Why? They’ve attacked us and our allies in the past. Now that they’ve got a nuclear shield you think they’d be more hesitant? I think the opposite is more likely.
You still haven’t told us why.
This is great debates. You need to come with something. As has been pointed out time and time again, it’s been over 64 years since the end of the war in Korea. There have been numerous minor confrontations between the US and North Korea, including the killing of American Officers by NK, and the capture of a US Navy ship with the captivity and torture of it’s crew. Will all of this, there still wasn’t a war.
So we can read that you don’t like Trump, and you think the the Pentagon is clamoring for a war. But with no war in all this time, please tell us why now? Not just “because” or because you’re not a fan of the military. But what has so fundamentally changed that you think any provocation now will result in a war?
The U.S. kicks off its ‘Global Thunder’ nuclear war exercises.
Russia is conducting a large number of major exercises alone, or jointly with countries like India and Belarus. Tokyo scrambles fighter jets against Russian nuclear bombers over the Sea of Japan.
Increasingly, U.S. Special Forces are deployed near the Russian border.
I cannot connect the dots, but with weak hands at the helm of the U.S. (and even a possible threat of anti-Trump blackmail tapes), our enemies are eager to make clever probes of U.S. resolve. The stories above may have nothing to do with North Korea, but there will be many geopolitical scares during this frightful Administration and I don’t know if we want to have a separate thread for each one.
The threat of major war is greater now than it’s been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. If the “Doomsday Clock” doesn’t reflect that, then the scientists who control that Clock are not thinking clearly.
As a friend, I recommend you lay off the Halloween candy this evening. You seem a tad high-strung.
I honestly wonder where you get your #Facts from. You don’t like John Oliver. Do you read the N.Y. Times ? Do you think the geopolitical situation is better or worse than it was under Obama?
The farcical Doomsday Clock is already 99% of the way to midnight at any given moment. It’s nothing but a solemn-pretending stunt to whip up hysteria.
Can Trump simply ask the marine nearby who has the football for the briefcase? Flip it open, bring up the war plan for North Korea - I would assume there’s a hard copy of the various plans in a binder in that thing - and just stick his tiny, stubby finger on the plan he wants as if he were ordering at Denny’s?
He then can just pick up the phone that is in that briefcase, find his code card - might be in his other pants - and read off the numbers, right?
“I want a combo #4 with fries and 18 megatons”. “here’s my card number”.
That’s all it would take. Not saying even Trump is that stupid…he must realize that every nuclear strike has the possibility of escalating into the end of the world - but he does have the authority.
I’ve wondered about the details. Mad Dog Mattis is supposed to sign off on the Presidential order, but what if he’s sound asleep (perhaps drugged by his Russian call girl)? What if Trump has a lackey who can imitate Mad Dog’s voice? General Hyten of Strategic Command is supposed to be in the loop, but do protocols call for him to override an order if he mistrust’s Trump’s judgement?
And where are the actual arming codes? Does the football/biscuit just contain a password to access arming codes in the War Room computer? And what special measures are in effect for this President? Is Trump’s biscuit a fake, with Mad Dog carrying the real biscuit in his holster?
There are two kinds of world leaders. Some see themselves as the custodian of a great culture that may last for centuries: Brezhnev, Chou, Nixon, etc. all saw themselves this way. Others, like Kim, are petulant egomaniacs who might be happy to shoot John Lennon, or worse, in a temper fit. Imagine a Kim with hundred times as many nukes but super-sensitive about his short fingers.
It really does depend on what you think the “geopolitical situation” means.
Do I think we are closer to war? In a better spot internationally? Where I think we should be? These are all different questions and receive different answers.
I think under Obama, the US was viewed a very risk averse, and the US just wasn’t going to force any issue internationally. Part of this was that Obama was determined to not be Bush (he was awarded a Noble peace prize for no other reason that he wasn’t Bush). Part of the reason was that he just wasn’t a fighter in my opinion. Wasn’t one internationally, wasn’t one domestically. So if that was fine with you, than he was fine. Having said that I liked Obama a lot, just wish he was more forceful.
But I believe that nations are always tested internationally, and for better or worse, after the “red line” issue, the US was pushed more than it would have been under Bush. For better or worse.
So is the situation better or worse now? Perhaps more risky now. But do you really want to live in a world where US progressively has less say in world events? Where China and Putin dictate world events? If you don’t care than we are in a worse position. If you do, than we may be in a better spot.
It’s not that I don’t like John Oliver. I think he’s funny, I just don’t consider him a reliable source of unbiased news.
Yes, I occasionally read the NYT (20 articles / month or less).
I think spifflog was correct to point out that ‘it depends’. I think the situation in Iraq and Syria has significantly improved this year compared to where things were last year. In contrast, the situation with North Korea is deteriorating.
I really really wish this was true. Unfortunately, I would expect that procedures were properly followed, and that the commander in chief was given the command authority that comes with the office.
I have read that it does not require the SecDef to sign off on a nuclear launch.
Wiki says "
and while only the president can order the release of nuclear weapons, the order must be verified by the Secretary of Defense to be an authentic order given by the president (there is a hierarchy of succession in the event that the president is killed in an attack). This verification process deals solely with verifying that the order came from the actual President. The Secretary of Defense has no veto power and must comply with the president’s order."
Reading between the lines, it sounds like Mattias is the only semi-steady head we have preventing WW3. Mattias can presumably state that he doesn’t feel the President’s order is authentic, that the man is senile/crazy/off his rocker, etc, and I would guess that whoever is on the other end in NORAD will listen to Mattias.
I’ve always wondered how Obama got the reputation for being “weak” on foreign policy. It seems like a bit of a coup for right-wing talking heads. By far, the biggest criticism of Obama from progressives has been that he *expanded Bush’s aggressive foreign policy. There were 10X more drone strikes under Obama than there were under Bush:
He toppled the Libyan government and Gaddafi. He introduced or escalated military interventions in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Syria. He continued the full-scale wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The only reason we didn’t escalate to a ground war with Syria is that he made the “mistake” of trying to get authorization from Congress, something we just don’t do anymore:
He then spent the next 3 years bombing the hell out of them anyway…dropping so many bombs in 2015 and 2016 that we literally ran out:
Short of nuclear war or a total war involving invasion of a country with massive amounts of ground troops, it’s hard to imagine a President being more aggressive in their foreign policy.
The technical term for progressives that believe this is ‘wrong’. Just saying.
Care to elaborate? Do you have some evidence that we *haven’t been attacking those countries with drone strikes and conventional bombings?
Toppling Gaddafi wasn’t a US operation…we reluctantly went along with NATO. Certainly, Obama didn’t topple the man. He definitely didn’t continue a full-scale war in either Iraq or Afghanistan…that’s just horseshit. He scaled back operations in both, even when those weren’t in the US’s best interests (let alone either of those countries). Not getting every troop out isn’t the same thing as full-scale war except to the faithful. I’ll rate the ‘He introduced or escalated military interventions in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Syria’ as ‘partially true but misleading’, so I’ll give you that one.
Anything else?
I’m more curious to hear your explanation of the “something we just don’t do anymore” portion of your post. I’m pretty sure if we’re going to have a “ground war” (like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq) the norm is still to get Congressional authorization. Obama was seeking Congressional authorization for what then-SoS John Kerry described as an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.”
Pretty much every war is sold as an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.” Rumsfeld repeatedly claimed the second Iraq War would be over somewhere between five days to five months, at a cost of $50 billion to $60 billion:
Anyway, we certainly do have ground troops operating in many countries, and have for the last 16 years. We just call them “advisors” until the number of troops becomes high enough that the claim becomes ridiculous, then we tack the operation onto the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force as part of the “War on Terror.”
In the news this week, Tillerson and Mattis stated that any new AUMF should not be “time-restrained or geographically restricted” - IE, we should be able to strike anywhere on the planet, at any time, without it being questioned. This point of view has become so much the norm that it barely made a blip on any major news outlet:
Is that what you think Bush did for the Iraq war? Just ‘tack[ed] the operation onto the 2001 [AUMF] as part of the “War on Terror”’?
Would you consider any of the operations we’ve done since then a “ground war”?
Factor in the upcoming PyeongChang Olympic games , 100 days from now, and it’s way more difficult to predict.
I’d like to add to the above with the question: By the way, at what point did the definition of war get downgraded to exclude missile and bomb strikes? Why is it now considered okay to kill large numbers of people in foreign nations without any specific Congressional authorization, so long as boots don’t hit the ground?