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Dark Side Last Updated: May 27, 2018 - 10:33:50 AM


With the North Korea Summit Off, “It’s Hawk Versus Whack Job” in Trumpland
By T.A. Frank, Vanity Fair, May 24, 2018
May 26, 2018 - 10:11:44 AM

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Mike Pompeo is pursuing terrible and deluded foreign policy all over the world, but, compared to Bolton, he’s Henry Kissinger. Trump’s version of nationalism, meanwhile, has increasingly come to mean nothing but pathological self-interest.

 

You know things are bad when North Korea looks like the reasonable party. Donald Trump has now canceled the summit between himself and Kim Jong Un, writing, in a letter that zero people doubt came from the man himself, “I felt a wonderful dialogue was building between you and me.” Not since Harlequin Special Edition 2018 has the common man seen more affecting words of heartbreak. Meanwhile, we seem to have failed to inform our allies that this was going to happen, and Republicans in Congress are speaking as if Kim is the one who walked away from the table. This White House produces more madness in an hour than anyone knows how to process in a week. Can we make pull any fresh insights out of latest pile of rubble? Let’s try.

1. John Bolton won this round with ease.

What killed these talks was sabotage, carried out by national security adviser John Bolton, but even he must have been surprised by how well it worked. All it took was to adopt a negotiating stance that wasn’t merely hard-line but insulting. “There’s no way we should give North Korea a peace treaty,” Bolton told an interviewer in March. “They’re lucky to have a meeting with the president of the United States.” If that wasn’t abrasive enough, Bolton insisted that North Korea adopt the model of Libya in 2003 and prepare “to pack up their nuclear weapons program and take it to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”

Now, this is like telling a monarch that you would like him to leave the throne along the lines of the Louis XVI model. Bolton spoke as if he fancied himself as some of kind of Anton Chigurh, demanding that Kim Jong Un throw himself upon the mercy of the United States. It was so insulting that North Korea probably could have started a nuclear weapon GoFundMe right then and collected enough to double its arsenal. Those who feel that Trump needed a hard-liner on hand in order to get someone to prevent him from giving too much away are missing the point. Even hard-line negotiators can get a lot accomplished if they’re polite, while even mushy negotiators can fail to get anywhere if they’re insulting. The aim of Bolton wasn’t parameter-setting. It was demolition.
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2. Let us not mention Trump and chess in the same sentence.

One reason Bolton’s sabotage worked so well is that Donald Trump is preternaturally and resolutely uninformed, which led him to amplify the insult. Asked about the Libya model last week, Trump signaled zero awareness of what was being discussed, namely the denuclearization deal that Muammar Qaddafi accepted in 2003, and instead referred to the ouster of 2011, when the world took advantage of Qaddafi’s disarmament to dethrone him. “If you look at that model with Qaddafi, that was a total decimation,” Trump told reporters. “We went in there to beat him. Now that model would take place if we don’t make a deal, most likely.” This didn’t help. Then Mike Pence, in an effort to cover for his boss and make Trump look less feckless, made things even worse, saying, “As the president made clear, this will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong Un doesn’t make a deal.” So now the message coming from Washington was, give up your weapons, just like Qaddafi did, or we’ll kill you, just like we killed Qaddafi. When senior North Korean official Choe Son-hui responded with a complaint about “such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing from the mouth of the U.S. vice president,” no one could have been surprised. And this, of course, was Trump’s cue to walk.

3. Pompeo can’t be happy.

Despite the all-hawk cast of characters in Trumpland, there are fissures. As my onetime boss Paul Glastris of the Washington Monthly explained to me over a decade ago about how to think about the foreign policy of the George W. Bush White House, “It isn’t hawk versus dove. It’s hawk versus whack job.” Mike Pompeo, the hawk, is pursuing terrible and deluded foreign policy all over the world, but, compared to Bolton, the whack job, he is the soul of diplomacy. Pompeo, for all his reservations, had been doing his homework and trying to lay the groundwork for non-failure with Pyongyang. One day, we’ll probably learn about how enraged Pompeo was over Bolton’s games. And he could not have enjoyed having to stonewall on questions about whether the United States had bothered to offer any other countries advance notice of this latest move. The disregard for the interests or position of South Korean President Moon Jae-in is jaw-dropping, even by Trump standards.

As for Bolton, he won’t last forever with Trump. Hawks reliably have a solution for problems, usually taking the form of a giant hammer, and that makes them appealing. But odds are he’ll take an accelerated path blazed by Dick Cheney as vice president. That road involves presenting the president with seductively simple solutions involving the use of force, the president being persuaded, disaster ensuing, and then getting sidelined. But before the sidelining comes the disaster.

4. Republicans used to be competent at foreign policy.

I know how unfair it is to note how different this dance has been from that of Mao Tse-tung and Richard Nixon in 1971 and 1972. It’s like comparing the Kirov Ballet to a wino yelling in traffic. But I’ll go there all the same, because we forget how Republicans used to be able to combine robust hawkishness with tact and homework, producing remarkable results.

The challenge of 1971 between Beijing and Washington was far harder. Beijing was belligerent, even in the face of U.S. overtures, and at one point came close to intercepting a U.S. spy plane off the Chinese coast, which would have put an end to any thaw. Even as it was, Nixon was vigorously prosecuting the war in Vietnam, fighting the side supported by Beijing. He was committed to guaranteeing the security of Taiwan, which Beijing was determined to retake. He was determined to undermine Marxist and Marxist-leaning regimes around the world, while Beijing was determined to support them and increase their number. China’s devotion to Maoism was near the peak of fanaticism.

Yet, united by a shared interest in containing Soviet power, China and the United States found a way to work things out. Henry Kissinger, as national security adviser, took secret trips and came up with creative language for communiqués in which the two nations resolved seemingly intractable differences. Nixon, for his part, sweated every detail of protocol and politeness, from how to handle a Chinese toast to how invitations should be worded. Knowing about how Premier Zhou Enlai had been snubbed in 1954, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had refused to shake hands in Geneva, Nixon made sure to approach Zhou with his hand extended. There was never any chance Trump was going to do any homework or preparation of this sort. (“He doesn’t think he needs to,” a senior administration official helpfully explained to Time.) But Republicans in general seem increasingly indifferent to the idea that other countries might have legitimate interests or values of their own, even when they are out of sync with those of the United States.

The folly of the George W. Bush White House required the combination of a national security crisis, a fanatical vice president, and an ignorant president who was confident of carrying out the will of God. Such a combination of factors hasn’t yet hit the Trump White House, but we’re getting close. Worst of all is that Trump’s version of nationalism has increasingly come to mean nothing but pathological self-interest. An obsessive focus on No. 1 is defensible for countries that mind their own business, in the manner of Japan, but not for countries that seem determined to mind the business of all the world. Our allies and competitors are increasingly looking for ways to work around the United States, or contain it, and it’s hard to blame them. That isn’t solely the fault of Trump. His predecessors bequeathed him with plenty of folly. But he seems determined to outdo them all.


Source:Ocnus.net 2018

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