fahrenheit451:261

There's a quote that's been mis-attributed to Winston Churchill about jaw,jaw being better than war,war.

it's a good quote,mis-attributed or not. Back in January 2003,I planned and curated a Poetry exhibition at Wakefield Cathedral on the Iraq war at the time using  the title , "Jaw,jaw war,war". Anyhow...

It's a good day today, June 12 2018 ; the world has opted for more life in preference to nuclear self-immolation.

Presidents Trump and Kim Jong Un shook hands and called each other friend.

And the Washington DC neocon neanderthals and their liberal global interventionist cousins are pissed off beyond belief.

Clearly they didn't see this one coming or they might with the benefit of hindsight in the next few days,as the new reality sinks into their troglodyte consciousness, claim to have done so but are not best pleased about it at all.

The inimitable practitioners of Realpolitik such as Bismarck and Talleyrand however,would no doubt be enormously pleased at the success of the Singapore summit.

Trump has brilliantly blindsided the very neocon hawks who had supposed that it was they who had taken Trump's vision hostage and had cowed him into submission to their nefarious schemes.

The thing is,that might still be partially the political / ideological status quo. Syria,Iran,Israel are still on countdown to something infinitely far more dangerous than whatever the state of the present multilateral imbroglio is in.

Yet, Trump and Kim Jong Un with the energetic involvement of China,South Korea and Japan riding to both their rescues have pivoted the world away from nuclear hellfire and damnation.

And the Obama/Clinton democrat liberal global interventionists and the McCain/Bush/Cruz reptilian republican neocons who want a Forever War are now wallowing in their own customised slough of despond.

And Schadenfreude is their only companion.

fahrenheit451:256

Back in 1982,in the middle of the ColdWar ,British commercial TV aired a mordantly witty six-part black comedy, "Whoops Apocalypse " -a tale about events in the week leading up to WW3.
This extract from Wikipedia,captures the tone :-  The naive and highly unpopular Republican U.S. President Johnny Cyclops (an obvious Ronald Reagan parody, played by Barry Morse) is advised by an insane right-wing fundamentalist security advisor,

And here we all are in 2018 and life is imitating art to the full, a real  President Johnny Cyclops is being advised by the likes of John Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo.

There was,what was commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal - the US unilaterally tore that one up.There was a summit arranged for June in Singapore between DPRK-North Korea and the US.The US has unilaterally cancelled it.

In a recent scathing denunciation of the Iranian government,in the wake of the US abrogation of the nuclear deal, Pompeo tore into Iran threatening the imposition of the harshest sanctions in history if Iran did not swear to forego nuclear technology development.

Washington DC's resident neocon psychopath-in-chief Trump's national security advisor- John Bolton gave a graphic warning that the DPRK would be heading the same way as Libya were they not to in effect do exactly what the US demanded of them at the forthcoming summit in Singapore.

The natural,indeed inevitable corollary of those twin egregious US propaganda assaults is that Iran and DPRK,as sovereign nation states and members of the UN, have reacted with their own barely restrained responses.

In one co-ordinated fell swoop,the world has gone from a functional and functioning nuclear restraining order on Iran involving  the UN Security Council permanent 5 plus Germany (representing the EU ) and a North Korea on a path of genuine reconciliation & de-escalation vis a vis South Korea,to a twin tsunami of belligerent hyperbole and outporing of crazed paranoia spewing forth from the neocon orifices of Washington that has eviscerated any semblance of balance ,order and sanity in international relations.

The World is not in a good place right now.

Obviously the US fancies its chances in simultaneous multi-regionalise confrontations.

For the time being its european NATO satrapies,even inveterate kowtowing bootlickers such as the UK aren't as certain as their Lords and Masters in the Washington Eyrie.

Schadenfreude awaits.

fahrenheit451:193

Another day, another test missile fire from DPRK aka NorthKorea. The missile was again reported as flying over sovereign Japanese airspace.
US Secretary of State Tillerson has  " demanded " that both China and Russia take firm measures against DPRK.
This is what an international  diplomatic relations kind of Groundhog Day looks like in a world of supposedly independent sovereign nation states.
The UN security Council is due to convene later on today in order to discuss this latest North Korean missile incident.
It's only a few days ago that the security council passed a resolution imposing additional sanction against DPRK for its nuclear bomb tests.
Business Insider UK of 11 September applied lateral thinking to this seemingly intractable and worsening Korean imbroglio.
" When Jocko Willink‏, a former US Navy SEAL who is now an author and occasional Business Insider contributor, was asked on Twitter how he would handle the North Korean crisis, he gave an unexpected answer that one expert said just might work.
Willink's proposal didn't involve any covert special operation strikes or military moves of any kind. Instead of bombs, Willink suggested the US drop iPhones.
"Drop 25 million iPhones on them and put satellites over them with free wifi," Willink tweeted last week.
While the proposal itself is fantastical and far-fetched, Yun Sun, an expert on North Korea at the Stimson Center, says the core concept could work.
"Kim Jong Un understands that as soon as society is open and North Korean people realize what they're missing, Kim's regime is unsustainable, and it's going to be overthrown," Sun told Business Insider.
For this reason, North Korea's government would strongly oppose any measures that mirror Willink's suggestion.
Sun pointed out that when South Korea had previously flown balloons that dropped pamphlets and DVDs over North Korea, the Kim regime had responded militarily, sensing the frailty of its government relative to those of prosperous liberal democracies. "
The off the cuff proposal has the major advantage of not involving as a central feature of its implementation the thermonuclear annihilation of several million people.
China and Russia  have seemingly been placed in the onerous position of having to do a favour for their greatest adversary and most potent military threat aka the USA.
And its all China and Russia's fault if the USA has to resort to military action against DPRK if events don't work out as the neocon Washington establishment wants them to.
I'd go with the iphones strategem.

fahrenheit451:189

Here's a terrific quote :-

It is difficult to talk to people who confuse Austria and Australia. But there is nothing we can do about this; this is the level of political culture among part of the American establishment. As for the American people, America is truly a great nation if the Americans can put up with so many politically uncivilised people.

Vladimir Putin

As of Wednesday,September 5th. 11:00 ,the DPRK is still standing. That this fundamental existential state might alter at any given moment ought to be a cause for worry among most rational minds.

But if you look back at the introductory paragraph,the quote from Putin, it is precisely the absence of rational minds within the United States Leadership echelon that is the cause of our present predicament regarding the sovereign nation of North Korea aka DPRK and the development of its nuclear weapons capabilities.

Something seen as alarming by the US Ruling Elites and their NATO satrapies. Who not entirely incidentally have,on entirely falacious grounds unilaterally imposed, as a kneejerk reaction to some other imaginary impropriety committed against the US, a plethora of economic and financial sanctions against Russia and its government and various private citizens.

These self same western ruling elites are currently, as part of their supposed containment strategy against DPRK, trying to inveigle Russia into agreeing that sanctions be imposed against DPRK!

Russia and more so China ( and truth be known probably 90% of UN member states  besides ) are endeavouring on a heretofore heroically diplomatic scale, to de-escalate what is a one-sided escalation of tension between DPRK and an increasingly irrational and bellicose USA.

The fact that venal,posturing globally unimportant non entities such as  the UK Defence Secretary Fallon or the equally vapid Prime Minister May have waded into this imbroglio by shooting off vacuous platitudes and otiose cant in all directions does nothing to stabilise this faltering regional house of cards.

I'm not quite sure whether schadenfreude, a usual response to such a pantomime is necessarily apt in this instance.

fahrenheit451:180

Nothing signifies the utter,crass stupidity of  the USA's  infantile,venal militaristic posturing than the current on going and seemingly escalating spat with the DPRK ( North Korea ).
The Byzantine convolutions and convulsions of Washington DC domestic politics aside, it would in theory have to take the US Congress to actually declare War,were it so inclined to do so over this latest hissy fit of theirs.
Not that the highly inconvenient constitutional necessity has ever impeded Neocon psychopaths from gerrymandering contentious and mainly bogus UN security council resolutions that allow the Pentagon a smoke and mirrors loophole to go ahead and wreak havoc on a historically unprecedented scale - Yugoslavia, Iraq (twice),Afghanistan,Libya,Syria.
President Trump's Hollywood-manque poorly scripted, sub-Churchillian rhetoric about fire and fury,yatta-ta-yatta is of itself not terribly enlightening other than it helps to highlight another facet of this entire useless,burdensome farrago of the US chucking the teddy out of its pram.The undiplomatic verbiage has even managed to upset John McCain, the terminally ill warmonger,neocon hawk supreme and soon to be ex-senator from Arizona.
The deep, deep state of CIA,career military and political thin tank neocons do crave for wanton carnage and global instability as long as it seems to favour US corporate interests long term. The spat with the DPRK doesn't accord with the preconceptions of their playbook and so it isn't welcome.
Which is worrying for them; ever since a Heritage Foundation report from 2013 concluded that the US ruling elites and their military-industrial complex are no longer capable of fighting a two front war.  Read and enjoy :-

http://www.heritage.org/defense/report/the-measure-superpower-two-major-regional-contingency-military-the-21st-century
Today’s military is too small to meet the two-MRC test credibly. Moreover, the qualitative advantage that the U.S. military has long enjoyed is eroding as advanced military capabilities proliferate around the world. The capabilities of U.S. forces are also deteriorating as platforms and systems age and as critical modernization programs are delayed or even cancelled.
Building a two-MRC force for the 21st century means increasing the size of the U.S. military, modernizing existing platforms and systems, and investing in advanced air, sea, and land capabilities. This will require resources above the levels proposed by the Obama Administration. Over the next decade, building a reasonable two-MRC force for the 21st century will cost roughly $70 billion more per year than the projected cost of the current defense program, which averages approximately $550 billion per year.

Section I: What It Takes to Be a Military Superpower

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has measured the fundamental adequacy of its force posture in terms of the ability of U.S. forces, without national mobilization, to defeat two nation-state adversaries in geographically separate theaters nearly simultaneously. From the time it was first articulated in 1991, the two-theater-war standard has undergone repeated reviews and revisions. The fundamental reason that the two-theater-war standard still survives is because no credible alternative has ever been proposed. Senior decision makers across five Administrations, Republican and Democrat, have been unable to avoid the reality that, in a world of continuing globalization and growing political and military uncertainty, the U.S. needs a military that is large enough and has a sufficient range of capabilities to cover multiple major military contingencies in overlapping time frames.
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No-one will be bombing anyone anytime soon,unless,of course there are those too stupid to comprehend what really is at stake were they to act so precipitously.
The term  " Schadenfreude " seems appropriate at this juncture.