Wait, So Trump Can't Even TALK to Putin Now? · 5:28pm Jul 21st, 2017
Trump can't even TALK to Putin now. Okay, cool. Let's all blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons. Let's not even have a freaking conversation before we hit the red button. We're all George Lucas now; guess we just love 'splosions. Got it.
The US media heads should be arrested for treason and public endangerment. Even as much as Dems hated Reagan, at least he was allowed to *talk* to Gorbachev. As a result, and also equally due to internal pressures from the Russian people themselves, the Soviet Union fell. Now, though, we are trying to resurrect the Cold War.
So what great, noble cause of freedom is this new Cold War with Russia to be fought over? Ending communism and bringing in a free market? Bringing in freedom of speech to an oppressed nation who was our ally before (WWII) and could be again (dreams of 1993)?
Not quite. Here is what we're fighting Russia for:
- A neo-Nazi client state of the US and the EU in power in Kiev, Ukraine.
- A bipolar government in charge in Georgia, Eastern Europe which belongs in the loony bin. They eat their own ties for god's sake.
- Attacking a secular dictator like Assad so that ISIS or its successors can take over the cradle of civilization.
- Shunning Iraq because they are 2/3 Shiite and are now becoming a client state of Iran due to our dangerous meddling under Bush.
- The US Military Industrial Complex needs to be able to sell moar guns and moar trillion-dollar planes.
- Let's add tiny, little insignificant Montenegro to our collection of
PokemonNATO members. Let's go to war for them and lose our boys if Serbia ever decides to invade (they will).
What a joke. At least Vietnam pretended to be about freedom for the Vietnamese. We don't even pretend anymore. Why are we doing this? Why is the media playing along? Why does half the American people believe this "Russia hacking the election" and "Russia collusion" bull crap?
They want war, that's why. They love destruction.
Red alert.
Why? Tell me why, must we blow ourselves sky high?
He can talk. We just prefer it be recorded as both by themselves are wild cards.
4608285
Reagan and Gorbachev had many off-the-record talks. Not everything has to be documented.
1. It's impossible to do so and
2. It might cause either leader to be less frank with the other, if they knew it was on the record.
What do you fear would happen if the convo was not recorded?
4608285 Indeed.
4608292
We have an egotistical maniac who acts like a mob boss who actively dehumanizes minorities and lies through his teeth just to get power, and then we have Trump, who has also become the laughingstock of all the other major world leaders and has such comparatively backwards thinking that it has them wondering if we're still competent enough to be a major power.
They ought to be recorded just so someone there can hold them to their word.
Yeah, as far as I could tell, they were discussing dessert, and what flavor ice cream was going to be served.
I have never seen the press and the Dems (but I repeat myself) go so bonkers bat-(censored) crazy over unsubstantiated rumors and anonymous sources in order to destroy a candidate, and I remember both George W and Reagan. There was just the flicker of hope when the CNN president issued an order requiring any new #RussiaRussiaRussia stories be passed by him before publication, due to CNN getting major egg on their faces with the Scaramucci story that turned out to be a complete fabrication. (A full apology and three firings resulted, which was justified.) Then about a day later, CNN went right back to it.
Oh, and you forgot:
Turkey, NATO 'ally' who has undergone a facist coup, but is still on the list to buy F-35 fighters even while they make friends and snuggle with the Russians.
4608314
Being a world power does not require competence. We certainly didn't have it under Bush or Obama.
"You should do what humans have been struggling to do for centuries. Just SIT DOWN and TALK!"
Yeah, the whole anti-Russia insanity really needs to get crushed, and the really sad thing is it doesn't look like Trump is going to do it. I was really hoping he would actually follow through with that lawsuit against the press for slandering his campaign he talked about and try to take control of the FBI to actually try to tackle corruption, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. That said, there are two pieces of good news.
First, the media has almost completely destroyed their credibility with most of the country and this witch hunt (plus the SJW insanity) is alienating a lot of people from the Democrat party, so it looks like they may collapse under their own weight to make room for something better. The media simply can't survive loosing the public's trust since a lack of trust means a lack of views and by extension a lack of revenue, so they'll probably largely collapse before too long. Similarly, the Democrats need votes to survive, so they'll either have to completely reinvent themselves or another party will break in sooner or later.
Second is ironically North Korea. Their nuclear weapons and missile programs have gotten to the point that we cannot possibly accept the current situation, and Kim Jong Un has made it clear he is unwilling to dismantle them so there is no realistic alternative to war left at this point. Everyone with any understanding of international relations knows this, and it's blatantly obvious that North Korea has no chance of military victory against the US, and since we know Putin is a very smart leader you can bet he sees this and is planning accordingly. Considering this and what we do know of the Trump/Putin relationship and agreements so far, you can bet that Putin is at least going to back the US rhetorically once the shooting starts, and he might even have agreed to provide military support to snap Russia to ally status which would be a very good thing.
Moving on to the actual reasons, most of them boil down to having two terrible presidents in a row. Bush made an ugly mess with the stupid Iraq war (even if the WMD intelligence was good, the sensible thing to do was to use the army to conduct an inspection at gunpoint which Saddam probably would have caved to, not topple the regime), but Obama managed to be worse with his refusal to participate in the normal back and forth of international relations which basically caused the world fall apart because prior to his presidency the world order was fundamentally built on the foundation of American leadership. More firm diplomacy could probably have headed things off both in Syria and Ukraine without too much trouble, and if people didn't feel like cooperating it would have only taken one American airstrike to bully them into talking things out for real. Incidentally, that political assertion and establishing a clear break from Obama's refusal to do anything of substance on the international stage was the real reason Trump launched those Tomahawks, chemical weapons were really just a convenient excuse (although they really didn't need to use that many missiles to get the point across).
Now for defense spending because this is a much more complex subject which I have some degree of expertise on. First, for all the money that got thrown at the military under Bush, it actually wasn't enough. Wars are really, really expensive things, and the long slow mess in the middle east ate so much money that it basically killed all the other things the military needs to be doing on a routine basis to remain functional. The development of new technologies and systems got canceled, shipbuilding slowed to a crawl and tons of ships were retired so the Navy shrunk dramatically, and the Air Force got less than 200 modern fighter jets to try to cover the entire globe. This forces shrinking inventories of ancient equipment to be worked harder in order to maintain the status quo, and that's obviously going to cause huge problems. Equipment tends to cost more to operate as it ages, especially once it gets past its designed service life, and cobbling upgrades onto old equipment tends to show diminishing returns with upgrades getting more expensive and less effective as time goes on. To make things even worse, all of this stuff relies on an industrial base capable of accepting the load, but if you don't invest money into maintaining that capacity the infrastructure falls apart and has to be rebuilt essentially from scratch the next time you need it. Needless to say, this is a hugely inefficient way to spend money because these half-assed patches get more and more expensive while the cost of doing things right doesn't go down, and when you try to patch things further by slowing programs down or reducing buy numbers you wind up killing your economies of scale and making things yet more expensive. Needless to say, this problem got a lot worse under Obama who cut defense spending a lot more than combat operations, so the military is now in a major crisis with equipment falling apart everywhere and no easy recovery path. The only real solution is major sustained spending to allow the major investments to happen while maintaining the mess of kludges that have been keeping the military running for the last decade or so, and while it would be possible to at least partially offset this with reduced combat operations, particularly in the middle east (although we'd need to shift our infrastructure towards nuclear power to truly pivot away from that region), there's no magic solution.
As for why this spending is important, the answer is very simple. It makes major war impossible. During the 90's and early 2000's the US military was so unquestionable superior to everyone else that no one seriously considered trying to challenge us, so major war was impossible because there was no one to have a major war with. Now that that edge has eroded, Russia and more importantly China are making serious attempts to build militaries that can seriously challenge the US at least within a limited area. While Russia isn't a real problem since they have fallen back into the old cold war patterns of restrained probing with no commitment and a clear desire to avoid a real war, China is another story. They are actively trying to capture (maritime) territory which is functionally protected by the US in the role of global security guarantor, and that steady encroachment is likely to eventually push something to a breaking point which could very easily kick off a major war.
4608349
CNN has turned our country into a living sitcom. Literally there is nothing left to do but laugh about the whole thing. That or accusing them of trying to start global thermonuclear war just for their own ratings. Sorry CNN, but charred corpses can't watch TV. At this point though, Nick At Nite has higher ratings than FNN.
Seal Team Six needs to take out Erdogan just like Bin Laden. At this point he has turned a formerly-secular, prosperous nation into an Islamic hell hole which ISIS or its successor will eventually take over. Turkey used to be great. At this point only external intervention can make them great again because they've crawled so far up Mohammed's ass that it's not possible for them to retrieve themselves. Most of the good Turks by this point were arrested or have fled the country. I know because one of them works at a local gyro shop here in Colorado Springs. He got out just before the fake "coup" and they started arresting teachers at schools. He was a teacher... made it out by the skin of his teeth.
4608822
I believe whole-heartedly that we can still talk to Russia. We can avoid the pitfall that the media has been trying to set for our two countries... WWIII.
However it's impossible to talk to somebody like Erdogan and his voters, who have used their free will to shut off their hearts, and their minds, to new ideas. They refuse to read any book other than the Koran and bomb-making manuals. Limiting your knowledge to just a single book is a classic sign of deliberately-imposed ignorance.
As an ardent liberal, I wholeheartedly concur. I’m afraid though that I’m part of a dying breed; almost to a man the left has turned its back on everything it used to champion in its holier‐than‐thou crusade against reason itself. It’s a near mirror image of what happened to the American right back when it kowtowed to the so‐called moral majority in order to claw back votes… only the left hasn’t kowtowed to but embraced an ideology that is in many ways more dogmatic and odious than the religious right ever were.
I’m fairly certain that one could make a legal case that, at this point, CNN is doing the equivalent of crying fire in a crowded theatre. Their propaganda — and it really is, for what else can you call deliberate campaigns of misinformation for a political agenda but propaganda? — is not only drawing attention away from important issues, domestic and foreign, but worsening political polarisation at a time when America has never been more divided. I really mean that, by the way; not even during the Civil War era did the people disagree so vehemently and on so many issues.
4608292 Sometimes, being honest in what you think is a private conversation with a Russian ambassador can be a bad thing for your political legacy.
4608995 No. The only simple solution for a complicated problem is always wrong. Erdogan is not doing this solo. Killing him (edited: used to be a much more subtle phrase, decided to be honest) will not change the government in Turkey, unless you've got an Arya Stark up your sleeve and a very, very large dinner planned (GoT S7) just the same as killing Sadam Hussain would not have changed Iraq (his sons were far worse). Think about it. Assassinating the elected leader of a NATO state. Not only no, but Hell NO. We're playing a diplomatic game of tap-dancing spiders in a minefield in that corner of the world. Heck, for a time we were openly arming two different factions who were shooting directly at each other. There are no simple solutions in the Muddle East. (Well, there are, but that much radioactivity only makes more problems)
North Korea (by comparison) is an easier situation, IF Little Kim or his minions have a shred of sanity. (Yea, big if there) China doesn't want a nuclear war in Korea. South Korea likewise. The US too. That leaves only three options for What In Hell Is Kim Doing?
1) Making a sensible "We're important, don't push us around" point which will stop short of war and allow the current regime to stay in power while expanding their global power.
2) Making a childish "I've got a stick. Looks at my big stick. Be very afraid. See me swing it around." Much like a toddler carrying a live hand grenade, treat with caution and keep as prepared to deal with the outcome as possible. Also, talk with the toddler's parent (China) to see if they would be willing to take the toy away before both sides get hurt. (I'm afraid this is the situation we're dealing with.)
3) Kim is nuts. He plans on attacking South Korea and reunifying the country over the radioactive remains of any who oppose him. The most probable angle on this is a conventional attack on SK while threatening the US to withdraw or he will nuke a US city, and threatening any SK city which does not surrender will be likewise nuked. This is only viable IF he believes the US can be intimidated, OR he can intimidate the SK government into surrendering. Otherwise, it goes radioactive fairly fast.
4609086
What makes the division even worse is that it's not even really about politics at this point. It has by and large descended into pure tribalism at this point which is why you see so many videos of people making a mockery of the other side because they don't really know or care about positions, they just blindly hate the other.
4609105
Yeah, simple solutions are almost never the right answer, yet that's what the majority view likes to push because rationally working out real solutions to problems and thinking through the consequences of your actions requires actual thinking, and that is methodically beaten out of people in school.
As for North Korea, we are definitely looking at either 2 or 3 (or something between the two). If he was trying to make a point and use it to lever more power, he would have either used the programs as bargaining chips like his father did or moderated his general stance towards the US to make it seem less threatening. Instead he has pushed things to the point where he is a direct threat to the United States with his rhetoric and capabilities, and that shifts him from a distant irritation to an urgent problem that must be dealt with. Since he has made it clear he is unwilling to dismantle his weapons programs, the only remaining option is military action so there will be an invasion in the very near future. The good news as I said earlier is that Russia is already on board with this thanks to Trump's diplomacy, and if we're really lucky Putin even agreed to commit troops to helping us out which will snap Russia firmly into the ally category and make the world stage a lot safer for everyone.
4609105
Turns out that "flexibility" involved first installing Islamists into Syria who kill Yazidis, and then installing neo-Nazis in power in Ukraine who kill ethnic Russians. And Obama/Hillary had the nerve to call Trump a racist. Democrats in power in this country are the true racists.
You are correct... killing Erdogan would not be a long-term solution. Turkey has got to re-humanize itself, by itself. They must re-secularize themselves. Right now they are becoming a theocracy and breeding the next generation of Islamist psychotic killers.
AKP deputy: "Useless to teach math to a child who knows nothing about jihad"
I advocate for a swift removal of Erdogan from power because he is turning a former shining beacon of Secular Islam into a hellhole. The secular military could be put in charge over the dumb masses, just like it is in Egypt. Don't see too many Muslim Brotherhood terrorists these days, do you? Military Dictatorships offend us here in the west but they work over there because majority-Muslim states don't really do ballot boxes and civil discourse. Even if they did... Erdogan must be removed because he is funding ISIS. HThe same ISIS which has repeatedly attacked America, Europe, and Israel. Maybe if we don't do it, then Iran will, because ISIS has attacked the Shiite state of Iran during Ramadan this year.
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
North Korea is simple. Nuke Pyongyang immediately. Massive land invasion to clean up the rest. Hopefully, Russia helps us from the North.
4609255
Thanks to Mr. Trump, we can dream of once again fighting side by side with our Russian brothers to save the world!
We had a westward expansion, they had an eastward expansion.
We beat them to the moon, but they got us to want to do it in the first place.
We are two of the most educated countries on the planet in terms of college degree attainment (Russia 55%, USA 50%)
Both countries have their own social media empires (Google and FB vs. Yandex and Vkontakte)
We are the only two countries who are able to destroy the whole planet by snapping our fingers, besides debatably China.
We are the only two countries who have our own GPS (US GPS and GLONASS)
We are practically brotherly nations and nobody realizes it. We have more in common with Russia than we do with Australia.
The US and Russia fighting on Earth, is as dangerous as Celestia and Luna fighting in Equestria. In that sense Starlight Glimmer was absolutely right in casting that spell on them to switch their cutie marks.
Why can't we be friends? Why is it so hard just to TALK?
4609526
Yeah, it's a very good thing that relationship will be improving soon. Hopefully Trump can firmly lock Russia in as an ally so we never have to deal with this shit again. It worked before with the British, and with the way our global interests generally align there's no reason we can't do the same with the Russians.
Hell, that would solve a lot of our other problems too because Ukraine is basically split on weather to ally with Russia or the west, so if we can build a strong US-Russia relationship the entire root of that conflict disappears and it'll be easy to work out a peaceful solution (ally with both, hold a new round of elections, and everything's good). Iran will also stop being the semi-manufactured problem it currently is once the cold war-era split on our end comes down, and with cooperation from Russia we should be able to talk Iran into leaving Israel alone which will clean up most of the real problems.
4609516
Nukes are a terrible idea. Even setting aside the politics, you really don't want to invade somewhere you just nuked if you can help it and we have plenty of ways to kick in the door without going nuclear, especially if Putin lets us drop the VDV on them.
4610227
With RF on our side, we can also fully tackle China as a threat. Communism does not rest until it destroys everything or is itself destroyed. It's in their book: worldwide communism.
Iran I agree with you. Now they are a huge threat to Israel but if they stop we can be buds with them again... assuming they don't also want to attack the west with nukes.
VDV would be a good alternative to nukes... of course our alliance with Russia is still theoretical at this point.
4610589
Yeah, China is definitely a headache, but if Russia starts telling them to play nice too they'll have to get in line or risk having essentially the entire world turn their backs on them.
As for communism, you can't overgeneralize like that. While there are certainly groups that want to export it everywhere, they are not the only communist faction out there (just like there are tons of books on communism) even if they are better known due to the trouble they cause. Hell, the classic example of functional small-scale communism is christian monasteries, and while they may push their religion, they generally don't push their lifestyle on others. The other important thing to remember is that communism is an economic system, not a political system, so it is entirely possible to have a western-style democracy combined with a communist economy. To make this even more complicated, post-scarcity economics is going to completely disrupt the global economic system once automation really takes off, and while it's impossible to truly predict what the endpoint of that will be, the result may very well wind up closer to communism because the supply and demand economics we are used to don't work when the supply is functionally infinite.
As for Iran, they don't want nukes because they aren't idiots. They know that will just provoke Israel into nuking them to keep them from becoming a real threat, so the old revolutionaries who have been running the country for the last few decades are settling for lower level harassment because they are too stuck in their ways to change. The really good news is that those people are starting to really die off which is making room for more moderate politicians which is why we got the nuclear deal which effectively formalized the previous defacto policy of limiting nuclear technology to power generation. The old guard were unwilling to work with the US even on things they were doing on their own, but their internal politics are shifting and I expect to see more headway on that front in the next few decades (after the inevitable stumbles and headaches of course), especially if closer US-Russia relations give everyone an excuse to compromise.
As for the VDV, they aren't essential. The Marines and Army airborne units can get the job done, but as the best airborne force in the world the VDV are much better suited to rapidly seizing the interior of the country and would add quite a bit of day 1 fighting power. They also have a major political advantage for securing the northern border because the Chinese wouldn't be stupid enough to directly attack Russian troops, so putting the Russians there guarantees that we won't see a repeat of the Chinese intervention which lead to the current situation.
4610727
Wow, lots of stuff to respond to here! Thank you for being such an active participant in my blog comments!
I will make a note to come back to this later... if I forget then please PM me.
4611367
No problem. You have interesting things to say and actually think things through logically. That's a rare thing these days, so it's a very nice change of pace and absolutely worth my time.