controversy misses the bigger picture. Washington’s chief obstacle to cost‐​effectively acquiring new ferries isn’t rooted in technology but protectionism. One only needs to look across Washington’s international border to see why. In late 2019, only two months after Washington announced its plan to purchase new hybrid electric ferries, Canadian ferry operator BC Ferries ordered four vessels with the same technology from a European shipbuilder. All four were delivered before the end of 2021. Featuring a capacity approximately one‐​third that of the vessels sought by WSF (450 passengers and crew and 47 vehicles versus 1,500 passengers and 144 vehicles), the ferries cost about $38 million each—less than a sixth of the new WSF ferries’ estimated price. I don’t have my usual 4 highlights this week. I got a bad cold on my return trip from Dallas last Saturday and have been sick or low-energy for most of the week. But I’m back! (0 COMMENTS)

According to press reports, the Biden administration is on the verge of announcing a quadrupling of the customs tariff (a tax on American importers) on EVs made in China. He may also announce other Trumpian tariffs (“Biden to Quadruple Tariffs on Chinese EVs,” Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2024). That would not be surprising. In a Regulation feature two years ago, I predicted that Biden would be Trump 2.0 (“Joe Biden’s Economic Agenda: An Early Appraisal,” Spring 2021). I wrote: In general, the basis of Biden’s economic approach seems to be the belief (which was largely shared by Trump) that voluntary exchange among free individuals cannot be counted on to ensure economic prosperity and individual flourishing. This is perhaps most obvious in international trade, where Biden is likely to continue Trump’s policies. The one difference is that the benefits will go to a different corner of the Washington swamp: trade unions instead of inefficient American companies. But it is all one big swamp. Trump had Peter Navarro to oversee his protectionist agenda, and Biden has an entourage of Navarro imitators to oversee his. Apparently, Biden and his entourage have no more understanding than Trump did that economic efficiency is defined in terms of consumer satisfaction, not producer privilege. … Like Trump, Biden does not believe in free trade but in “fair trade” as he (and his union‐boss supporters) defines it. He promises to “stand up for America.” Protectionism is the area where Biden is most likely to be Trump 2.0. If he goes ahead with his reported protectionist plans, Trump 2.0 would be, in this area, more Trumpian than Trump 1.0. As I argued in a recent post, protection against environmental goodies is especially farcical: see “The Farce of Clean Energy Dumping,” Econlog, April 1, 2024. But it is no more economically absurd and dangerous than Trump’s nationalism. Underlying all this are phenomena that the economics of politics has accustomed economists to see: the politicians’ power greed before organized interests and the logic of interventionism begetting interventionism. In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins encapsulates one aspect of the logic of politics (“Whose Trade War Is Worse, Trump’s or Biden’s?“): Mr. Biden shows every sign of wanting to start a global trade war to protect the high-cost, uncompetitive green-energy industry he’s been building at home with taxpayer dollars. ****************************** I am using for the present post the same featured image (reproduced below) that appeared in the previous one, “The Farce of Clean Energy Dumping.” As I explained there, my idea for DALL-E was that Chinese solar panels and EVs were falling from the sky like manna, and Commerce Department agents were trying to shoot the goodies and prevent people from collecting them. To get DALL-E’s half-cooperation, I had to explain that the guns of Commerce Department agents shoot roses. Commerce Department agents stop Americans from harvesting green manna from China (DALL-E) (0 COMMENTS)

The DOJ’s  antitrust lawsuit against Apple rounds out the set of cases against the big tech firms that have drawn so much ire from enforcers. These include the DOJ’s ongoing suits against Google, and the FTC’s cases against Amazon and Meta.  While the Biden administration’s antitrust officials initially signaled that their targets for enforcement include a preoccupation with political power and harm to democracy, harm to workers and small businesses, fairness, and inequality, their white whale cases against the tech firms have largely complained of harm to consumers. Notably, Lina Khan’s career catalyzing note in the Yale Law Journal made the case that antitrust’s focus on higher prices was outdated in a world in which firms like Amazon harm competition through low pricing strategies. The complaint that Khan’s FTC has now filed against the company argues that Amazon harms competition through business practices that raise prices and harm consumers, largely in line with recent enforcement doctrine.  In the Apple case, it will be interesting to see if the DOJ can convincingly demonstrate harm to consumers rather than simply harm to competitors. This is a difficult tension to overcome when bringing a “monopolization” case under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Section 1 covers collusive agreements and conspiracies to restrain trade, like fixing prices and dividing markets. This involves multilateral decisions, i.e. conduct involving more than just one individual or firm. However, Section 2’s prohibition against monopolization implies that a single firm can be prosecuted for unilaterally protecting their monopoly power in an illegal manner.  As this suggests, it must be established that a firm has market power before it can be determined that it illegally protected that power. However, in a world of open market competition, maintaining margins and market shares is an all-consuming effort for businesses. Anything a firm does to compete – to gain market share and elevate itself above its rivals – could be construed as an attempt to monopolize an industry, especially if the firm succeeds. The DOJ must outline how Apple’s practices have been problematic with respect to antitrust law. To be successful in court, it will likely need to show harm to consumers specifically, not just harm to competitors.   The DOJ’s complaint makes the case that Apple indeed has market power in two relevant markets, which they outline as the market for “performance smartphones” (a category they have devised that excludes non-premium, lower quality, “entry-level” smartphones), and the broader market for smartphones in general within the United States. It argues that Apple abuses this market power to disadvantage rivals and degrade quality for users outside of its “walled garden” ecosystem.  The complaint asserts Apple achieves this through five major abusive practices: (1) it discouraged the development of “super apps” which are written in programs that can be used across platforms and therefore accessed by any user regardless of what kind of phone they have; (2) it suppressed cloud gaming apps that reduced dependence on its own hardware; (3) it degrades messaging quality purposefully between iPhone and other smartphone users to discourage iPhone users from leaving the ecosystem and encourage others to join it; (4) it doesn’t allow non-Apple smartwatches to interoperate with its ecosystem; and (5) it doesn’t allow external digital wallet app developers access to a key input they would need to compete with Apple Pay through the app store.  If Apple can make the case that these business practices were instituted to the benefit of consumers, it may be tough for the government to persuade the court that the practices are illegal. The toughest to defend may be the third assertion, of which smartphone users have been increasingly suspicious. An added wrinkle is that the group of “consumers” alleged to be harmed in an antitrust case has sometimes varied throughout the era of the consumer welfare standard, as Greg Werden, a former economist in the DOJ’s antitrust division, notes in this podcast conversation. For instance, is the relevant group of consumers users of iPhones or all U.S. users of smartphones?  An editorial in the Wall Street Journal released the same day the case launched claims that, while most apps on Apple’s app store are free, the number of paid developers using the store increased by 374%, to 5.2 million, over the last decade. The company also has claimed that the global commerce facilitated by the store increased from $685 billion to $1.1 trillion, or 64%, over the years 2020-2022. If these numbers are true, it could be difficult for the government to convince the court that consumers have been harmed in a traditionally monopolistic method of raising prices and lowering output.  The outcome of this and other major cases will show if we’re moving toward a “competitor welfare” policy as opposed to a consumer welfare policy. This would more closely resemble the European Union’s competition policy system, an example which many modern antitrust advocates hope the U.S. will follow. In the EU, many more investigations into unilateral conduct are opened, typically at the instigation of the defendant’s rivals or firms it transacts with. A relevant example is the recent 1.8 billion-euro fine levied against Apple by the European Commission at the conclusion of an investigation that was launched after an initial complaint by Spotify.  A strand of the industrial organization economics literature in the latter half of the 20th century explored how antitrust law could be used by firms to gain an advantage over rivals, i.e. to subvert competition rather than protect it. During this time, the consumer welfare standard took its place as the lodestar of antitrust enforcement alongside of the “end of history” where liberal open markets and democracy were seen as the new hegemony.  However, antitrust has not been immune to the rise of populism in recent times, as demonstrated by the Biden administration enforcers zeal for targeting consolidation (“big is bad”). However, it seems that their cases against big tech, contrary to what they’ve stated before, attempt to make the case for harm to consumers and innovation. It remains to be seen whether they can successfully make that case in court.    Giorgio Castiglia is the Program Manager for the Project on Competition at the Mercatus Center, and a PhD student in economics at George Mason University. (0 COMMENTS)

I recently came across three news stories that are worth thinking about. The first story discussed the US government’s role in encouraging gun exports, which often lead to violence in developing countries. Here’s Bloomberg: Last October, a recently fired police officer walked into his stepson’s nursery school in the remote northeast of Thailand and, in under 30 minutes, killed 23 children and two teachers. Panya Kamrab hacked some of his victims to death with a sugar-cane machete and shot others point blank with a pistol, including three local government employees eating lunch outside the school. The rampage, which left a total of 36 dead, ranks as the worst in Thai history and one of the worst in the world. The killer’s gun, a Sig Sauer P365 — touted by the company as small enough to easily conceal yet able to hold 13 rounds — had traveled more than 8,000 miles from a factory on New Hampshire’s rocky seacoast to Thailand’s lush Nong Bua Lamphu province. It was part of a growing number of semiautomatic handguns and rifles exported by American gunmakers and linked to violent crimes. . . . The federal government has helped push international sales of rapid-fire guns to record levels. Is the US government responsible for the deaths caused by the gun exports that it encourages?  Or does the blame lie with those who used the guns? Here’s Politico: Secretary of State Antony Blinken ended three days of meetings in China on Friday with a stark warning to China’s leadership — stop exporting materials that allow Russia to rebuild its industrial base or face U.S. sanctions. Chinese state-owned firms are providing key components for Russia’s defense industrial base, including microelectronics and machine tools that have “a material effect against Ukraine” and constitute “a growing threat that Russia poses to countries in Europe,” Blinken told reporters in a press briefing in Beijing on Friday. Is the Chinese government responsible for the way that Russia uses its machine tools and microelectronics? To be clear, there’s a good argument for China cutting off exports of key materials to Russia.  But it’s also important to recognize that countries often put their own economic interests ahead of those of small countries half way around the world.  A third story explores just such a case, involving a split between the US government and Ukraine on the question of drone strikes on Russia: The US has urged Ukraine to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, warning that the drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation, according to three people familiar with the discussions. The repeated warnings from Washington were delivered to senior officials at Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU, and its military intelligence directorate, known as the GUR, the people told the Financial Times. . . . One person said that the White House had grown increasingly frustrated by brazen Ukrainian drone attacks that have struck oil refineries, terminals, depots and storage facilities across western Russia, hurting its oil production capacity. Russia remains one of the world’s most important energy exporters despite western sanctions on its oil and gas sector. Oil prices have risen about 15 per cent this year, to $85 a barrel, pushing up fuel costs just as US President Joe Biden begins his campaign for re-election. In both the US and Chinese cases, there is a conflict between foreign policy interests and domestic economic interests.  China’s economy benefits from exporting manufactured goods to China, and the US economy benefits from lower global oil prices.  On the other hand, a Chinese export embargo would help Ukraine by weakening the Russian defense capability, and drone strikes on Russia’s oil sector deny Russia funds that help finance its war machine.  How should these dilemma’s be resolved? As far as I can tell, the US prefers that China is the one to sacrifice in support Ukraine.  Indeed the US government feels so strongly about this issue that it threatens sanctions against China if the Chinese government doesn’t adopt sanctions against Russia.  (Interestingly, India’s exports of manufactured goods to Russia have recently doubled in value, but the US is not threatening economic sanctions on India.) On the other hand, when it comes to drone strikes the US government seems much less willing to sacrifice.  Even though drones are an increasingly effective weapon, we ask the Ukrainians to sacrifice by not using this weapon against Russian oil refineries.  High oil prices might inconvenience our consumers. To be clear, I am not arguing that there are any easy answers to these questions.  Instead, I am asking people to consider how these questions would be viewed if the roles were reversed.  What if Chinese exported guns were causing mayhem and murder throughout much of the developing world?  How would we feel about that?  How would a Chinese person feel if the US government sanctioned China over machine exports to Russia?  How would Americans feel if the EU sanctioned the US because they believed our cheap energy policy was leading to global warming? Everyone feels passionately about certain issues.  (I passionately support Ukraine’s defense of its homeland.)  But people in different countries often feel passionately about different issues.  I’m not sure its reasonable to expect a uniformity of views, and I’m not sure it’s wise to sanction everyone who differs from our perspective—especially if we exempt countries from sanctions solely because they are our “friends”. PS.  A recent story in Foreign Affairs suggests that the Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia do not increase the global price of oil, which further weakens the US government position on this issue. (0 COMMENTS)