He gave a fire and brimstone speech about how we totally don't want to but, ya know, we could destroy North Korea any second now if we wanted to. Or if they made us do it. Point is, we could kill everything living thing in that country and it wouldn't be our fault at all, oh no. It's all Kim Jong-un's fault, yep, his and nobody elses. For one thing, it takes an individual truly blessed in the art of delusion to believe you can threaten an full-on nuclear war that will wipe out an entire country and still be able to see yourself as the good guy in the story. Only a complete idiot could look at how North Korea has responded to threatening rhetoric with more frequent and ambitious missile tests and think "Maybe this time go with genocide?" and think that will be an effective deterrent. The only people who could come to that conclusion are people so mind-numblingly dense that they can't see that North Korea's entire nuclear strategy revolves around not wanting to become another Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan etc. etc. and that the lynch-pin of having a nuke is that there would never be anyone so suicidally stupid as to attack them when they knew a nuclear strike against South Korea would be the immediate retaliation.
Apparently they never anticipated someone of such spectacular capacity as Donald Trump. To be fair, it's a common failing.
Trump also made mention of how he doesn't believe Iran is living up to its end of the 2015 nuclear agreement and that if it doesn't get in line, well, they'd just better watch out too. He closed his speech saying that the rest of the world should be more like him and focus on strengthening their countries internally instead of focusing on things like interventionism and nation-building. That this is an inherently contradictory and mutually exclusive to his earlier idea that the righteous nations of the world should go out and smite the renegades with holy artillery to preserve world peace is just something the rest of us will have to make sense of on our own.
I want to circle back to Iran, though, because if Trump pulls out of the agreement like he's signaling to do and re-instate the nuclear sanctions on Iran as a prelude to war, then he will have done something so remarkable I didn't expect to see it in my lifetime: He will have made an even bigger mistake than Bush did when he invaded Iraq.
Real quick, let's just get out the whole "they aren't living up to their end" bit out of the way: It's a fucking lie. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the agency responsible for verifying Iran's compliance with deal, says that Iran is living up to the agreement and following it to the letter. There is no debate about this. The only real thing they're trying to do is say that Iran is violating the spirit of the deal, or to be more specific:
"The secretary of state said that Iran had not lived up to the expectations expressed in the document’s preface, which says the signatories “anticipate that full implementation of this JCPOA will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security.”
Pointing to Iran’s role in the Syrian, Iraqi and Yemeni conflicts as well as its missile programme and cyber operations, Tillerson said: “It’s pretty difficult to say that the expectations of the parties that negotiated this agreement have been met.”
This is pretty rich considering that in Syria, we were the ones who directly armed al Qaeda and ISIS, in Iraq we were the ones who installed the Shia friendly government and empowered most of the Shia militias Iran later allied themselves with in the first place, and, last but not least, we are the ones in Yemen guaranteeing that the worst famine on the planet and a cholera epidemic continue unabated for the foreseeable future. So, really, the only thing proven by complaining that Iran is either on the same or slightly not as terrible sides in conflicts we either started or directly contributed to, is that Tillerson is just as much a cunt as everyone else in this administration.
When Trump pulled out of the Paris Accords, it primed much of Europe to prepare themselves to live in a world where they would no longer need to respect the tone or actions of the United States. Pulling out of the nuclear agreement would tell the entire world that the United States cannot be counted on to fulfill its commitments, that our word is shit because the next President could come along and say "Nope, we're not doing this, we're just gonna take our ball and go home." It's unclear how Trump expects to pull off reneging on a deal almost the entire rest of the world is in favor of and acknowledges is working exactly as intended and still have the U.S. come out as a leading figure on the international stage. I mean, there's no way he can do that, but it would be nice to at least have an inkling as what these people are thinking.
With Bush and Obama at least, you knew where they were coming from. Bush thought he would deliver the Middle East to Jesus with bombs, bibles, and democracy and Obama followed the idea of "I can blow up as many weddings, funerals, and rescuers as I want as long that story stays on page 10 and nobody gives a shit" to an equally religious degree. Both of those are pretty terrible and they played a direct role in creating the chaos the Middle East is in right now, but, at least they're an ethos. The only real question Trump seems to be capable of asking when he looks out at anything in the wider world is "Do I look like a bitch?"
Also, let's really take a look at what a war with Iran would look like. We'd be all alone except for the Saudi's and the other Gulf theocracies and Israel, which, honestly, is a coalition of the incredibly useless. We'd be a global pariah for starting a second war of aggression within twenty years of each other and unlike Iraq, our standing on the global stage is damaged to the point to where the idea of actually punishing us for that will seem like a good idea to more than a few countries. When it comes to the actual fighting, for the first time in a long time we'd be fighting a trained, dedicated, and cohesive army that's capable of putting up a sustained and coordinated resistance against us. If we go by Korean and Vietnam wars as examples, we really don't come out well when we fight someone who can actually punch back.
There's also the issue of what to do about the guerrilla fighting coming from the civilians. Iran's people may have a shaky and reformist attitude towards their own government, but they are unified in that they absolutely have no love for ours or our military, so you can bet once we come in guns blazing killing their families, they're going to want blood to even the score. So what do you do about that? How many hundreds of thousands or millions of troops will you need to fight the army, revolutionary guard, and the guerrilla fighters all at the same time? Where are all those bodies going to come from? Because right now, only the desperate and true believers are signing up for the armed services, and for some reason, I don't think that'll be enough.
But let's say that it is. Let's say we "win" and install a new government in Tehran, what then? What are we going to do about the civilians and surviving army members who will go about blowing up troops, checkpoints, and whatever else they can put an IED next to? Are we really going to spend decades occupying Iran until it's "pacified?" And that's not even getting into the secondary consequences which will be the Taliban retaking full control over Afghanistan while we're committed elsewhere, the flood of Sunni terrorists groups into Iran to inflict as much carnage as possible on the strongest symbol of Shia Islam in the world right now, the renewed fighting in Iraq as the Shia government loses the resources of both its primary backers, and that really, is just the off-the-top-of-my-head scenarios. Who knows what the fuck else will happen if that ever gets started.
The irony of a man who got elected President on the promise that he would make America great again single-handedly convincing the world that the sooner they get away from American influence is almost too much to process. It'd be hysterical, even, if he wasn't dragging us down with him.
When Trump pulled out of the Paris Accords, it primed much of Europe to prepare themselves to live in a world where they would no longer need to respect the tone or actions of the United States. Pulling out of the nuclear agreement would tell the entire world that the United States cannot be counted on to fulfill its commitments, that our word is shit because the next President could come along and say "Nope, we're not doing this, we're just gonna take our ball and go home." It's unclear how Trump expects to pull off reneging on a deal almost the entire rest of the world is in favor of and acknowledges is working exactly as intended and still have the U.S. come out as a leading figure on the international stage. I mean, there's no way he can do that, but it would be nice to at least have an inkling as what these people are thinking.
With Bush and Obama at least, you knew where they were coming from. Bush thought he would deliver the Middle East to Jesus with bombs, bibles, and democracy and Obama followed the idea of "I can blow up as many weddings, funerals, and rescuers as I want as long that story stays on page 10 and nobody gives a shit" to an equally religious degree. Both of those are pretty terrible and they played a direct role in creating the chaos the Middle East is in right now, but, at least they're an ethos. The only real question Trump seems to be capable of asking when he looks out at anything in the wider world is "Do I look like a bitch?"
Also, let's really take a look at what a war with Iran would look like. We'd be all alone except for the Saudi's and the other Gulf theocracies and Israel, which, honestly, is a coalition of the incredibly useless. We'd be a global pariah for starting a second war of aggression within twenty years of each other and unlike Iraq, our standing on the global stage is damaged to the point to where the idea of actually punishing us for that will seem like a good idea to more than a few countries. When it comes to the actual fighting, for the first time in a long time we'd be fighting a trained, dedicated, and cohesive army that's capable of putting up a sustained and coordinated resistance against us. If we go by Korean and Vietnam wars as examples, we really don't come out well when we fight someone who can actually punch back.
There's also the issue of what to do about the guerrilla fighting coming from the civilians. Iran's people may have a shaky and reformist attitude towards their own government, but they are unified in that they absolutely have no love for ours or our military, so you can bet once we come in guns blazing killing their families, they're going to want blood to even the score. So what do you do about that? How many hundreds of thousands or millions of troops will you need to fight the army, revolutionary guard, and the guerrilla fighters all at the same time? Where are all those bodies going to come from? Because right now, only the desperate and true believers are signing up for the armed services, and for some reason, I don't think that'll be enough.
But let's say that it is. Let's say we "win" and install a new government in Tehran, what then? What are we going to do about the civilians and surviving army members who will go about blowing up troops, checkpoints, and whatever else they can put an IED next to? Are we really going to spend decades occupying Iran until it's "pacified?" And that's not even getting into the secondary consequences which will be the Taliban retaking full control over Afghanistan while we're committed elsewhere, the flood of Sunni terrorists groups into Iran to inflict as much carnage as possible on the strongest symbol of Shia Islam in the world right now, the renewed fighting in Iraq as the Shia government loses the resources of both its primary backers, and that really, is just the off-the-top-of-my-head scenarios. Who knows what the fuck else will happen if that ever gets started.
The irony of a man who got elected President on the promise that he would make America great again single-handedly convincing the world that the sooner they get away from American influence is almost too much to process. It'd be hysterical, even, if he wasn't dragging us down with him.
