April 23, 2018--Contortions

It has been painful to witness progressives, Democrats twisting themselves into contortions as they attempt to come to grips with what is happening with the North Koreans.

Their problem is less with Kim Jong-un and the North Koreans than with how to think about and react to Donald Trump's involvement.

Remember how during the 2016 primaries he said it would be his "honor" to meet face-to-face with Kim? He was roundly criticized and mocked by both his Republican and Democratic opponents as being naive and inexperienced in the world of global diplomacy. He was chastised for asserting that traditional forms of diplomacy (which included many months of pre-summit negotiations between lower-level staffs) were the necessary prerequisites to meetings between heads of states. Particularly hostile ones.

Think Kissinger meeting privately with Zhou Enlai before Nixon would consider getting together with Zhou much less Mao.

Failing to recall how neophyte Barack Obama was roundly criticized and mocked by his political opponents (Hillary Clinton leading the pack) during the 2008 campaign when he declared he would be willing to meet face-to-face with the leaders of Iran and North Korea in the search for peace, progressives, opposing Trump now in such ahistorical, knee-jerk fashion are being, well, intentionally forgetful, hypocritical, or both.  

So now we not only have a heads-of-state meeting on the books for late May/early June, but we appear to have Kim making all sorts of preemptive concessions about his nuclear weapons program.

First he announced he was suspending all testing of missiles and nuclear warheads. Then, again without demanding anything in return, he announced over the weekend that he will be shutting down his nuclear weapons research and fabrication facilities. He wants, he says, to turn his focus to the collapsed North Korean economy.

This latter promise is discombobulating progressives. On Saturday and Sunday, for example, on CNN and especially MSNBC, former senior Obama national security advisors and staff have been all over the airwaves struggling with how to think about and respond to these overtures.

First, and most appropriately, they expressed skepticism, warning that the North Koreans for decades have made promises of this sort that they haven't kept. Then they dismissed the evidence that the extra-severe sanctions imposed on the North Koreans, mainly by the U.S. and China, have led to the further hollowing out of the North Korean economy, such as it is, and this is forcing Kim to the table. 

They are ignoring this evidence because, as with Kim's pledge to scale back his weapons program, not to have criticized what seems to be unfolding would give tacit if not overt credit to Trump, as unlikely and crazy and as confounding as what may be happening might turn out to be. 

Liberals so despise Trump that they cannot bear to give some credit, much less offer any praise for his leading the effort to bring this about.

Most outrageously, if Trump pulls this off he would be a leading candidate to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. If the unthinkable were to occur, he as well as Obama would have one. 

Worse--all of us in our heart-of-hearts know Obama didn't really deserve his whereas if we manage to make a verifiable deal with the North Koreans, Trump will have earned his.

Sometimes the world is too confounding to deal with. This may turn out to be one of those occasions.

Kissinger and Zhou Enlai

January 4, 2018--Let the Games Begin!

Kim Jong-un and Trump Donald-un are at it again. We've moved from "Little Rocket Man" to back-and-forths about whose nuclear button is bigger than whose. (Fortunately, on both sides, there are no such buttons.)

Do you think these world leaders have a size problem? We know that "Little Marco" Rubio felt that way about candidate Trump's hands and other body parts. 

This ends the entertainment portion of this posting. 

The rest is perhaps even hopeful.

Remember back in the early 1970s, after 20 years of estrangement between the United States and "Red" China, both sides were looking for a face-saving way to begin to engage each other.

The U.S. ping pong team was in Japan competing in the world table tennis tournament. Since they were in the neighborhood, the People's Republic of China invited them to come to Beijing for a series of exhibition matches. 

Never mind that our team was trounced. What turned out to be important was not the ping pong but the fact that this represented the beginning of communication between both sides which culminated in 1972 with fierce Cold Warrior Richard Nixon visiting China, most remarkably sitting down to talk with maximum leader, Mao Zedong. The rest is the history we are living with today.

There may be, may be something similar happening right now on the Korean peninsular.

With the Winter Olympics less than a month from opening in South Korea, in his annual New Years address to the world, North Korea's president Kim Jong-un hinted that he would like to talk with his South Korea counterpart, Moon Jae-in, about the possibility of the North sending athletes to the games. I suppose in the tradition that enemies put aside their weapons to compete in the Olympics.

Quickly, President Moon took up Kim's offer. They or their representatives have already made plans to meet in the demilitarized zone as early next week and they have already reconnected the hot line between the two Koreas. We know that when they meet they will be talking about more than ski jumping.

Obervers in Asia and the West are noting that this is an attractive strategy for each side--for Kim it shows some flexibility in regard to talking to those who oppose him and his nuclear program. It also, as many are putting it, "drives a wedge" between two erstwhile allies--South Korea and the United States. Presuming that if Moon agrees to meet it will be in defiance of Trump, president of South Korea's longest time ally, the United States.

On President Moon's side of the table, it shows his independence from the United States. That his is not a puppet regime. We have been a huge presence there from the years of the Korean War until today. Nearly a remarkable 70 years. Currently there are 37,500 U.S. military personnel in South Korea, and for decades we have been the the major patrons of most South Korean political leaders.

But Moon, who recently come to power as a "liberal" has sought to put some distance between us and his country. So this wedge may be just what he is seeking--some measure of independence from our influence.

In a frenzy of threatening tweets about Pakistan, the Palestinians, Iran, and North Korea, President Trump has indicated he has no problem with the two Koreas talking with each other.

Perhaps he too is hoping that this small opening, not unlike the ping pong diplomacy of the 1970s, will lead to a way for us to back off while saving face. 

This has not been Trump's MO--backing off or looking for ways to save face--but one never knows with someone as unpredictable and as embattled as he. Maybe he will switch to becoming as obsessed with Pakistan or Venezuela as he is with North Korea. In his world, that could be a version of a good thing. And it does fit an America First agenda of sorts, though Pakistan has at least 100 nukes and I'm not sure provoking them as he recently has is such a good idea.

It is fragile things of this sort that we hope for and cling to.

December 15, 2016--Am I Missing Something?

If I am, it wouldn't be the first time.

When newly-inaugurated president Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton called for the re-normalization of relations with Russia, in the person of Vladimir Putin, progressives supported that and even chuckled when Clinton brought an actual reset button with her as a present to Putin on her first official visit to Moscow.

Thankfully, we felt, we no longer had a president who proclaimed that he looked in "the man's eye and found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy." The "man" of course was Putin.

We know how that worked out. First with Bush and now with Obama, who not only can't exchange a civil word with Putin or look him int the eye but, more dangerously, we have Russia allied with the murderous Syrian regime, perpetrating a holocaust on opponents to the Assad government, while we stand by impudently doing nothing.

And now we know officially that Putin's people hacked their way into the middle of our recent election in an attempt to bring Clinton down and tip the election to Donald Trump. And once again, we are sitting around fulminating but doing nothing. What was it that the Chinese said about "paper tiger"?

Whatever shred of tiger still resides within us is now expressing itself as moral outrage that Trump's nominee to serve as Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was too cozy with Russia and Putin during his tenure as CEO for Exxon Mobil.

Almost foaming at the mouth, John McCain, undoubtedly itching to get at the hated Donald Trump, has already declared that he will likely vote against Tillerson's nomination because his "friend" Putin is "a thug, a murderer, and a killer."

I wonder what McCain would have said about Stalin during the Second World War? Someone we disliked but depended upon to win against the Nazis. Historians have concluded that if it weren't for the Soviet involvement--defeating Hitler on the Second Front when he invaded Russia--we might very well have lost.

Stalin, this essential ally of ours, was more than a thug, murderer, or killer. He was a mass murderer the likes of which the world has thankfully rarely seen. He is reported to have slaughtered between 34 and 49 million of his own people. And yet, Roosevelt found ways to work with him.

And then later, President Nixon concluded it was expedient to reset relations with another mass murderer--Mao Zedong, who ordered the slaying of at least 45 million. This outreach to China was and is in our self-interest and therefore our leaders somehow found ways to overlook the flood of bloodshed and move on.

And now with Russia again challenging us, McCain and Paul and Rubio and a host of Democrats in the Senate are threatening to block Tillerson's confirmation.

If we could calm down about Tillerson in 2013 receiving the Order of Friendship medal from Putin, wouldn't we see his "friendly" relationship with Putin to be an asset rather than a killer virus to his confirmation? Or do we prefer the prospect of Secretary of State John Bolton? Or, help us, Rudy?

What would McCain and others have us do with regard to Putin and a resurgent Russia--bomb, bomb, bomb . . . bomb Moscow?

I'm just getting over the results of November's election and now I have to worry about World War III?

This is my 3,000th blog posting. The first was way back in August 2005. Thanks for taking the time to look in on these.

December 6, 2016--Madman Theory

One of the first things that Donald Trump has actually done is very disturbing--taking what he claims was a call of congratulations from Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan. He has welcomed many such calls, so why is this one disturbing?

Here's the problem--

Who's in charge of Taiwan has been hotly contested since shortly after the end of the Second World War. Formosa, as it was then called, was the island refuge in 1949 for Chiang Kai-shek after his Kuomintang forces were driven there from Mainland China at the end of the Chinese Civil War or Revolution--Mao Zedong gained control of what we used to call Red China and Chiang and his followers, with our direct assistance turned Taiwan into an island fortress, where Chiang nurtured fantasies, again indulged by us, of invading the mainland to retake and unite China.

That of course never happened though through the years there was a lot of saber rattling and occasional threats of a widespread war breaking out in the region. With us right in the middle of it. This became especially dangerous when Mainland China tested and then deployed nuclear weapons. Many of the aimed at Taiwan.

As part of our struggle with communism, with the Soviet Union and China, we steadfastly recognized Taiwan and its leadership as the sole representatives of all of China--it was referred to as the One China policy--and we through the decades refused to extend any form of recognition to Red China, even though the population there was about 1.0 billion while on Taiwan it was a relatively few million.

Then, with Jimmy Carter as president, after Nixon visited Red China in 1972, seven years later, in 1979, the American government recognized Mainland China and severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

China, then, had it's own version of One China during the Mao regime and subsequently. Though China didn't control Taiwan, they considered it, and continue to do so, as China. Just China.

And though we continue to sell at least $2.0 billion a year in weapons to the Taiwanese, we have otherwise kept them at a political distance.  That is, until last week when Trump spoke to Tsai Ing-wen and it, by so doing, hit the diplomatic fan.

On the Sunday talk shows, vice-president-elect Mike Pence tried to downplay the conversation but early Monday morning Trump made matters worse by tweeting--

Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the US doesn't tax them) or build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don't think so.

A couple of things are possible--

In his narcissistic mode, Trump is loving the global attention being lavished upon him. Like an ingenue he is giddy about being courted by world leaders such as Vladimir Putin and China's president, Xi Jinping, among many others. And, so, when President Tai's call arrived he (1) didn't know who she was (2), said what the hell harm can it do to wallow in her congratulations, or (3) saw talking with her an opportunity to poke his finger in China's eye, declaring that when he becomes president in January, unlike his predecessors, he plans to be tough on China.

Well, if the answer is that he didn't know the implications of talking with President Tsai that's one sort of issue--his lack of knowledge about global affairs. And, I'm being kind. Then, if he knew the call was coming from Taiwan and had any sense of the history of China and Taiwan, he might have thought twice. Though thinking twice is something apparently rare for him.

Alternately, I wonder how Trump would feel after being sworn in if Xi Jinping called the governor of Texas and by so doing implied support for the idea of Texas succeeding from the Union.

Then, if Trump is swaggering, maybe there is some lesson from history about what he might be up to--historians call it the Madman Theory.

Get the Chinese thinking he is, well, mad, so they will treat him carefully and perhaps be more prone to make concessions than if he were fully rational and stable.

For antecedents we have to go back to the Richard Nixon presidency who maybe was actually unhinged or perhaps crazy like a fox.

His chief or staff, H.R. Haldeman, in his memoirs, wrote that Nixon had confided in him--

I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, "for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry--and he has his hand on the nuclear button" and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.

The only problem with this is that it didn't work then and it made the world a more dangerous place. The war went on and on and many more thousands were killed.

Let's hope Trump soon names someone other than Rudy to be Secretary of State. Someone who knows something about the world and isn't crazy.