FYI
"North Korea expert Victor Cha has said that normally in this situation, the U.S. would go to Chinese President Xi Jinping and say that diplomacy has hit a snag and it was time for China to tighten its sanctions to bring North Korea back to the table. But Trump has started a nasty (and incoherent) trade war with the Chinese and is now blaming them for the diplomatic impasse with Pyongyang. So his government is unlikely to get much of a hearing there."
"He could also, in normal circumstances, go to NATO and other regional allies to put pressure on China and otherwise show a united front to lean on the North Koreans. But he's loaded for bear going into the annual meeting and is preparing to harangue the other NATO members over money again because it is literally the only aspect of the organization he knows or cares about. To state the obvious, Trump's ability to bring America's traditional allies on board for any collective campaign is now severely hampered by his increasingly hostile relationship with all of them."
"So that leads up to Trump's meeting in Helsinki with his most trusted foreign policy adviser, Vladimir Putin, who will likely suggest that the president do something that will weaken the West's position and strengthen Putin's own country. After all, he already persuaded Trump to cancel the joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises as a freebie in the North Korean negotiations. (Trump has unconvincingly insisted that was done to save money, even though those exercises cost less than his cumulative trips to Mar-a-Lago.) Who knows what Putin can persuade Trump to give up next?"
"As we have now seen demonstrated in living color, Trump's alleged negotiating savvy and deal-making prowess have been monumentally oversold. It's not that we didn't suspect that already, considering how clumsily he has botched his own domestic legislative agenda over, even with a friendly GOP Congress. Still, you never know. Maybe he had a secret talent for one-on-one negotiations with foreign leaders. But no. He is a disaster."
"Since Trump is uninterested in history, he does not know or care that peace and prosperity in Europe are essential to peace and prosperity in the United States. When Europeans go to war with each other, as they did twice in the last century, the U.S. ends up paying a huge price in both human and financial terms. As former U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder said on MSNBC this week, "70 years of peace is a pretty darned good investment."'
"But then, good investments are something Donald Trump doesn't really understand. This is the guy who couldn't even make a profit running casinos. He simply can't recognize a sensible long-term deal when he sees it."
I don't think it's that he can't recognize a sensible long term deal when he sees it, it's that he's powerless to do anything about it due to his puppermasters. The larger problem to me is now a younger generation is going to see all this as normal when it's anything but.
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