snip -- [a whole lot of opposition statements from a swamp creature]
And yet I can’t help but wonder if that kind of background has provided a decent education for dealing with the sort of hopped-up mobsters running parts of the world today. There is growing reason to believe that Donald Trump understands the thug mind a whole lot better than the people who attended our prestigious Foreign Service academies.
The first piece of evidence is North Korea. When Trump was trading crude, back-alley swipes with “Little Rocket Man,” Kim Jong-un, about whose nuclear button was bigger, it sounded as if we were heading for a nuclear holocaust led by a pair of overgrown prepubescents.
In fact, Trump’s bellicosity seems to have worked. It’s impossible to know how things will pan out, but the situation with North Korea today is a lot better than it was six months ago. Hostages are being released, talks are being held. There seems to be a chance for progress unfelt in years.
Maybe Trump intuited something about the sorts of people who run the North Korean regime that others missed.
The second piece of evidence is our trade talks with China. Over the past few decades, the Western diplomatic community made a big bet: If we all behaved decently toward Chinese leaders, then they’d naturally come to embrace liberal economic and cultural values and we could all eventually share a pinot at the University Club.
The bet went wrong. Today’s Chinese elites are polite and coolheaded, but their economic, political and military behavior remains pure thug. Beijing throws its economic weight around with abandon, punishing foreign firms like Mercedes-Benz that don’t toe its line, cutting off Philippine trade over dubious geographic disputes, closing off its own economy to foreign investment and stealing hundreds of billions of dollars in American intellectual property each year.
The president has pushed back harder on the Chinese and has netted some results. After some Trump swagger, Xi Jinping promised to “significantly lower” Chinese tariffs on imported vehicles.
Again, it’s hard to know how this will turn out, but as The Financial Times’s Jamil Anderlini and my colleague Thomas Friedman have argued, Trump is picking the right fight at the right time.
The third piece of evidence is Iran. I have doubts about the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the nuke agreement. But I do know that the argument that many of the Obama people relied on as predicate for the deal is wrong. They argued that, deep down, the Iranian leaders are worldly sophisticates who, if we just gave them the welcome mat, would want to join our community of nations.
This is the vanity of the educated class going back for centuries. Since we’re obviously so superior, everybody else secretly wants to be like us. It’s wrong. Thugs gotta thug. Religious fanatics gotta fanaticize.
The Iranian regime has continued on its merry way, pouring troops into Syria, lobbing missiles at Israel, propping up extremist armies across the Middle East. Maybe Trump is right to intuit that the only right response to a monster is to enclose it. Maybe he’s right that when you sense economic weakness in a potential threat, you hit it again.
Please don’t take this as an endorsement of the Trump foreign policy.
Ha ha!!! swamp creature! TM
I’d feel a lot better if Trump showed some awareness of the complexity of the systems he’s disrupting, and the possibly cataclysmic unintended consequences. But there is some lizard wisdom here. The world is a lot more like the Atlantic City real estate market than the G.R.E.s.
"The demographic most opposed to President Trump is not a racial minority, but a cultural elite." Daniel Greenberg
"Failure to adequately denounce Islamic extremism, not only denies the existence of an absolute moral wrong but inherently diminishes our chances of defeating it." Tulsi Gabbard
"It’s a movement comprised of Americans from all races, religions, backgrounds and beliefs, who want and expect our government to serve the people, and serve the people it will." Donald Trump's Victory Speech 11/9/16
INSIDE EVERY LIBERAL IS A TOTALITARIAN SCREAMING TO GET OUT -- Frontpage mag
I checked and gather that David Brooks is the NY Slimes token conservative.
Could it be that Trump clearly sees the dark side of human nature and knows how to handle it, while elites allow their dark side free reign cloaking it in virtue signaling ?
Illegitimi non Carborundum
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.- Orwell
The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it - Orwell
I checked and gather that David Brooks is the NY Slimes token conservative.
Could it be that Trump clearly sees the dark side of human nature and knows how to handle it, while elites allow their dark side free reign cloaking it in virtue signaling ?
"Please don’t take this as an endorsement of the Trump foreign policy. I’d feel a lot better if Trump showed some awareness of the complexity of the systems he’s disrupting, and the possibly cataclysmic unintended consequences."
REALLY??? Perhaps like ....John Kerry?
John Kerry certainly has that "awareness" in spades! ["of the complexity of the systems"] But please good swamp creature Mr Brooks, know that THIS TIME the people elected a man with "raw toughness" who speaks to the thugs of this world, in language they understand FOR the people of America!
Not some feckless, gentile, coiffed-nail, metro- sexual who speaks to the thugs of this world in the language of elites!!!! TM
"The demographic most opposed to President Trump is not a racial minority, but a cultural elite." Daniel Greenberg
"Failure to adequately denounce Islamic extremism, not only denies the existence of an absolute moral wrong but inherently diminishes our chances of defeating it." Tulsi Gabbard
"It’s a movement comprised of Americans from all races, religions, backgrounds and beliefs, who want and expect our government to serve the people, and serve the people it will." Donald Trump's Victory Speech 11/9/16
INSIDE EVERY LIBERAL IS A TOTALITARIAN SCREAMING TO GET OUT -- Frontpage mag