How can we be so focused on toppling a nation, hostile to us even today, that was relatively stable under its totalitarian regime when there is another nation practicing genocide?
"Free" trade, which is what America (though few other nations) practices now, means opening our borders (with trivial exceptions) and letting the chips fall where they may.
Preston asserts, "A quarter century later, all nations practiced unrestricted submarine warfare".
The fact is that most nations practice electronic surveillance and that citizens everywhere surrender personal data voluntarily to digital services and social networks.
When American pharmaceutical companies pressured Mr. Zoellick to do something about African nations' practice of buying generic knockoffs of popular AIDS drugs, he stood firm.
While the United States has hardly been innocent of such practices, and provides military and financial aid to nations practicing torture, it has generally supported the international standards regarding torture.
But, wading into the debate over the outsourcing of American jobs to lower-cost nations like China, Mexico and India, he sought to convince the crowd that he was fighting to give American workers a fair shot by demanding that other nations practice fair trade.
And partly it was a leap of economic faith, the hope — driven by the will to believe, despite vast evidence to the contrary — that everything would work out as long as nations practiced the Victorian virtues of price stability and fiscal prudence.
Caitlin Hayden, the National Security Council's deputy spokeswoman, said the administration was "not cutting or tying" foreign aid to changes in other nation's practices.
(These, too, have been seriously questioned in recent years by economists as respected as Paul A. Samuelson, the Nobel Prize-winning professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Adam Smith idea that free trade always benefits every nation that practices it is very much in question now).
