ITK Daily | November 4

Happy Friday afternoon.

Here’s today’s ITK Daily | Annotated Edition.

To be ITK, know this:

Ross Rant: Germany ain’t decoupling from China anytime soon

I penned an opinion editorial for The Hill exploring the focus of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's trip to China.

Scholz was in Beijing earlier today with a top-flight business delegation in tow, including the CEOs of 大众 and 巴斯夫 . Access the full opinion editorial here.

Made in America? Try Made in Democracy. John Austin + Elaine Dezenski

+ Several provisions of the recently enacted US Inflation Reduction Act are needlessly undermining this resurgent spirit of collaboration and shared stake in countering aggressive authoritarians.

+ everal provisions of the recently enacted US Inflation Reduction Act are needlessly undermining this resurgent spirit of collaboration and shared stake in countering aggressive authoritarians.

+ There is popular support and a good case to be made for more US production of a variety of emerging sector products. But achieving sustained leadership and growth in these emerging industries will also require selective deepening of strategic international alliances.

+ Even if we wanted to “go it alone” on all fronts, it’s simply not possible.

+ “Ally-shoring” offers a better path than exclusively “on-shoring” for the health of our economy, that of our allies and our alliances with them, It would also work better to check China and other authoritarians’ bad behavior and strengthen the economic and geopolitical hand of democracies.

+ Let’s not hunker down in fortress America but ramp up support for democracy and its many fruits in all our countries and our lives.

The British ambassador brings her unique style to Washington: Dame Karen Pierce, the first female envoy from the United Kingdom, makes a colorful splash on Embassy Row: ‘Diplomacy is a contact sport.’ WP

+ The British envoy in Washington has always been a powerful and respected figure, sought after as a strategic partner and a VIP dinner guest. But Pierce stands out from her predecessors: colorful, extroverted and unpretentious — she once wore a feather boa to a United Nations Security Council meeting — not to mention the first female ambassador to represent her country in the United States.

+ Although Britain elected a female prime minister in 1979, it took four decades to send a woman to lead the embassy in Washington.

+ She hosted or attended as many parties as time and lockdowns permitted; as she loves to say, “Diplomacy is a contact sport.”

China keeps the wheels on electric vehicles: Toyota Motor Corporation has joined Tesla in tapping the country’s vast EV supply chain, showing just how indispensable it is. Anjani Trivedi

+ The largest car company on the globe is doubling down in China. Toyota Motor Corp.’s success there, and its plans to tap into the country’s electric vehicle-supply chain, shows how tough it is to circumvent the factory floor of the world — even for top manufacturers.

+ China has become the Japanese car company’s EV launching pad and savior.

+ That China has made Toyota’s electric plans a reality shows how deep and efficient its supply chains are and how it’s able to gear up industrial production quickly. It’s an underappreciated factor, often lost in the constant geopolitical wrangling.

+ Supportive policy has no doubt been helpful. But China’s industrial prowess is key. As Beijing boosts its auto industry, especially EVs and batteries, it is focused on staying ahead. That means ensuring components are available and up-to-date.

+ The reality is business is business, and China’s supply chain is indispensable for now.

Military briefing: Ukraine raid heralds new era of naval drone warfare: Thwarted attack on Black Sea fleet in Crimea highlights Kyiv’s ability to offset Moscow’s superior firepower. FT

+ The long-distance attack by multiple unmanned explosive boats that penetrated a supposed protected harbour provided a “glimpse into the future of naval warfare”, said H I Sutton, a defence analyst.

+ Videos posted online showed floating maritime drones — known in naval jargon as unmanned surface vessels — homing in on their targets, including a Grigorovich-class frigate thought to be the Admiral Makarov, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Other footage showed drones coming under cannon fire as Russian forces frantically tried to thwart them.

+ The lack of Russian anti-drone defences is all the more remarkable because its navy received a warning of the new threat when an exploding drone washed up on the shore near Sevastopol in September.

+ Some 30% of respondents overall said in the new survey they believe the administration is doing too much to help Ukraine, up from 6% in a March Wall Street Journal poll.

There has to be a better way to lose $800 billion: Intelligent failures in business are based on small bets. Meta bet the company. Ben Cohen

+ Eight hundred billion dollars! That’s more than the market cap of almost every company in the S&P 500. It’s more than Exxon Mobil. It’s more than Berkshire Hathaway. It’s more than Tesla and a parking lot of Tesla cars.

+ Many companies change strategies because they lost money. Meta is losing money because it changed strategies.

+ The decision to place so much faith in such an unproven premise will go down as one of the riskiest bets any corporation has ever made, no matter what happens next.

+ A surprising thing about companies that have been in Meta’s position is how many of them made their money back. In fact, nearly two dozen S&P 500 companies have recovered from being down 70% in one year since 2020 alone, according to Dow Jones Market Data research.

Goldman flacks: Tony Fratto is the latest executive to head from the hilt of DC to the 高盛 PR throne. Some notes on what he can learn from his predecessors. Puck

+ Goldman had hired Tony Fratto as its new head of communications, only the fifth person to hold that job in the company’s 153-year history.

+ Fratto, a former deputy White House press secretary under George W. Bush and one of the founders of Hamilton Place Strategies (now known as Penta), a revered DC-based communications advisory firm, will join Goldman as a partner on November 14.

‘Emasculating Vance is actually part of Tim’s effectiveness’: Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan may be Democrats' best messenger on the economy. But what voters like best are his fighting skills. Politico

+ “Ohio needs an ass-kicker, not an ass-kisser.”

+ In Washington, Ryan, the working class-obsessed congressman from the Mahoning Valley, has been held out by Democrats as a kind of prototype for messaging on the economy that could help the party recapture white, working-class voters lost to the Republican Party in the Trump era.

+ John Anzalone, the longtime Joe Biden pollster, called Ryan “a superstar who may understand working people better than anyone in our party.”

+ Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic pollster who advised Biden’s 2020 campaign, told me that regardless of whether Ryan wins or loses, for Democrats he will remain “very influential in terms of [advancing] an economic message.”

+ Ryan does have an economic message. He calls for tax cuts and for bringing manufacturing jobs home. He thinks Democrats should pay more attention to people who don’t have college degrees. He tells audiences in one TV ad, “I agreed with Trump on China.”

+ Most political professionals — including, privately, many Democrats — expect Ryan to lose on Tuesday. Trump carried Ohio by about 8 percentage points in 2020, and the demographics in this overwhelmingly white state are not favorable to a party whose gains in recent years have come largely in rapidly diversifying states like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada.

+ Democrats this year all but wrote Ohio off.

Profiles in ignorance — are America’s politicians getting dumber? In his illuminating and hilarious book, Andy Borowitz not only skewers political stupidity, he identifies its three key phases. FT

+ “It’s easy being a humorist when you’ve got the whole government working for you”, the American political satirist Will Rogers once said.

+ Politicians no longer have to pretend they are smart.

+ Andy Borowitz describes Palin, the governor of Alaska rashly plucked by John McCain to be his 2008 running mate, as a “gateway for ignoramuses.”

+ And we have not yet reached bottom. The lesson is that Americans have grown so cynical about their politicians that any sign of authenticity — including sounding stupid — is a feature, not a bug.

Qatar races to ready itself for an unusual World Cup: The stadiums are set, the beds are not, and some locals wonder if this was worth $300bn. Economist

+ Qatar’s promise to stage a uniquely compact World Cup has been kept: football fans should have no trouble watching more than one match a day.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

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