Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries, by Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher. 849 pages with index. Cambridge University Press 2024.

Although many (including this writer) will reject its conclusions, Fasteau and Fletcher’s compendium, Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries, will serve as the standard reference work on industrial policy in the foreseeable future. Its 800 pages provide a thorough survey of all the major economies’ experience with government planning, including a sober assessment of successes and failures. They rightly emphasize the key role of military R&D. Nonetheless, they miss the trees for the forest, so to speak—namely, the singular contributions of maverick inventors. Innovation can’t be budgeted and scheduled, only fostered and encouraged. And that depends on a delicate balance between government support and private initiative.

The authors want the government to remake the economy, with a new corps of federal officials empowered to direct investment to favored industries. In their enthusiasm, they ignore the gross deficiencies of the most ambitious piece of industrial policy in decades, namely the Biden CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. And they naively propose a devaluation of the U.S. dollar to promote exports without considering the ways in which cheapening the currency adversely affects manufacturing. 

“In 2021 and 2022, Biden proposed and Congress enacted the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act (BIA), the CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). These ambitious new programs, combined with their explicitly pro-industrial policy rationales, were a big step forward,” the authors write. They worry that the $170 billion CHIPS Act wasn’t big enough: “The Act was a major advance, but the aid it provides, while sizeable, is dwarfed by that provided by Taiwan, Korea, and China.”

The CHIPS Act subsidies prompted $450 billion in planned investments, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, but the industry encountered crippling shortages of skilled labor, engineers, and infrastructure. The cost of building new industrial plants jumped by 30 percent in little more than a year, and unfilled construction job openings jumped to an all-time record in 2023. Plant openings by TSMC, Samsung, and other fabricators were delayed by years. Intel took $8.5 billion in subsidies under the CHIPS Act and shortly thereafter laid off 15,000 workers and cut capital expenditures by 20 percent.

The CHIPS Act turned out to be a horrible example of how industrial policy can go wrong. Apart from its shoddy implementation, Biden’s venture into industrial policy failed to encourage research into new semiconductor technologies that promise increases of computing speed by orders of magnitude. The authors discuss molecular electronics, which, if successful, will create circuits from individual molecules rather than silicon wafers, but do not mention the absence of support for such technologies in the CHIPS Act.

Perhaps the serried ranks of federal officials proposed by the authors would have foreseen these bottlenecks, but Fasteau and Fletcher did not. The term “skilled labor” appears just five times in the book and only once with reference to the United States. American manufacturers invariably cite the lack of skilled personnel as the single biggest constraint on expansion. A worker with a high school diploma and a year’s training can earn $60,000 a year operating a computer-controlled machine, but this work requires proficiency in high-school math (for example, trigonometry). Less than a quarter of American high school students are rated proficient, according to the Department of Education, and they aren’t looking for factory work.

The authors mention Germany’s apprenticeship system as an element of that country’s industrial policy, but are silent about the abysmal state of American secondary education. High schools used to teach industrial skills; I still have the draftsman set my father used at a Brooklyn public school before starting as a machinist’s apprentice at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Nor do Fasteau and Fletcher mention that just seven percent of US undergraduates major in engineering, vs. a third in China, which now graduates 1.2 million engineers each year, vs. 200,000 in the United States. They provide detailed reports of university programs in quantum computing and nanotechnology, but ignore the biggest single problem now facing American industry.

The role of the military in promoting innovation is a central theme in their account. “The shadow of Mars is long,” they observe. “The Englishman Henry Bessemer,” who invented modern steelmaking, “had been trying to make a cannon strong enough to fire new rifled artillery shells.” They rightly draw attention to the national security imperative in inspiring innovation, but their account has an important lacuna.

A set of breakthroughs in the 1970s—optical networks, CMOS manufacturing of integrated circuits, and the Internet, among others—that launched the Digital Age. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work explained:

In 1973, the Yom Kippur War provided dramatic evidence of advances in surface-to-air missiles, and Israel’s most advanced fighters, flown by the top pilots in the Middle East, if not among the world’s best, lost their superiority for at least three days due to a SAM belt. And Israeli armored forces were savaged by ATGMs, antitank guided munitions.

U.S. analysts cranked their little models and extrapolated that [if] the balloon went up in Europe’s central front and we had suffered attrition rates comparable to the Israelis, U.S. tactical air power would be destroyed within 17 days, and NATO would literally run out of tanks.

Vietnam fell two years later, and the American military went back to the drawing boards. By 1978, advances in chip manufacturing put into the cockpits of fighter planes computers that could run lookdown radar. By 1982, American avionics helped Israel to destroy the Syrian air force in the Beqaa Valley “turkey shoot.”

Their account of the role of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other government agencies in promoting industrial innovation is extensive, although it misses some decisive points.

Part of the problem is that federal R&D funding has shrunk as a share of government spending and GDP. “Federally funded R&D—the spending that generates fundamental technological breakthroughs—peaked at 1.9 percent of GDP in 1962, fell to 0.7 percent by 2020, and as of mid-2024 is only at the beginning of a possible turnaround,” they note. DARPA funding made possible Sergei Brin and Larry Page’s Google search algorithm, the voice recognition system later branded as Apple’s Siri, the Internet, the analog-to-digital transformation that enabled the smartphone, as well as GPS, stealth technology, night vision, smart weapons and a vast number of other innovations.

When the U.S. military is compelled to innovate as a matter of national security, it funds research at the frontier of physics. This puts technology in the hands of entrepreneurs who want to create new products. The Achilles’ heel of industrial policy is rent-seeking by corporations. When technology changes incrementally, industry easily corrupts the officials responsible for doling out federal money by offering them future employment. But when national security demands breakthroughs at the frontier of physics, entrepreneurs gain access to technology that challenges the existing business structure. That is what happened during the 1980s, when startups like Cisco, Intel, Apple, and Oracle became the new corporate giants.

Federal bureaucrats do a poor job of picking winners in the business world, and they don’t do a good job of forecasting technological breakthroughs, either. Although virtually every important innovation of the Digital Age began with DARPA funding, the most important of these inventions had little to do with the initial motivation for the project. An example related by Dr. Henry Kressel, the former head of RCA Labs, is the semiconductor laser: The military wanted to illuminate battlefields for night fighting. Kressel and his team took DARPA’s money and perfected a laser that could transmit vast quantities of information through optical cables, making the Internet possible. 

Maverick engineers with a mind of their own rather than federal planners discovered the most important innovations. The great corporate labs at RCA, IBM, GE, and the Bell System formed half of a public-private partnership, in which the government paid for basic research, but private capital took the risk of commercialization. 

Fasteau and Fletcher draw attention to America’s declining share of manufacturing in GDP and its widening trade deficit. They propose withdrawing from the World Trade Organization, rejecting any new free trade agreements, and raising tariffs, along with a devaluation of the U.S. dollar. They caution against disruptive, sudden action:

Tariff rate quotas and tariffs phased in over time should be used to nurture industries the U.S. is attempting to develop, is in danger of losing, or is trying to regain. For example, the federal government’s current $54 billion effort to rebuild U.S. capability in semiconductors should be supported by a staged tariff and quota policy. Said policy should track along with and protect the development of American production capacity, but not prematurely burden US users of advanced chips that domestic manufacturers are not yet capable of making.

Caution is called for indeed, given that we now import most of our capital goods. To reduce dependence on imports, we must invest in new capacity, which means increasing imports of capital goods for some years before replacing them with domestic production in the future. 

Less convincing is the authors’ plaidoyer for a cheap dollar. The steepest decline in manufacturing employment in U.S. history occurred during the 2000s while the US dollar’s real effective exchange rate fell sharply. That does not imply that a falling dollar caused the decline in employment, but rather that more important factors were at work. Perhaps the most important price point in capital-intensive investment is the cost of capital itself. Stable currencies generally are associated with a low cost of capital, because currency depreciation promotes inflation, and inflation adds both a surcharge and a risk premium to the cost of capital. 

When corporations write investments off taxable income over years, inflation reduces the value of depreciation, and thus increases the effective corporate tax rate. For that matter, Fasteau and Fletcher praise Japan’s use of accelerated depreciation to promote investment, but have nothing to say about the subject as it might apply to the United States. Tax relief for investment might prove a more effective incentive for manufacturing investment than tariffs. 

Despite these flaws, Industrial Policy for the United States belongs in the library of every policymaker concerned about the state of U.S. industry. 

How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold, by Philipp Felsch, trans. Daniel Bowles (Cambridge: Polity, 2024), $29.95

The most learned man I know suggests a comic figure. He is bald, short, and excitable. He wears thick glasses. An idiosyncratic filler tic (“um-nyah”) punctuates his communication in, presumably, all 17 languages he knows. That Vittorio Hösle’s Morals and Politics ought to be more widely read in the United States is another way he reminds me of Timofey Pnin. He is also kind, wise, and deadly serious. When he habilitated at the tender age of 26, people made the inevitable comparisons to the youngest German philosopher to qualify for a professorship: Friedrich Nietzsche, at age 25.

Mention this earlier prodigy, however, and Hösle will shudder with disgust. He suggests a shower may be in order after reading Ecce Homo. His graduate class at the University of Notre Dame was my first encounter with vicarious embarrassment (of course the Germans have a word, Fremdscham) regarding Nietzsche. Some people cannot forget the enthusiasms of the Nazis and the young Benito Mussolini. Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s only sibling to survive into adulthood, selectively promoted anti-Semitic scrawlings among the papers that Nietzsche had left behind (his Nachlass). She pawned off others as his posthumous masterpiece, The Will to Power. Her presentation of the Nachlass was not seriously challenged until the postwar era. Philipp Felsch’s How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold begins here, at the nadir of this strange thinker’s reputation, and tells the curious story of its rehabilitation by two underappreciated Italian scholars. 

Felsch’s is strictly a European story. Americans are too affable, too blasé, or too credulous to have turned Nietzsche the cold shoulder, ever. At Princeton since the days of Walter Kaufmann, a dash of spiritual elitism is permissible to give style to your character; it even makes a salutary ingredient in the mix of democratic individualism. Didn’t Nietzsche have a lifelong respect for Ralph Waldo Emerson? At Chicago since the time of Leo Strauss, and in the many places Hannah Arendt taught, the brooding provocations of Martin Heidegger loom, and wasn’t it Nietzsche who made possible Heidegger’s overturning of metaphysics? But Baltimore first and foremost welcomes Nietzsche. Here H. L. Mencken wrote the first monograph on Nietzsche in English. And it was to Johns Hopkins that Richard Macksey and René Girard invited Jacques Derrida to introduce the “poststructuralist” Nietzsche at a famous conference in 1966. Poststructuralist shenanigans at two Nietzsche conferences in France, the Royaumont colloquium (1964) and “Nietzsche adjourd’hui?” at Cerisy-la-Salle (1972), bookend Felsch’s reception history. Derrida and his colleagues make Nietzsche into a hero of playful textual vandalism. Nowhere is “the truth” or even the intentions of “the author” to be found, they argue, least of all in Nietzsche’s exposé of the will to truth as the will to power. Felsch’s main subjects are mostly ghosts at these banquets. During this time, Giorgio Colli (1917–1979) and Mazzino Montinari (1928–1986) were compiling a new critical edition of Nietzsche’s collected works, including his Nachlass, on the other side of the Iron Curtain in Weimar. Even as Derrida quotes their manuscripts, however, he mocks their painstaking philological effort. Seizing upon one marginal note, “I have forgotten my umbrella,” Derrida asks, does this jot belong to Nietzsche’s “works”? Is, he gibes, the forgotten umbrella a key to unlocking the “truth” of Nietzsche’s intent?

Felsch presents this Nietzsche reception history in the context of a love story between young men and philosophy. It begins at Ginnasio N. Machiavelli in Lucca in 1942. Colli is a charismatic 25 year-old high-school teacher. Montinari is a promising pupil of 14. Surprisingly, Colli’s obsession with Nietzsche chafes against the official fascist curriculum more radically than the liberal opposition. For while Benedetto Croce presented a rival understanding of Hegelian historicism (storicismo) to Giovanni Gentile’s, Nietzsche promised untimely thoughts, an escape from unfortunate times, and even philosophy as practiced by the ancient Greeks. Colli’s desire to overcome time-bound ideas and return to classical philosophy also struck Leo Strauss, another Nietzsche enthusiast from his youth, around the same time in New York. Now Nietzsche’s promise may or may not be a false one, since he may regard the “truths “ of the ancient thinkers as artistic expressions of their will to power. And some people also question the earnestness of Strauss’s return to timeless philosophical questions. But to anyone who has encountered the debates among and surrounding “Straussians,” the decades-long disagreements between Colli and Montinari, about the relationship between art and philosophy in general and over Nietzsche in particular, will sound familiar. 

According to Montinari, who would spend decades in Nietzsche’s archive, there is not an accidental phrase, word, or even punctuation mark in all of Nietzsche’s writings. “Logographic necessity” is the Straussian term for this inerrancy. If Colli and Montinari had taught in the United States, they might not stand out at Colgate, Keynon, or Carleton, where Strauss’s students insisted on the possibility of a return to philosophy, despite Nietzsche and Heidegger, by close readings of Plato and other worthies. And even Felsch, despite his close focus on Europe, cannot avoid citing Allan Bloom’s phrase (from The Closing of the American Mind) when Colli and Montinari bemoan the “Nietzscheanization of the Left”.

In all great philosophical love stories, like Nietzsche contra Wagner, the student overcomes the master. Does Montinari betray and outshine Colli? Felsch suggests that Montinari’s communism is a repudiation of his apolitical teacher. But this is complicated. Italian Communist Party membership is Montinari’s ticket to Weimar, in East Germany, where the Soviets had stashed the one hundred wooden crates of Nietzsche’s original papers. Archival research was good communist praxis in the party of Antonio Gramsci, with its critical focus on the cultural hegemony of the bourgeois class. The Soviet Union, too, was invested in cultural diplomacy in Italy. (On the other side of this cultural-diplomacy contest, Professor Hösle was born to the director of the Goethe-Institut in Milan and an Italian mother in 1960.) Before rededicating himself to Colli’s dream of bringing Nietzsche back to philosophical life, Montinari was the director of the communist-funded Centro Thomas Mann in Rome.

Both Colli and Montinari elevate artistic insight over the reigning philosophical opinions of the day. This is not exactly apolitical. Take Montinari’s favorite writer, Thomas Mann. Nietzsche inspires Mann to declare for aestheticism in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), which means the artist’s freedom from politics. Mann opposes German Kultur—the dark, passionate, even “Dionysian” world of life, love, and art—to the rational principles and socially conscious literature of Enlightenment Zivilisation. Artists have a prior responsibility to primal experience that cannot be historicized into a conscious story of bourgeois social progress. The non-political man turns out to be opposed to the progressive politics of the socialist Left and the liberal Right. The same impulse that brings Mann to the defense of the Kaiserreich during the First World War impels him, thirty years later, to defend blacklisted communist film directors in America. There are more loose ends of third-way political aestheticism than Felsch is able to sort out. Is Colli non-political in the sense of Mann, that is, aiming for something like Nietzsche’s aesthetically higher “great politics” that Germany can learn from classical Greece? Do Montinari’s communist sympathies go beyond this same aestheticism? Teacher and student, who are perhaps not so different politically, die as friends.

The power of art does not only confound philosophy and politics in these abstract ways, but also drives the narrative of the Nietzsche Boys, as they are nicknamed in Turin. It is crucial that the archive director in Weimar, Helmut Holtzhauer, is a man of culture. No communist official would have sanctioned archival work on Nietzsche’s decadent barbarism for any other reason. (I was at times reminded of the film The Lives of Others.) Of course, Montinari’s work on Nietzsche had to remain a secret within East Germany. Felsch’s narrative touches can be a little heavy-handed. He initially withholds the identities of a rival researcher and the Stasi informer who monitored Montinari, for example, though neither amounts to a plot twist.

Expectations of profound insights in Nietzsche’s unpublished writings bring Heidegger closer to the Nietzsche Boys than the supercilious Derrida. Yet Heidegger’s insistence that The Will to Power is Nietzsche’s masterpiece makes him an anachronism who was unlikely to appreciate Montinari’s only book, The Will to Power Does Not Exist. Colli and Montinari do not strike gold in the Nietzsche archives. Felsch’s story is one of underappreciated scholarly labors.

If there is gold among Nietzsche’s unpublished letters, for me, it is a remark to his friend Erwin Rohde in 1869. This remark was collected in Montinari’s 1977 edition of Nietzsche’s letters, and it is singled out by the contemporary German philosopher Byung-Chul Han to show just how far this philosopher of the will to power searched for what is beyond power. “Outside the windows, there lies the autumn… which I love as much as my very best friends because it is so mature and unconsciously without a wish,” Nietzsche writes, “It does not desire anything for itself and it gives everything of itself.” These are the contradictory insights, despite Professor Hösle’s apotropaics, that draw young people into this strange love story of art and philosophy.

Donald Trump can’t catch a break. 

Only a month removed from an attempt on his life and the woeful debate performance that forced President Joe Biden off the Democratic ticket, new polling suggests the Trump bump has faded and the Harris waltz is on.

Three thousand five hundred registered voters polled by Reuters/Ipsos across an eight-day timeframe made one thing abundantly clear this week—what once looked like an easy climb to the White House has, in the strangest of fashion, become arguably Trump’s toughest challenge yet.

Not only is he down by four percent among registered voters (he was down only one percent in July), Harris is suddenly torching Trump in key demographics (women and Hispanics). Harris, who led Trump by nine points among women and six points among Hispanics in July is now up 13 with both demos in August. More troubling, Trump’s lead among voters without a college degree, a demographic he relied on in his 2016 victory, has been slashed by half, from 14 points down to seven. 

And Harris has surprisingly—at least for Democrats—brought a fresh air to the race. In March, Reuters found that 61 percent of Democrats were voting for Biden as a means to “stop Trump.” Today’s polling found that a majority of Democrats now say they are voting for Harris, not against Trump. The Vice President’s ascendancy to the top of the ticket has allowed shy Biden supporters to become vocal Harris voters.

And it’s not just Reuters confirming the swing.

Data firm Target Smart told CBS News on Wednesday that “among young black women, registration is up more than 175%” across 13 states since Harris entered the race. 

“I more than triple-checked it,” said Target Smart’s Tom Bonier. “It’s incredibly unusual to see changes in voter registration that are anywhere close to this. I mean, to remind people, 175 percent is almost a tripling of registration rates among this specific group. You just don’t see that sort of thing happen in elections normally.”

And if things couldn’t get worse for Trump, Fox News dropped its latest poll Wednesday finding Harris has “closed the gap with Trump in the Sun Belt states.” 

“Harris is up by one percentage point in Arizona and by two points in Georgia and Nevada,” noted Fox, whose polling division found one bright spot for Trump, arguing the former president was “up one point in North Carolina.” 

Not so fast. Just as Fox News was giving Trump a narrow lead in North Carolina, the Cook Political Report was moving the state from Trump’s camp to a toss-up. A state that Trump led comfortably by a seven-point margin in July’s aggregated polling is now Kamala’s to lose.

Even Nate Silver on Thursday afternoon couldn’t overshadow what polls in state after state show—that the numbers have swung, in unison, toward Harris. 

Worse yet are the numbers for Trump’s greatest fighters—the Arizonan Senate candidate Kari Lake and North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson. 

In Arizona, Fox News finds Lake down 15 points and without a paddle. Phoenix-based pollster HighGround Public Affairs has Democratic challenger Ruben Gallego up 11. Despite a border plagued by drug and human trafficking, the Democrat Gallego is looking at a landslide while Republicans and their tough-on-the-border message are “hemorrhaging support” with Trump and Lake at the top of the ticket. 

“The playbook she used in 2022 is not working in 2024,” said Phoenix pollster Paul Bentz in response to the numbers. 

In North Carolina too, MAGA’s favorite son appears headed for a substantial loss. Though Trump and Harris are running neck to neck in the Sun Belt state, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is viewed unfavorably by more than half of the state’s voters, and polling aggregate FiveThirtyEight finds Robinson reliably losing the governor’s mansion by a wide margin.

And it’s not just the polling numbers that will have Trump heated over the Labor Day weekend. 

His social media app Truth Social is a digital graveyard, so much so that the former president has begun posting campaign ads and statements to his 𝕏 account. The stock price of Truth Social ($DJT) sank below $20 a share on Thursday, its lowest since going public and a far distant cry from its eye-watering $94 price tag in October of 2022. 

Amidst all of it, there was Trump on Wednesday resharing QAnon posts calling for military tribunals and “The Storm.” And although his allies in Congress and his political aides have publicly asked Trump to steer clear of personal attacks on Harris, Trump lobbed one of his most violent ones yet yesterday, suggesting that both Harris and the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton only achieved their positions of political power via sexual favors. 

Then, there was the incident at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday. 

What had at first appeared to be Trump’s finest moment of the week—a lockstep salute honoring the fallen U.S. service members who were killed during Biden’s botched withdrawal of Afghanistan—ended up being marred by controversy and made headline news for all the wrong reasons. 

“An ANC [Arlington National Cemetery] employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside,” read a tersely-worded statement by the U.S. Army on Thursday about the Trump campaign allegedly violating restrictions on using footage from the cemetery. 

“This was unfortunate” continued the letter which claims Trump staffers “unfairly attacked” a worker who attempted to stop staffers from taking images that could be used in political ads.

The Trump team later released a controversial video of his appearance on the former president’s TikTok account. (The clip has since raked up more than nine million views.)

A spokesperson for the U.S. Army reiterated in the statement that the Trump camp had been previously made aware of “federal laws that clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.”

Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita, whose job security has been the source of speculation as Trump struggles on the trail, posted a video Thursday of Trump at Arlington. LaCivita doubled down: “Hope this triggers the hacks at SecArmy.”

So has been the trials and tribulations of Donald Trump these last few weeks as he heads into the final barrel roll. The bounce he hoped to win from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s (sort-of) exit from the race remains questionable as the independent presidential candidate has been unsuccessful in removing his name from several all-critical battleground states he promised to abandon. 

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fought to get onto NC’s ballot,” read the headline from NC Newsline. “Now he can’t get off.”

And it’s not just North Carolina where Bobby can’t get off the ballot. In a cruel twist of irony for everyone involved, Kennedy looks set to remain on the ballots of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota as well. 

Trump still has the time and opportunity to turn things around but it’s difficult to deny the aspects of the 2024 race which now appear clear—if he is to win it, again, it will be Trump the underdog.

The repercussions of the July 28 election in Venezuela continue to grow, as President Nicolás Maduro’s refusal to release the ballots from the election to certify the vote count announced by Venezuela’s National Electoral Council has driven a wedge into relations in what was once a relatively closely aligned bloc of left-wing Latin American nations. Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua and a close ally of Maduro in Venezuela, on Monday sharply criticized Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro and Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for their continued insistence that Venezuela release proof of Maduro’s victory in July.

“If you want my respect, you will respect me, Lula. If you want the respect of the [Venezuelan] people, you will respect the victory of President Nicolás Maduro, instead of being dragged around,” Ortega said. “Petro? What can I say with regard to Petro? Poor Petro… Petro, I see as competing with Lula to see who will be the leader to represent the Yankees in Latin America.”

Petro responded with a broadside of his own the next day. “Daniel Ortega has said we are being ‘dragged around’ just because we want a peaceful and democratic negotiated solution in Venezuela,” he wrote in a post on X. “At least I do not drag through the dirt the human rights of my country’s people, much less those of my brothers in arms and my companions in the fight against dictatorship.”

Ortega’s angry outburst follows a joint effort by the two countries to gingerly renegotiate their relationship with Maduro. While Ortega, Petro, and Lula—along with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico—have traditionally supported Maduro against the more right-wing governments of the region and what they perceive as the hostile interests of the United States, Maduro’s doubtful reelection and his increasingly harsh repression of the Venezuelan populace have precipitated a rift between the authoritarian left of Maduro and Ortega and the more democratic left of Lula and Petro.

In many ways, it is not surprising that the Brazilian and Colombian leaders would wish to distance themselves from the increasingly violent and unstable Venezuela. Both countries have suffered serious disruptions from fleeing Venezuelan refugees, whom Maduro refuses to allow to be deported back into the country. Moreover, linking domestic left-wing political movements with the situation in Venezuela is a losing proposition. 

Petro in particular is in a precarious place. He is already considerably unpopular in Colombia, where conservatives consider him a traitor and appeaser for negotiating with the guerrilla narcoterrorists that infest the Colombian selva. This is a golden opportunity for him to burnish his democratic credentials and unchain himself from a sinking and regionally unpopular government.

The same rationale goes double for relations with Nicaragua’s Ortega, who has gone on a campaign of brutal retaliation and suppression in the past several years. The Catholic Church has been a particular focus of Ortega’s ire, after it supported protests against his government in 2018. Since then, 20 percent of the nation’s priests have been killed, imprisoned, or exiled—including nearly a score just this month. Hundreds more of Ortega’s political opponents were jailed leading up to and subsequent to the 2021 national elections, which—like the recent Venezuelan elections—were of doubtful legitimacy.

Ortega’s attack on the two South American leaders suggests that what was once a relatively robust coalition of left-wing governments in Latin America may be fracturing for good. Maduro now can only count on the support of Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico and Bolivia. Colombia and Brazil, Venezuela’s most important neighbors, may soon join Gabriel Boric’s Chile as left-wing critics of Maduro.

Mexico’s position regarding Venezuela deserves closer attention. Immediately after the election, López Obrador joined Petro and Lula in calling on Maduro to release the ballots from the election. He quickly changed his tune, however, and endorsed Maduro, arguing that he sees no reason not to trust Venezuela’s National Electoral Council. This is a potentially concerning approach, given the president’s current efforts to dramatically rewrite Mexico’s constitution in ways that favor his own political party, including ending the independence of Mexico’s own National Electoral Institute. Continued convergence between Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela should be considered a warning sign for the continued health of the Mexican political system. An authoritarian Mexico, even if it were far less harsh than the current Venezuelan or Nicaraguan governments, would be a major blow to American interests and to our ability to control our southern border.

On the other hand, the new distance opening up between Venezuela on the one hand and Colombia and Brazil on the other may provide new opportunities for amicable cooperation with the U.S. Left-wing Latin American governments are often hostile towards the U.S. for its long history of intervention in the region. But, with the specter of worldwide communism long gone, the U.S. should work for positive-sum engagement with democratic left-wing governments where reasonable—particularly as China will eagerly fill the deficit if Americans decline to step up.