Trump was saying no more than the truth. If one of Kim Jong-Un’s missiles impacts on S Korea or Japan (the two most likely targets) then all bets are off. There will be no choice but to obliterate (bits of) N Korea.
I know that it is received wisdom amongst liberal intellectuals that Trump is an idiot but he he really isn’t.
I’m so happy not to be one of them then!
But he is really liked by red-neck morons.
How do you know they’re morons ?
Because they voted for him? 🙂
Janus: That was one of those Sophie’s choice elections.Hillary was even worse. I compare the 2016 to dodging a bullet by jumping off a cliff.
Definitely.
One thing that many of my American-type chums complained about was that a country of 330,000,000 people couldn’t come up with a better pair of candidates. I truly hope that the Democrats and Republicans alike come up with something more sensible for 2020. For all its foibles and idiosyncrasies, the USA is the least bad super power.
Trump is a dotard, says Kill-thingy, which as we all know is someone in his dotage. Pushkin by contrast is determined never to reach that stage in life, using the martial arts and photoshop to protect his eternal youth.
I don’t think the Brits should be so smug about choice of candidates. After all, we ended up with a choice between Maggie May and Corbyn Monoxide!!
But both can read and neither is a crook (allegedly).
I like Trump – and I just dare you to call me a moron, Janus.
Why do I like him? Well it’s actually very simple – and it’s the same reason that I like one or two of our pollies here. He, and they, say it as they see it – and don’t mess around with political ‘nice-talk’ that means absolutely nothing and encourages the ‘bad-guys’ to think they can carry on being obnoxious because no one is ever going to do anything about their behaviour.
And I would suggest that an awful lot of Americans felt like I do – and that’s why they voted for Trump. It was a straight choice between someone who said he would do something different and someone who offered more of the same – which clearly was not working.
Even the most moronic moron eventually learns that there is no point in continually putting a coin into a faulty machine in the hope it will deliver chocolate – one has to find a different machine. And Trump was the different machine.
As Jazz rightly says, if one of NK’s rockets lands in SK or Japan, the US has no choice but to retaliate. The US would lose immense face if it did not… it isn’t only Asian countries who are concerned about their reputation.
As Christopher says, the US is the least bad super-power and it needs to maintain its image of being a good-super-power in order to retain the support of most of the rest of the world. To fail to deal with attacks on its allies would lose that support immediately.
Personally, I have no problem with Trump denigrating Kim Jong-Un, it’s about time someone did! Nor do I have any problem with Trump threatening to flatten NK – there must be one or two intelligent people in NK who know that the US can do that in two seconds flat. OK I exaggerate a bit – but it must give them pause to think. But, we all know that no one, not even Kim Jong-Un who knows that he will lose, really wants to start a nuclear war.
Of far, far more importance, I think, and this does not seem to have been so widely reported is Trump’s determination to impose sanctions on any country or business that continues to deal with NK and to cut them out of the US. Loss of participation in the US or in the NK economy? I think that is no-contest question, and most countries will abandon NK.
Trump is definitely someone who does not follow the long ‘accepted’ way that pollies behave – but do not write him off as an idiot…
Boa, point made, but doesn’t it worry you that he seems capable of changing direction on a whim – without the knowledge of his ‘cabinet’?
Boadicea: Absolutely right. There is a sense that the USA is a nation in decline in relative and, increasingly, real terms. Much of this falls on Obama. Obama would stick his nose in everything — nothing new for the USA — only to run away when things hotted up. Although I think it would be nice for the USA to not involve itself with every conflict in the world, if it does involve itself it needs to be prepared to see things through.
China and Russia have been using this as a test case. If they can get the Americans to cede an inch they will only exploit other geopolitical fault lines. With Obama, they had a better than odds-on chance to accomplish this. Trump has to be thrice as aggressive as Bush or Bill Clinton simply because he has to show that tales of the death of the USA’s relevance are rather premature. If the US and South Korea don’t continue joint war games, for example, Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines would be in stitches as they know that the US can now be forced to cede ground and it would only be a matter of time before the Chinese and Russians start pressing their disputes more and more with no one to check their ambitions. I expect that the Chinese will put just enough pressure on Kimmy Jungle to force him to take a few steps back after a few more fits of well-staged madness.
Janus: Sorry for ticking “post” too soon! In this case, both you and Boadicea are perfectly correct. Trump is interested in getting things done, not saying things well. At the same time, he has no coherent set of policies and his apparent inability to stay on topic or cooperate with his cabinet his worrisome. That can work — just — in a privately held company, but it’s the stuff of chaos in politics and diplomacy. A brash, brusque leader can be accommodated but if things change from tweet to tweet, from day to day there’s no way of preparing for anything.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Trump was saying no more than the truth. If one of Kim Jong-Un’s missiles impacts on S Korea or Japan (the two most likely targets) then all bets are off. There will be no choice but to obliterate (bits of) N Korea.
I know that it is received wisdom amongst liberal intellectuals that Trump is an idiot but he he really isn’t.
I’m so happy not to be one of them then!
But he is really liked by red-neck morons.
How do you know they’re morons ?
Because they voted for him? 🙂
Janus: That was one of those Sophie’s choice elections.Hillary was even worse. I compare the 2016 to dodging a bullet by jumping off a cliff.
Definitely.
One thing that many of my American-type chums complained about was that a country of 330,000,000 people couldn’t come up with a better pair of candidates. I truly hope that the Democrats and Republicans alike come up with something more sensible for 2020. For all its foibles and idiosyncrasies, the USA is the least bad super power.
Trump is a dotard, says Kill-thingy, which as we all know is someone in his dotage. Pushkin by contrast is determined never to reach that stage in life, using the martial arts and photoshop to protect his eternal youth.
I don’t think the Brits should be so smug about choice of candidates. After all, we ended up with a choice between Maggie May and Corbyn Monoxide!!
But both can read and neither is a crook (allegedly).
I like Trump – and I just dare you to call me a moron, Janus.
Why do I like him? Well it’s actually very simple – and it’s the same reason that I like one or two of our pollies here. He, and they, say it as they see it – and don’t mess around with political ‘nice-talk’ that means absolutely nothing and encourages the ‘bad-guys’ to think they can carry on being obnoxious because no one is ever going to do anything about their behaviour.
And I would suggest that an awful lot of Americans felt like I do – and that’s why they voted for Trump. It was a straight choice between someone who said he would do something different and someone who offered more of the same – which clearly was not working.
Even the most moronic moron eventually learns that there is no point in continually putting a coin into a faulty machine in the hope it will deliver chocolate – one has to find a different machine. And Trump was the different machine.
As Jazz rightly says, if one of NK’s rockets lands in SK or Japan, the US has no choice but to retaliate. The US would lose immense face if it did not… it isn’t only Asian countries who are concerned about their reputation.
As Christopher says, the US is the least bad super-power and it needs to maintain its image of being a good-super-power in order to retain the support of most of the rest of the world. To fail to deal with attacks on its allies would lose that support immediately.
Personally, I have no problem with Trump denigrating Kim Jong-Un, it’s about time someone did! Nor do I have any problem with Trump threatening to flatten NK – there must be one or two intelligent people in NK who know that the US can do that in two seconds flat. OK I exaggerate a bit – but it must give them pause to think. But, we all know that no one, not even Kim Jong-Un who knows that he will lose, really wants to start a nuclear war.
Of far, far more importance, I think, and this does not seem to have been so widely reported is Trump’s determination to impose sanctions on any country or business that continues to deal with NK and to cut them out of the US. Loss of participation in the US or in the NK economy? I think that is no-contest question, and most countries will abandon NK.
Trump is definitely someone who does not follow the long ‘accepted’ way that pollies behave – but do not write him off as an idiot…
Boa, point made, but doesn’t it worry you that he seems capable of changing direction on a whim – without the knowledge of his ‘cabinet’?
Boadicea: Absolutely right. There is a sense that the USA is a nation in decline in relative and, increasingly, real terms. Much of this falls on Obama. Obama would stick his nose in everything — nothing new for the USA — only to run away when things hotted up. Although I think it would be nice for the USA to not involve itself with every conflict in the world, if it does involve itself it needs to be prepared to see things through.
China and Russia have been using this as a test case. If they can get the Americans to cede an inch they will only exploit other geopolitical fault lines. With Obama, they had a better than odds-on chance to accomplish this. Trump has to be thrice as aggressive as Bush or Bill Clinton simply because he has to show that tales of the death of the USA’s relevance are rather premature. If the US and South Korea don’t continue joint war games, for example, Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines would be in stitches as they know that the US can now be forced to cede ground and it would only be a matter of time before the Chinese and Russians start pressing their disputes more and more with no one to check their ambitions. I expect that the Chinese will put just enough pressure on Kimmy Jungle to force him to take a few steps back after a few more fits of well-staged madness.
Janus: Sorry for ticking “post” too soon! In this case, both you and Boadicea are perfectly correct. Trump is interested in getting things done, not saying things well. At the same time, he has no coherent set of policies and his apparent inability to stay on topic or cooperate with his cabinet his worrisome. That can work — just — in a privately held company, but it’s the stuff of chaos in politics and diplomacy. A brash, brusque leader can be accommodated but if things change from tweet to tweet, from day to day there’s no way of preparing for anything.