I’ll go along with this analysis. I strongly opposed the Iran deal, for two reasons. First, I thought it was unlikely in the extreme that we could trust Iran. Given the IAEA miserable failure in Iraq in the 80s before the first Gulf war and after a less than stellar results in other places in the world it was a reasonable assumption. Second, it did nothing to stop Iran’s other bad actions, terrorism, missiles, interfering in Iraq.
Even knowledgeable folks who oppose it, have not been able to point to a specific instance of Iran doing anything worse than failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. I’m happy to be wrong about this.
The benefits to the US and the west are in the front end. In return, for unfreezing Iran assets, we got a significant reduction in Iran’s enhanced uranium stockpile and a big reduction in their centrifuges. As such it is too early to renege on the deal. It is better to get out of the deal near the end. if Iran continues to behaving like its been doing for the last 30 odd years. Hopefully, in ten years the Iranian regime will be less hostile to the west, if not we can impose additional sanctions.
It is laughable that Trump could negotiate a better deal since he has absolutely no clue what that means.
It was noted in one of the talking head shows that the deal was structured so that most of the good parts of the deal for Iran came right away (sanctions, releasing frozen funds), while many of the good parts of the deal for the rest of the world would be gradually realized later over time. So by the simple act of cancelling the deal early, DT makes the deal a bad deal for us.
It’s similar to his Obamacare strategy: declare it is dead, all the while secretly strangling it to death in its cradle with his executive actions.
As long as American leaders–whoever they may be–keep acting as if the USA has some sort of extraordinary and unique right to dictate the actions of other nations, getting any sort of agreement with anyone will continue to be difficult. Categorical statements about who does and who does not “deserve” nuclear weapons or whatnot aren’t terribly helpful. The only reason non-proliferation even works to the extent it does is because most of the nuclear powers agree, as a sort of cabal, that the club is quite big enough, thank you, and try to discourage others from putting in their membership requests. It’s inherently a collective thing, and it is not helped by unilateral grandstanding. I’d argue that the harder you push against a particular country’s nuclear program, singling it out and painting it in disparaging and hostile terms, the more you make that nation want nuclear weapons.
The Europeans and Chinese, even the Russians, for God’s sake, seem to understand that if you really want to limit nukes, you have to make the countries involved feel less threatened, not more threatened. But the US, even before Trump, has never cared much about actual results, only about appearing tough and unyielding.
I often think the best solution to non-proliferation (barring setting an example and, um, not having nukes ourselves, which isn’t terribly practical) is to continue discouraging nuclear development, abstain from threatening to annihilate people, and make it 100% clear that anyone using nukes signs their own death warrant. That’s one case where threatening destruction might make sense, if it’s done dispassionately and simply as a matter of course–“you understand that while you may have developed nuclear weapons, if you use them, everything you have will be gone in a literal flash.”
But then, our country really has never fully embraced the idea of disavowing the first use of nuclear weapons, because hell, you never know when the might need a beat down.
If I’m Trump and everyone is telling me I can’t start a war or China will be mad, but I really want a war with NK, then I’m going to insult them as much as I can in order to get THEM to start it. I feel like that’s what he’s doing and it might be working?
Nah, they’ve been threatening imminent war any second now im literally holding my finger on the button its all going to kick off right now on a near daily basis for decades.
True. But Trump is different. I think he’s convinced pretty much everyone that he’s for real, and if NK thinks he’s going to attack now who knows what will happen.
So what does this do?
SecDef can call all retired(!) military back into service by rather simple orders. Usually a wartime/disaster move.
And for the truly paranoid:
And mind you… This can also be misused to supress criticism of the Commander in Chief. If on active duty you cannot just simply step out in the open critisize the President - he is your commander in chief.
But many - especially Generals - did so after their retirement and even got into politics. This is a astoninglishly simply way to supress those critics by just calling them back on AD and putting them under the UCMJ again.
Just in time for Halloween, South Korea’s army said it’s looking to build a new monster missile capable of wiping out major North Korean political and military installations in the event of an all-out war between the belligerent neighbors.
South Korea first announced the idea after President Donald Trump pledged last month to remove restrictions on the U.S. ally’s missile payload, paving the way for bigger and stronger weapons at a time when tensions on the Korean Peninsula have escalated significantly. In a report released Thursday, the South Korean army said the Hyunmoo IV surface-to-surface missile, dubbed “Frankenmissile” by South Korean media, would be used in combination with other surface-to-surface missiles and Hyunmoo-class intermediate-range missiles to inflict an “unbearable cost” to its nuclear-armed northern rival.
