Monday, March 28, 2016

Trump Ramps Up Pro-Nuclear Proliferation Policy

by JASmius



The ever-reliable #NeverTrumper Kevin Williamson provides the much needed general context for this story:

The Stupid Psychopath Problem is the political distortion resulting from the fact that a great many people — some of them on barstools, some of them dangerously close to the levers of real power — believe that there are obvious, simple, straightforward solutions to complex problems such as the predations of the Islamic State or the woeful state of U.S. public finances, but that these solutions are not implemented because people in government are too soft, unwilling or unable to get tough and do what needs to be done.

Men such as Donald Trump, and a half a hundred million idiots just like him across the fruit[less] plain, really believe that the reason we haven’t eliminated Islamic terrorism is that it never occurred to anybody in the federal government — including the people who run, e.g., the U.S. Special Operations Command — to get tough. These people imagine that the trained killers in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, and the often ruthless men who oversee them in Washington, simply are not willing to do what it takes to win. What that means, these people have no idea, because they are unwilling to think very hard about these sorts of problems and generally have no experience themselves. Trump is famously a physical coward who lied to stay out of the military during the Vietnam war, and he knows nothing about foreign policy, national defense, or the workings of the military, which is why all we ever hear from him is “get tough” and “win.” [emphasis added]

Here is another terrifying case in point:

In a sharp departure from historic U.S. policy, "Republican" presidential front-runner Donald Trump said in an interview published on Sunday by the New York Times that he would consider letting Japan and South Korea build their own nuclear weapons, rather than rely on America for protection against North Korea and [Red] China.

Japan and South Korea do not require our permission to construct nuclear weapons.  The reason they have not done so is precisely because we have been their ally and protector for three quarters of a century.  The reason that is a good thing is because it is not in OUR national interest to set the planet on the fast-track to nuclear Armageddon by seeding via isolationist withdrawal nuclear arms races in every part, region, nook, and cranny of the world.  American global hegemony is what has created the worldwide stability in which the pre-Obama golden age prospered; the Obama Doctrine of "reducing America to the level of the rest of the world" and abandoning U.S. global security responsibilities has already set the world aflame and sparked a nuclear arms race in the Middle East via the Iran nuclear "deal'.  Now Trump would take that baton and ride it into the fiery ground.

It is The One's disastrous foreign policy direction that needs to be fixed via its reversal; Trump would instead exacerbate and accelerate it, which I would not have thought possible.  Think the 1930s and the rise of Nazi Germany ["NATO is obsolete"] and Imperial Japan with modern nuclear arsenals.  Or read the late Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor.  Is Trump insane, or just completely ignorant about foreign policy and national defense?

When asked by the Times about the topic of Japan and South Korea developing their own nuclear programs, Trump said:

“It’s a position that at some point is something that we have to talk about, and if the United States keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they’re going to want to have that anyway with or without me discussing it, because I don’t think they feel very secure in what’s going on with our country.” [emphases added]

That sounds like a criticism of the Obama Doctrine, doesn't it?  But it also sounds like he has no intention of reversing it, but just abandoning the Japanese, SoKos, Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, etc. to their fates with the flippant toss-off to "have the balls to build your own nukes".  And if, absent U.S. support and influence, Tokyo and Seoul drift toward hostility towards the West, or even into Red China's modern-day "Greater East Asia Co-Properity Sphere," what then?  We'll have multiplied our enemies and given our blessing to their armament with weapons of mass destruction.  And if they didn't backslide, they would simply fall under ChiComm and NoKo domination.  A Trump sellout and betrayal of allies that trusted us that he would just blow off as their being "too dumb" and "weak" and "not tough enough" to survive.

Geostrategic darwinianism, in short.  A "philosophy" that is utterly without honor.

The point is, it is in our own national and strategic interest to remain engaged in the world on behalf of those interests and the "values" we as a nation and people used to have before Barack Obama "fundamentally transformed" them, remaining the engine of the global economy, upholding freedom of the seas, keeping regional threats checkmated, and maintaining to the greatest extent possible global security and stability, than to pull back and let the rest of humanity destroy itself, idiotically confident in the delusion that it won't affect us, or that we can always "fire up the arsenal of [republicanism] on a moment's notice if we need to].  The last time we went the "Fortress America" route, following World War I, the world was at war again within twenty years, and more and more has come out recently about how close the Western Allies came to losing that war (if Hitler had green-lighted the Me-262 jet fighter earlier, the Luftwaffe could have repulsed the D-Day Normandy landings, and if he'd given his own "Manhattan Project" the same top priority as FDR did ours, with German technological superiority, the Nazis would have won the race for "the bomb", etc.).  Isolationism, in other words, was near-suicide eighty years ago.  Now?  It's a foregone conclusion.

Has Trump given this ANY thought at all?  Is he even capable of any thought at all, on any topic?  Or does his stupendous narcissism keep him complacently self-assured that he knows everything, and if there's anything he doesn't know, he can "pick it up" in a snap?

In other words, Donald Trump is a "stupid psychopath," as Ted Cruz concurrently and somewhat more diplomatically argued over on Fox News:

Trump's chief rival for the Republican nomination, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, called the real estate mogul's views on NATO "catastrophically foolish." Speaking on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Cruz said Trump was "out of his depth."

"Abandoning Europe, withdrawing from the most successful military alliance of modern times, it makes no sense at all," Cruz said. "It would hand a massive victory to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, a massive victory to ISIS," the [jihadist] group also known as [the] Islamic State.

Oh, but that doesn't matter, Senator.  None of it matters.  Because "abandoning Europe, withdrawing from the most successful military alliance of modern times, handing a massive victory to Putin and ISIS" and repeating the whole thing with our Pacific Rim allies for Xi Jin-Ping's and Kim Jong-Un's redounded benefit is something the "establishment" would never do, so that's why it must be done, and Donald Trump is the man to do it.

That's what the idiot on the next barstool just told me, anyway.

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