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Iowa Governor Branstad Chosen As U.S. Ambassador To China

Iowa Governor Branstad Chosen As U.S. Ambassador To China

BEIJING/NEW YORK (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Iowa Governor Terry Branstad as the next U.S. ambassador to China, a transition official said on Wednesday, choosing a longstanding friend of Beijing after rattling the world’s second-largest economy by speaking to Taiwan’s president.

The appointment of Branstad may help to ease trade tensions between the two countries, the world’s two biggest agricultural producers, diplomats and trade experts said. It also suggests that Trump may be ready to take a less combative stance towards China than many expected, the experts said.

The New York real estate developer, who defeated Hillary Clinton in last month’s election, has said he intends to declare China a currency manipulator when he takes office on Jan. 20 and has threatened to impose punitive tariffs on Chinese goods coming into the United States.

Trump’s unusual call with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen last week prompted a diplomatic protest on Saturday from Beijing, which considers Taiwan a renegade province. Trump’s transition team played down the exchange as a courtesy call, but the White House had to reassure China that its decades-old “one China” policy was intact.

The Trump transition official confirmed the choice of Branstad, first reported by Bloomberg, which said he has accepted the job.

Earlier in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang called Branstad an “old friend” of China when asked about a report on the appointment, although he said Beijing would work with any U.S. ambassador.

“We welcome him to play a greater role in advancing the development of China-U.S. relations,” he told a daily news briefing.

Branstad called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “longtime friend” when Xi visited Iowa in February 2012, only nine months before he became the Chinese leader.

Xi visited Iowa in 1985 on an agricultural research trip when he led a delegation from Hebei Province. He returned 27 years later and reunited with some of the people he had met.

Trump’s stance on China has been in particular focus since Friday’s call with Tsai, the first such top-level contact with Taiwan by a U.S. president-elect or president since President Jimmy Carter adopted a “one-China” policy in 1979, recognizing only the Beijing government.

DUMPING ALLEGATIONS

Specific U.S. trade concerns include allegations that China is dumping steel and aluminum in global markets below the cost of production, hurting American producers. In the agricultural sector, the U.S. has been unable to get Beijing to lift anti-dumping measures on U.S. broiler chicken products and an animal feed ingredient known as distillers’ dried grains (DDGS).

China is one of Iowa’s biggest export markets, so Branstad is well-placed to deal with China-U.S. trade issues, said Professor Huang Jing, an expert on Chinese politics at the National University of Singapore.

“This really sends a message that Donald Trump wants to handle China at the bilateral relationship level,” he said.

Branstad’s personal ties with Xi could also help to ease U.S. access to Beijing’s leadership, the diplomats and trade experts said.

Still, they said his many years running Iowa, the top U.S. state for production of corn, soybeans and pigs, may not have prepared him for the more delicate tasks of diplomacy with Beijing.

During Xi’s 2012 trip, Chinese soybean buyers announced they would buy more than $4 billion in U.S. soybeans that year.

Since then, the United States has grown more reliant on China’s voracious appetite for commodities to spur demand for everything from oil to corn as global oversupply has hurt prices. Volumes of U.S. agricultural exports to China hit record levels in 2015.

“It’s natural that they should continue this good relationship with China,” said Pan Chenjun, senior analyst at Rabobank in China.

As Trump puts together the top people in his administration, the process of announcing his choices has not always been smooth. A Branstad spokesman, Ben Hammes, said early on Wednesday that the reports of the governor’s nomination were “premature and not accurate.”

Trump transition official David Bossie told Fox News Branstad may join Trump at an appearance on Thursday in the Iowa capital, Des Moines.

(Reporting by Sangameswaran S in BENGALURU, Christian Shepherd in BEIJING, John Ruwitch in SHANGHAI; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu in Washington and Kay Henderson in Des Moines; Editing by Robert Birsel, Martin Howell and Frances Kerry)

IMAGE: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump meets Iowa Governor Terry Branstad as he speaks during Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s Roast and Ride at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines August 27, 2016. REUTERS/Scott Morgan

Iowa Governor Urges Caucus-Goers To Say ‘No’ To Cruz, Cites ‘Big Oil’

Iowa Governor Urges Caucus-Goers To Say ‘No’ To Cruz, Cites ‘Big Oil’

ALTOONA, Iowa (Reuters) – Iowa’s governor said on Tuesday it would be a “big mistake” for voters in the nation’s first presidential contest next month to choose Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination, citing the U.S. senator’s opposition to a biofuel mandate important to the state.

Republican Governor Terry Branstad said Cruz was in the pocket of “Big Oil,” and criticized the Texan’s opposition to the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires U.S. fuel to contain a minimum amount of biofuels, including ethanol.

Ethanol is a major market for Iowa corn, and the state’s voters have generally supported ethanol mandates.

Branstad said Cruz is a big opponent of renewable fuels who is “heavily financed by Big Oil.”

“Ted Cruz, who is ahead in the polls, is diametrically opposed to what we really care about, and that is growing the opportunity for renewable fuels in this country,” Branstad said.

Branstad spoke after addressing the Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit, where Republican front-runner Donald Trump also spoke later in the day and endorsed the Renewable Fuel Standard. Branstad’s oldest son, Eric, has worked on a political action committee that has been critical of Cruz’s ethanol stance.

The governor has said he would not endorse a candidate before the Feb. 1 caucuses in Iowa, where Cruz leads Trump in some opinion polls.

“I think it would be a big mistake for Iowa to support him,” Branstad said of Cruz. “I know he’s ahead in the polls, but the only poll that counts is the one they take on caucus night. And I think it could change between now and then.”

U.S. Representative Steve King of Iowa, who backs Cruz, criticized Branstad’s comments as a “de facto endorsement of Trump.”

(Reporting by Kay Henderson; Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Photo: Governor Terry Branstad of Iowa attends a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and four other United States governors to discuss clean technology and economic development in Seattle, Washington September 22, 2015. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight

Iowa’s Branstad Among Governors In The Wrong On Immigration Issue

Iowa’s Branstad Among Governors In The Wrong On Immigration Issue

A few days after Iowa’s governor was spotlighted on MSNBC for declaring undocumented children from Central America unwelcome in his state, Meet the Press highlighted one Iowa city’s plan to welcome them.

Governor Terry Branstad is this week digging in his heels, even after drawing wide criticism for his hard-line stance. Meanwhile, Davenport Mayor Bill Gluba is talking logistics with leaders from hospitals, schools, charities and churches.

Branstad raised the issue last week after returning from Tennessee, where the federal Health and Human Services secretary was appealing to various governors to house immigrant children. Iowa’s governor refused, but Davenport’s mayor reached out to the White House on his own.

This is not a Democrat vs. Republican issue. It’s a humanitarian crisis. Since October, 57,000 children, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, have arrived without parents or papers and are waiting for their cases to be reviewed by immigration officials. Border patrol stations are overflowing. So HHS officials are scrambling to find places for the children while the president appeals for money for faster processing of their cases.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who was in Iowa days earlier, campaigning for a fellow Republican governor, has said he was willing to take in some children if asked. “We are an empathetic people in this country and we don’t like seeing people suffer,” CNN reported him saying.

Former Republican Iowa governor Robert Ray responded to a call following the Vietnam War in the 1970s to take in thousands of Southeast Asian refugees. But Branstad says the situations aren’t comparable because those families arrived intact and legally, while the Central American kids were brought without papers by crooked people. “They told them lies that if they could get here, they could stay,” declared Branstad. “That is not true.”

So if the kids were exploited and lied to, that should be grounds for our turning our backs on them, too?

Texas Governor Rick Perry used the occasion to mobilize up to 1,000 National Guard troops to secure the border. Declaring that drug cartels, human traffickers and individual criminals “are exploiting this tragedy for their own criminal ends,” Perry said, “I will not stand idly by while our citizens are under assault and little children are detained in squalor.”

But he might just exploit it for political ends — blame the president for not securing the borders and then close the door on the kids.

What Perry, Branstad and others ignore is that the current situation has roots in a bipartisan 2008 law Congress passed on “unaccompanied alien minors,” intended to protect potential child trafficking victims. It requires border patrol agents to turn unaccompanied children from Central America over to HHS within 72 hours to be placed in appropriate short-term housing while their cases are studied for evidence they were being trafficked for labor or sex.

The law came in response to concern that young trafficking victims were being turned away at the border before their circumstances could be evaluated, notes Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, who heads the State Department’s anti-human trafficking office. “It didn’t create an incentive to lie or send kids here,” he said.

CdeBaca said the law was the result of, “folks who normally wouldn’t have been working together on an immigration issue coming together to say, ‘What do we do to protect children?'”

Religious and business communities see it as a matter of conscience and compassion for the most vulnerable. A Des Moines businessman who runs a charitable foundation has started “1,000 Kids for Iowa,” which is working on finding homes for as many kids. But an Iowa nonprofit agency that wanted to set up a shelter to house 48 immigrant children on space it rents from the state backed off after meeting with state officials.

Sequel Youth and Family Services, which runs a program for troubled youth on correctional facility space, responded to a request from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement in May. It had advertised for Spanish-speaking case managers for the shelter. But state agency heads didn’t think the space was appropriate, and said the plan would stretch resources, according to a Branstad spokesman.

Or was it that his administration didn’t want to be seen as cooperating with Obama’s?

Either way, governors like Iowa’s who take such an unyielding stance in the face of a humanitarian crisis may find themselves outnumbered by local leaders and individuals who recognize this is about protecting innocent children — and mobilize to help.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Analysis: Iowa Welcome Mat Awaits Christie, But Not Jersey Swagger

Analysis: Iowa Welcome Mat Awaits Christie, But Not Jersey Swagger

By Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times

DES MOINES, Iowa — As the Chris Christie Mystery Tour continues, he may want to swing by Iowa, where a rare welcome mat awaits the embattled governor of New Jersey.

Christie, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, has been plying the party fundraising circuit, raising cash, if not his political profile, ahead of a possible 2016 presidential bid. The problem is the George Washington Bridge scandal back home, which has made Christie, for now at least, the political equivalent of plutonium: a possible danger if you get too close.

That has resulted in the oddly furtive nature of Christie’s recent travels, a cavalcade of closed-door fundraisers, jealously guarded schedules and candidates — including the beneficiaries of Christie’s money-gathering efforts — conspicuously keeping their distance.

But here in Iowa, fellow Republican Governor Terry Branstad is glad to share a stage with Christie.

“Any Republican governor that comes here, I will welcome them,” Branstad, who is seeking a record sixth term in November, said in an interview Thursday.

He said there was no reason for Christie to give up his chairmanship of the governor’s association, as some have suggested.

“He’s been a good fundraiser,” said Branstad, a former head of the group. “Unless there’s more that I’m not aware of, I see no reason why he should do that.”

Branstad did, however, offer some advice, which carries the weight of the most powerful and important Republican in the state that will host the first balloting of the 2016 presidential campaign: If Christie hopes to do well here, he needs to dial back some of the Jersey attitude.

The advice, from one who has been waging and winning campaigns in Iowa for nearly four decades, should be no surprise. Even before the bridge scandal, one of the big questions surrounding a Christie candidacy was how the famously pugilistic governor would play among the extravagantly polite voters of the first caucus state.

“I think he’s a real good retail politician and I think he handles town hall meetings really well,” Branstad said. But, he added, “Wouldn’t hurt to be a little more humble. Iowans really like their leaders to be hard-working and humble.”

Branstad has no plans to endorse a candidate for president, especially this early — “I want to be a good host; I want all the candidates to feel welcome in Iowa” — but he made his preference clear: He would like to see a governor lead the party into the next presidential election. Mentioned, unbidden, were Texas’ Rick Perry, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.

“They have executive experience,” Branstad said. “Look at the disaster we have now. We have a senator” — President Barack Obama, who secured the White House in his first Senate term — “who has never had executive experience and never run anything [now] running the country. And that’s the reason why we’re in trouble.”

A small thumb on the scale, perhaps, but it could weigh against Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, freshman Republicans eyeing a White House bid. Cruz, who plans to pay a fourth visit next month, has already generated considerable buzz among Iowa GOP activists.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr