01-29-2018, 10:44 AM
(01-28-2018, 07:05 PM)bobc Wrote: The decision to set the doomsday clock was a political statement as part of the "resistance".
The 3rd Turning decisions to defer a crisis conflict between the US and North Korea has now resulted in a time to confront the issue.
The strong resolute confrontation by President Trump has a better chance of a peaceful resolution than the kicking the can down the road approach of his predecessors.
Would you like North Korea to have an effective ICBM ability to attack the US?
3T behavior intended to defer danger in a 4T tends to come at a cost of worsening the eventual conflict. I think of the unwillingness of countries to protest the mistreatment of Jews in Nazi Germany before the Holocaust even where Jews were a significant part of the population (Netherlands, Belgium, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Norway, and Greece, all of which would lose great numbers of their Jews to the Holocaust). Qui tacet consentit.
The fault is that 3T thought badly suits the reality of a Crisis. I can think of a solution in Korea that would satisfy all interested parties of the Korean Conflict which has never ended in law, as there is no peace treaty. For example, South Korea and the People's Republic of China (PRC) agree on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. Sure, the PRC is armed to the teeth, but South Korea does not allow American nuclear weapons within its borders. I think that South Korea would be perfectly content with a puppet state of the PRC beyond its demilitarized zone and would collaborate with the PRC to that end.
It is not reasonable to expect any country to see its people less precious than those of some other country.
Donald Trump is very much an out-of-season character, pushing rampant nationalism when international solidarity is precious. He supports the intensification of economic inequality and the concentration of wealth and income. He is a military blusterer even if he knows even less about military affairs than does the usual combat veteran but pretends to be more knowledgeable than everyone else because he is the Great Donald Trump. He sees the profit and his glory in war and not the suffering.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.