No, we don’t. The past few presidents have all stuck tariffs on various goods, and that didn’t amount to a “trade war”. Besides, the Chinese are too smart to engage in a trade war. 
As for predicting the next war… I think the latest moves at the Cabinet and other posts increase the chances for war, but those chances are still pretty low. My prediction is no new wars in the next 2 years, at least. Trump is, at heart, a coward.
The thing about war is that nations do not want to go to war with someone who can successfully fight back. So that takes Iran & North Korea off the table.
‘Maybe’ Venezuela. Maybe we’ll do a mission like we did in Haiti in the 90s where we invade and try to re-establish a sense of order. I could see that happening. Honestly I’d be in favor of it, the government there has taken all tools for the people to remove them from power out of their hands and now it is a dictatorship undergoing a famine. If north & south American nations form an alliance to overthrow the Venezuela government, and the US has a role in that, that’d probably be our next war.
Invade Venezuela. What could possibly go wrong?
It would be violation of international law, too, you know.
Speaking as a South American, I would like to request the U.S.A. to please stick it’s “help” with Venezuela where the sun don’t shine.
My impression is that a fight with Iran would be significantly more one-sided than a fight with North Korea.
What on earth makes you think that?
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The US-Taiwan-China is a possibility.
Fair enough. But it may be south American nations that invade and overthrow Venezuela to restore the old government if the issues there keep getting worse. It depends on how bad things get and if the problems keep affecting nearby nations.
The official war would be over pretty quick. But Iran would be far harder to occupy than Iraq for multiple reasons.
The problem with this is it really only applies to nations with rational leadership. I see less and less daily to make me believe our political leadership, in particular the executive, are acting the way rational leadership would.
So basically, Iran & North Korea are still on the table.
I would let that to the Venezuelans if you don’t mind.
Many of the Venezuelans keep trying to protest their government but so far it hasn’t worked. They boycotted the elections because they knew they were fraudulent.
Something will give eventually. The international community should be willing to use economic pressure to demand legitimate elections there.
Why don’t we first start with Saudi Arabia?, Qatar?, China?, Why it’s so important that Venezuela has a government that you recognize as democratic?, I don’t like the current government of Venezuela, but I like the Saudis even less.
The “International Comunity” has done enough damage for this century.
Let’s give it a rest, at least until the “International Comunity” is not represented by the likes of Trump, May, Xi, Netanyahu and the rest.
With Bolton’s appointment, I’d also peg Iran as the front-runner but I’d throw in Cuba as a long-shot possibility. Bolton wanted Cuba added to the Axis of Evil back in 2002 and got extremely pissed off when his lackies couldn’t scrounge up enough evidence of WMDs to warrant their inclusion. As seen in his continued unwavering support for the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Bolton does not change his mind easily so I thinks it’s highly likely he’s the one person outside of an assisted living center in Miami-Dade County who still thinks Cuba is a threat to the US.
If Trump/Bolton absolutely MUST go to war against a country - if this is an absolute certainty and the only question is which country - I would really it rather be Venezuela than any of the others mentioned in this thread.
I would have guessed Iran, but the question of Kushner’s security clearance has been bugging me. There’s simply no reason that Trump wouldn’t grant his son-in-law, who is expressly tasked with managing the Middle East, full access to all of the security information he wants over John Kelly’s say-so.
Kushner was all set to go, enacting his plan of backing Israel and Saudi Arabia in anything they wanted, so long as it meant forcing Palestine into a deal, and suddenly Trump announced that he was going to accept Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, scuppering everything for many months following.
Then, as noted, just as it was all finally about to boil over, and Kushner was going to be able to put things back into motion, he quietly swallows a request to downgrade Jared, strongly incapacitating his ability to do what he needs to do to win a war against Iran.
There’s no reason for Trump to force the women that he has dated PLUS his wives and ex-wives to sign NDAs. As a wealthy guy, sure you’ll sign a prenup when you’re getting married, but an NDA? If it was just wives, then we would expect that it’s about not letting on that his businesses are in the red. But that’s not something that Stormy would know. His wife has to know that he has a roster of sexual companions on the side, so there’s no reason to have an NDA with them.
While I’ve always taken the Steele Dossier with a healthy dose of salt; looking back at Trump’s actions in the world, I do have to accept that these things are well explained by kinky proclivities and thus Russian blackmail.
So while it seems like the addition of John Bolton would be significant evidence that Trump is serious about going in there and getting Iran and North Korea, I somehow expect that he’s going to do mysterious, seemingly irrational things that cleanly scupper everything on both those fronts.
And I mean we heard all about the Bloody Nose strategy. But did anything ever say that it was Trump proposing or supporting the idea? It seems to have been McMasters who was the key agent making the pitch and, we’ll note, it was never accepted.
I’m highly doubtful of anything at this stage of things, but if we are to take the assumption that Russia really does have Trump by the orange raisins, then I would expect to see a lot of what we’ve already seen, which is a lot of doing nothing but talking about how fierce we’ll be, and buildup, with no action, allowing Russia to quietly do as they will in the Mideast and continue to supply and work with North Korea on whatever illegal schemes the two of them have together.
The interesting thing will be Bolton. While, at the moment, Bolton seems to trust Trump and believes that the whole Russia thing is nonsense, pretty soon he’s going to be looking at all of the internal research and reports that McMasters and everyone else in the Intelligence Agencies and Military have seen that have lead them to make unequivocal statements that Russia had interfered in the election and sought to place Trump on the throne (in the final months). He might see the security clearance reports that are keeping Kushner and everyone from receiving full access. And he’s going to see Trump giving a whole bunch of evasive, nonsense reasons to avoid going in there and riling things up.
While I feel like McMasters would simply write off Trump as an idiot and accept that as a plausible explanation, from what I’ve read of Bolton, I think that he’s significantly more likely to jump on the “Trump is a Traitor” train and take that message out into the world if he even smells the wiff of favoritism towards Russian interests. He’s not the sort to take “no” for an answer and a “no” without an explainable reason is going to make every fiber of John Bolton’s being want to discover the real reason, and so he will go in and request intelligence documents about Trump, and he will read through the security clearance research.
If Trump just brought on Bolton in the hopes of bluffing North Korea and Iran into backing down, I feel that he may have made a horrible mistake, and that it’s going to cost him dearly.
And if he does take on Bolton and we don’t see him start to mobilize troops against Iran, within the next two months, then I think it’s safe to say that Russia does have something on him.
They revoked Kushner’s security clearance for the purposes of giving him a new, double-secret clearance…he is going to personally lead SEAL Team 6 into North Korea to kill Kim Jong-un.
When Trump’s wall fails it’s likely he’ll make a move fifty miles in to Mexico and declare it a neutral defense zone. It is an area that has been used before so lawyers can find a precedent.
Crane
Yeah, no. That is not even slightly likely.
Agreed that it would not result in a war, but extending our border fifty miles into Mexico is very likely.
Crane