Hillary Clinton, George Herbert Walker Bush (the Elder), Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Barack Obama, Larry The Cable Guy, Mister Bean,
uhhh anybody else I guess?
Bozo the Clown or Zippy the Pinhead would be better than this weak and failing “president” we have now.
“All life is a blur of Republicans and meat.” - Zippy
To Drunky Smurf:
More the id, I think. 
Ooh, I’ll play! I’d rather have George W. Bush in charge than Trump. Or a lot of other people, but W is on the list.
And the proper response would be one that was coordinated with South Korea, China, and Japan, and probably based on contingencies agreed upon by January at the latest.
Keep that shit up and sooner or later they’re going to actually hurt somebody.
The fat one with the funny looking hair and tiny hands.
That would be the obvious one, but the Cracker song contains the a propos line: “What the world needs now is a new kind of tension, 'cause the old one just bores me to death.”
–Admiral Painter, The Hunt for Red October
The problem in dealing with a country we barely speak to except in (mutual) insults and threats is that the possibility of an action being taken because the result will turn out in the way the one taking action believes is in his favor…but that may not be how his opponent sees it.
Two thought examples:
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The N. Koreans, sometime in the next few weeks, launch several missiles that land within, say, 300 miles of Guam. They are not armed and the only thing killed is the fish that the rockets land on. Kim and his high command feel that this act will intimidate the US and lead to negotiations to ‘buy off’ the North. But maybe Trump sees it as an attack and orders an attack (non-nuclear) on the North’s missile systems, killing hundreds. Trump may think that this show of strength will cow the N. Koreans, as happened with Libya in 1986 (remember the ‘Line of Death?’). And we proceed from there…see next for my surmises…
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President Trump gets advance knowledge of a N. Korean missile launch and orders a cruise missile attack that destroys the rocket and kills dozens of N. Korean military. He feels that this ‘strong action’ will demonstrate that he is not fooling around and cause the North to pull in it’s horns (and give him a ‘victory’). But the North reacts by mobilizing and moving tens if not hundreds of thousands of troops toward the DMZ, which causes South Korea, fearing imminent invasion, to launch a ‘preventive assault’ against the N. Korean Artillery emplacements. Kim, faced with ‘use it or lose it’ scenario, goes full-tilt with an all-out attack and…who knows what happens next.
It’s quite possible neither option will occur; or one we haven’t even considered will take place. But with both sides making decisions based on what they think the other guys is going to do in reaction to their move, the chances of stumbling into a conflict are reasonably high; not guaranteed, by any means, but still a lot higher than I’m comfortable with.
IMHO as always; YMMV.
I agree that I’d rather have George W. Bush deal with this and I hated W.
As for what I’d do, I would admit what is obviously true: North Korea has won, they have got what they wanted and I would let them have it. North Korea wants to be treated like a normal state. They want to be at the table in international affairs, they want legitimacy for their rule. The fact that they have nuclear missiles capable of hitting us, makes that true. Nukes are like tortoise shell glasses, they confer a certain respectability and status.
This is a bitter pill to swallow, N. Korea is truly a murderous dictatorship, but we need to acknowledge that they have done what they set out to do. Making them a pariah state isn’t working, it’s time to change tactics.
Yes.
A year ago, I honestly believed there is no way in hell Trump would be elected president. I have learned the hard way not to underestimate the unfortunate outcomes from large amounts of stupidity.
One thing about the GWB boomlet here: he’s the one who scrapped the Agreed Frameworkthat had kept NK from developing nukes in exchange for food and other aid.
Shrubby thought that this constituted ‘appeasement’ and maybe it was, but it kept NK from developing nukes for most of a decade. And what was the alternative? He didn’t have one, so NK became a nuclear power during the early 00’s.
And of course, Shrub’s invasion of Iraq is the big reason that small hostile countries feel the need to have nukes as a deterrent. The fact that we could go into an Iraq-sized country and topple the strongman as easily as we did (no matter how bad the aftermath was for us) put the rest of the Axis of Evil on notice that maybe the U.S. Army isn’t gonna come barging in next week, but “just in case, we’d better get a bomb.”
So Dubya’s already been tested in this arena, and flunked. He might still be better than Trump, but only marginally.
Bingo, the invasion of Iraq made it clear that the only way to not be at the mercy of the US military was to develop nukes.
Again, I said that I preferred W to Trump and that I hated W. One thing W didn’t do was to engage in bizarre, off the cuff coke fueled ramblings. That’s a low bar, but that’s where we are.
The right wing has gone bananas. A pair of tweets retweeted by Donald:
Uh- the nuclear modernization that Dumb Donald is taking credit for was started by Obama.
No, they’re confusing being unpredictable with being ill-prepared, undisciplined, childish, and stupid.
Predictability in foreign affairs is a good thing. Brashness and threatening others is a bad thing. First thing they have to do- nominate an ambassador to South Korea. They need somebody with authority in Seoul that they can address their concerns with. Then shut the fuck up and see what effect the new sanctions have.
Wouldn’t it be something if President Obama showed up at the White House and just beat the living piss out of Trump?
US policy of the period might be pithily described as:
“If they possess oil, send weapons of mass destruction.
If they possess weapons of mass destruction, send oil.”
Agreed.
The hardliners in Bush’s cabinet believed that it was important to establish and maintain American military capabilities that were vastly superior to the nearest military challenger. And of course it also advocated policies of regime change and military engagement on grounds of America’s perceived national security and nothing else - international consensus be damned. These policies aren’t just relevant to North Korea, but to Russia as well. America needs to really start accepting that there are limits to its military capabilities and there are even limits to its economic and political clout as well. It needs to accept that it might just start having to talk its way out of conflicts rather than just trying to impose its raw power and will on others. That in no way means that we have to tolerate bad behavior, but the days of America acting unilaterally to dominate other countries and getting away with it are over.
Bush’s hardliners also never understood that America’s real strength came from soft power, not military power; that our cultural and economic influence was much more responsible for our standing and prosperity than our military.
But this is the pit so let’s call Trump names, my new favorite is The Cum of All Our Fears.
Yep, this is the real danger that we’re in now. John Bolton gradually had his profile lowered as George W Bush, the individual, realized how badly he had been misled by the likes of Cheney, but Bolton has a lot of fanboys on the right for his chest beating and tough talk (and the fact that he looks like a walrus). Trump doesn’t listen to advice but watches a lot of Fox News and that’s a terrible combination. This is not the time to go with his gut, especially when he has no idea what he’s wading into. There are scant military and diplomatic communication channels between the US and North Korea, if they exist at all. If North Korea or the United States misinterprets the actions of the other, we’re going to end up having a disaster with consequences that will last decades.
In one sense, Trump’s bluster and the immediate political reaction at home may already have potentially permanent consequences that nobody has really discussed, and that has to do with the strategic alliance in Asia. In fact Sen. Lindsay Graham made a very revealing comment that might have ripple effects:
And this is what both the political right and left wings in Japan have been saying for a long time, which is that the United States military alliance serves the American interest, not their own. This has probably been one of the goals of the Kim regime (and one reason why China has been willing to tolerate their behavior): to weaken and break the alliance so that they can deal with countries like Japan and South Korea one on one, rather than as part of a global alliance manipulated by an external superpower.