Actions have consequences.
Look, I'm not enthusiastic about the Dubai deal. I'm also not happy that so many of our baseball teams, buildings, and utility comapnies are now foreign owned. That doesn't make me an isolationist. I sympathize with people who are generally uncomfortable with the Dubai deal. And to ridicule people who share this discomfort as isolationist is unwarranted.
But it's too late. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, our country has traded dollars for real goods and services. What is a dollar? A dollar is an IOU. Nothing more, nothing less. An IOU has no inherent value other than the good faith of the person issuing it. When you give someone an IOU, you're making a promise that he can redeem it with anything that happens to be for sale.
Right now our country produces very few goods. We've gotten a free ride because the dollar happens to be the world's foreign reserve currency.
The only other option is selling off assets. It's an awful situation, the heroine addict pawning his jewelery.
To jump in now and say the deal shouldn't go through is like lamenting a ball falling after you've thrown it up in the air.
Already, the UAE is giving up some of its dollars for euros. When we restrict the ability of another country to redeem these little slips of paper we've given it, we reduce the value of the dollar.
If you're willing to pay this price for stopping the Dubai deal, fine. But there is a price. Everything has a price. If you regard native ownership of ports as a national security imperative, then you probably don't care how it effects the dollar. But you MUST concede that it will hasten the collapse of the dollar.
Nor do I enjoy seeing Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, and Chuck Shumer engaging in what appears to be a demented parody of everything I loathe about the right, who I think have made altogether too big a deal over terrorism and security. (The recent apprehension of suspects in the Alabama church fires illustrates clearly that it doesn't take much for a bunch of testosterone poisoned teenagers with too much time on their hands to go around destroying things, even without an ideology to back them up. It's the economy, stupid.) Let's leave the frenzy and paranoia to the Republicans.