It’s been a summer of discontent, to be sure, and the signs aren’t good for this fall. Internationally we appear to be on the brink of major upheavals, from India’s escalation of the conflict in Kashmir to uprisings in Hong Kong, Russia, and elsewhere. India-Pakistan is particularly worrisome, as these now nuclear armed states have already fought three wars over founding disputes like Kashmir; with Modi in control, this could end very badly. What a great time to have Donald Trump as president, right?
As much as pundits have tried to paint Trump as an atypical GOP politician with regard to foreign relations, his administration is doing about what you might expect a president Rubio to do; bellicose rhetoric, imperial policies, and arrogant attitude. The only question about Trump is whether, at any given moment, he may be pursuing his own narrow self interest or following the directions handed to him by his neocon national security team. It is hard for TV commentators to hold both administration positions in their heads at the same time. Trump speaks nicely about Putin, while his cabinet officials tear up arms control agreements signed by Reagan. Trump exchanges notes with Kim Jong Un while is Pentagon plans military maneuvers in South Korea. Trump appears to resist the march to war with Iran, but the confrontation continues. The net effect of all of this is basically a mainstream Republican foreign policy, with a few fewer diplomats.
The fact is, I would far rather Trump and his administration start having a dialog with Russia over nuclear arms and nuclear materials. The mishap they had in the northeast of the country, at the Nenoksa test site, this past week underscores that need. Putin’s proposed nuclear-powered cruise missile is a tremendously destabilizing and toxic program. Think of it: even if it works as planned, you would have a missile with a conventional payload spewing radioactive fuel all over the place when it strikes its target, rendering it basically a dirty bomb. We are playing a similarly dangerous game with the development of low-yield nuclear “bunker busters”. Both of these weapons amount to a backdoor introduction of nuclear isotopes into common use in a conventional war. We need to put nuclear disarmament back at the top of the agenda … and right now, we’re heading in the opposite direction at full speed.
When the Trump administration is finally over, no doubt the GOP will attempt to distance themselves from this dumpster fire, claiming Trump was, at heart, a lifelong Democrat. Nothing doing. We need to hang this around their necks for as long as they remain the party of right-wing extremism, climate change denial, serial invasion, etc.
luv u,
jp
Probably the most dangerous element in this speech was Trump’s comments on India. Bush made some effort to balance his administration’s outsized relationship with Pakistan by working with India. The current president suggested greater Indian involvement in resolving the Afghan conflict, which would absolutely drive Pakistan’s leaders mad. Their principal adversary active on two fronts? Not a good outcome from their point of view, and that would make another devastating conflict between India and Pakistan even more likely.
It is a bit maddening to see Defense Secretary Ash Carter denounce the Russians for being the gang that can’t shoot straight (which they apparently are) when only days ago our forces in Afghanistan blew up a Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital – an accident, of course (we seem to have a lot of them). While we’re railing against Putin, we might pause to remember that we have been in Afghanistan for fourteen years, and that the place is still ungovernable. We’ve been in Iraq for 12 years at some level or another, and large swaths of it are under the control of a group we profess to hate – ISIS or ISIL, nurtured in the government-free zone we carved out in the cradle of civilization, supported by Saudi and Turkey. (I guess the friends of our friends are somehow our enemies. And the enemies of our enemies … also our enemies. Have we no friends?)
Our drone war in Pakistan-Afghanistan, and essentially everywhere else, runs on a similar principle. It isn’t as all-out, of course, but it appears to be nearly as random. And just as every living thing in the Vietnamese countryside was assumed to be Viet Cong, every military age male in the tribal areas of Pakistan is, by definition, an extremist, a combatant, a terrorist, and therefore the target of killer drones, piloted by some dude who works at a terminal in a trailer about fifty miles from where I’m sitting right now.
Jump forward about a week. India launches its AGNI-V A5 ICBM, what is indisputably a ballistic missile. Their officials brag that it is capable of carrying nuclear warheads and that it can reach Beijing or Shanghai – two major cities in a nation India fought a war with in 1962. The reaction over here? Crickets. Serious crickets. Ho-hum. Boys will be boys. Now this week, Pakistan (which has fought three wars with India) launches their latest ballistic missile. Here is the report from the Daily News:
My second thought was, this is not simply about burning Korans. This incident followed ten years of war and all the evils that are contained within that fact. It occurred during a stretch of weeks in which we saw cell-phone video of American soldiers laughing and joking as they pissed on the corpses of Afghans; our military personnel adopting an SS-type insignia for one of their units; our Defense Department persisting in its robotic Drone war on both sides of the Pakistani border. Now Afghans are turning their guns on our people. Is anyone really surprised?
The interpersonal connections between ISI and networks like Al Qaeda were built up over the course of decades. How else could such a notorious terror leader hide in plain sight, except by the same kind of tolerance shown to killers like Jose Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch?
Imperial Prerogatives. There has been a lot of reporting on Pakistan the last couple of weeks. Their military closed a crossing to U.S. convoys on the Af-Pak border in response to a range of disagreements, not least of which are disputes over U.S. and NATO (essentially U.S.) incursions into Pakistani national territory. There is a kind of impatience to the reporting, communicating the administration’s and the military’s frustration with Pakistan’s failure to adequately support their seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. It’s reminiscent of the official line during the Vietnam war, when American officials would complain about “sanctuaries” in Cambodia and Laos, while they confidently flew devastating bombing runs out of their own “sanctuaries” in Thailand and elsewhere.
The “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy. This is an unexpected bonanza for jihadi recruitment. It validates much of the propaganda about an America at war with Islam. It demonstrates the depth of our political pathology and our willingness to scapegoat more than 1 billion people because of the actions of a handful of criminally insane zealots. And it does so at the worst possible time, when expectations in the Islamic world are already being deflated by Obama’s Bush-like foreign policy. Jihadi leaders hope that this controversy will drag on, I’m sure, or that the Park 51 center will be forced to relocate in Staten Island so that its detractors, flush with victory, will expand their campaign against Muslims. 
mainstream media. This sometimes manifests itself in the form of stories that focus on a reporter’s experience rather than whatever that reporter is witnessing. (Gary Trudeau has offered an extreme example of this with his journalist character Roland Hedley and his perpetually inane Twitter feed.) There’s also the phenomenon of framing complex historical events as being largely the product of one person’s efforts. Probably the best example of this would be Reagan purportedly bringing down the Berlin Wall through the awesome power of speech. And there’s “Charlie Wilson’s War”, the namesake of which – former Texas representative Charlie Wilson – just passed away this week.
Whatever his role may have been in providing fuel to the Afghan war effort during the 1980s, this was not the work of one man, any more than the fall of the Berlin Wall was the result of one speech. This ongoing crisis was many, many years in the making, beginning in earnest with the Carter administration and the decision to begin backing the fundamentalist factions within Afghanistan because it was felt that they would prove a longer-term, more pernicious problem for the Soviets than any secularist elements. Money began flowing on a larger scale in the Reagan years as the CIA embarked on what was up to that time the largest operation in their history, conducted in cooperation with the Pakistani ISI and the Saudis. Fanatical fighters were recruited all over the Muslim world, including most notably Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. So we all had a piece of this one, and now it’s got a piece of us.