How Trump Spent His Summer Vacation

The setup: When the G7 got together in Quebec, the vibe was already uptight by Trump's trade shenanigans and his non-stop rhetoric that Europe should pay more for its defense. By all accounts Trump was fine throughout the week but then refused to sign off on the Friday press release--which is the whole reason get-togethers like this happen--thus resulting in this already-classic photo. 

G7 Summit (June 10, 2018)

The takeaway: These meetings are pre-planned down to the last detail, there's no reason to meet unless you're all going to agree on something bland like the Friday communique. I suspect all week long, Trump told them he was going to be a jackass and they should prepare for his bull headedness, so I suspect all week long they worked on this precise pose: Trump being an obstinate ass and the other leaders of the world looking like exasperated parents. By now these leaders have properly internalized Trump for their own constituencies: Merkel is an inch away from a no-confidence vote, at least she can go back home and say it's all Trump's fault (and find much succor from her citizenry). Macron looks like a tough guy, John Bolton looks like a fucking ghoul, Abe is above all this. That said, let's be sure to remember that the G7 means nothing, these meetings mean nothing and, again, working out how best to make Trump look like a party pooper is in everyone's best interest. If the G7 disappeared tomorrow, no one would notice or care, it doesn't matter and its existence at the moment merely produced this already-classic photo (and nothing else because there's nothing for the G7 to do except produce photo ops).

The setup: If the G7 is an annual photo op, then the Singapore Summit was a seemingly impossible photo op. For decades the Kims of North Korea have demanded a public audience with the President of the USA and for decades American presidents have demurred. But Donald Trump is a different kind of president and he took Kim up on his offer. So here they are shaking hands shortly before signing an utterly meaningless piece of paper that pretty much matched the last piece of paper we signed with North Korea (in the Obama years). So what happened? Well...this now-classic photo...and not much else.

Singapore Summit (June 12, 2018)

The takeaway: I dunno, I can't for the life of me figure this one out, except that they each called each other's bluff...but they were both bluffing...so neither of them had anything in the end. It's like a theater company that booked a bunch of shows then forgot to rehearse. The world talked up this meeting like it was gonna be important and nothing happened. They shook hands, Trump looks more like Alfred Hitchcock than I'd ever noticed before and Kim is actually a little taller and fatter than I would've thought...but otherwise...that was pretty much it. Since then, Kim met once more with Xi in Beijing, called off all further meetings with South Korea, may have made a secret trip to Vladivostok, and otherwise has done nothing, said nothing and blown off most of his meetings with Sec State Pompeo and his underlings (where the actual work of diplomacy gets done). So who got played? Trump got nothing out of it, Kim got nothing but this now-classic photo (though I'm betting a top drawer Singapore hotel would probably be a pleasure palace to a great leader such as this), and the world isn't any safer. Indeed! The USA-North Korea relationship seems to be exactly where it was this time last year. After all the weird shit that has gone down in the last 12 months, we're in the exact same place! The Singapore Summit will go alongside Al Capone's Vaults for all-time over-hyped letdowns.


The setup: Unlike the G7 which could disappear tomorrow and no one would notice, NATO is so rock solid that dissolving it would likely take a major war or multiple presidential administrations. The general perception that Trump clamoring for the Europeans to spend more on defense was some great crisis to the institution is just hogwash. The POTUS complaining about money is the purest indication that there isn't anything more important to complain about. So, though NATO is important while the G7 is not, this meeting was pretty much the same (though Shinzo Abe doesn't appear in this now-classic photo).

NATO 2018 (July 11, 2018)

The takeaway: I think Trump genuinely believes the Europeans should pay more for their defense. And since the USA is paying so much for European defense, if POTUS really had something he wanted to discuss about the defense of Europe, I think he'd be eager to talk about it. Turns out there isn't anything to say about Ukraine or Serbia or Montenegro, so Trump went back to complaining about money. Now personally I agree that the Europeans should be paying more for their defense, it is unifying and empowering on their part to exert their control over NATO (and letting American presidents have this much power over their borders sure looks kinda dumb right now, don't it?); but the Europeans aren't ready to go down that road, they're still figuring out how their money works, so letting the Americans shoulder the burden in staring down Putin is something that will continue for a while. Rather, the Europeans will go back to their constituencies and turn Trump's NATO rhetoric back to his trade war (presumably his method of extracting value from allies) and blame all their local problems on Trump (and they'll be successful because...well, he's a total douche). The good news is NATO is so rock solid and without problems, they can spend an entire summit together and just goof around on nonsense (like producing this now-classic photo).


The setup: Supposedly Trump called for a one-on-one summit with Putin a few months back and now the time had come for the two to go mano-a-mano (and the interpreters to go lingua-a-lingua). Tongues wagged worldwide but no one knew what Putin and Trump discussed even after this now-classic press conference.

Trump-Putin Summit (July 15, 2018)

The takeaway: I dunno. What do I care what they talked about? At this particularly point in time, neither of these guys has anything to offer the other. There's no room for USA to budge on Ukraine or sanctions, no room for Russia to budge on Syria, Iran or oil. (If they were talking about anything really juicy it was probably North Korea, who knows what Putin knows about Kim?) Trump's one taboo back home is anything related to Russia, so I suspect this meeting is purely for Trump to annoy his political foes (they are his lifeblood). There's nothing for Trump and Putin to talk about,so this meeting was likely purely social, just a coupla joes ditching their wives and commiserating over political nonsense. (Or perhaps they peed on hookers together or whatever the conspiracy theory du jour is, I can see that, too) At any rate, there's nothing for them to talk about, so what difference does it matter what was said?


We increasingly live in a world where people want their leaders to take pictures together. The G7, for example, is of little use but a photo op, the organization does nothing, discusses nothing, administers nothing, and isn't even what it purports to be (top 7 economies in the world....so why isn't China there? India? Saudi Arabia? Or even *gasp*...Russia?). Seriously, the G7 does not need to exist and if Donald Trump harrumphs around and ruins the get-together, then honestly....who gives a shit? I got a better idea: let's never have another G7 meeting ever again! I'm all for multi-lateral organizations that can get stuff done but the G7 is not one of those, it can be done away with. No way POTUS can screw up something that doesn't happen.

NATO, on the other hand, is not going away and if there were grave matters to discuss, they would get discussed....not by the leaders, of course, the serious matters would get discussed by the various under-secretaries that actually do that kind of work. When this many national leaders get together it is either to discuss something very important or something not important at all. (I got two grand on the latter, who's taking the former?) This is a meeting that doesn't need to happen and the only point of it is the sure spectacle of getting this many leaders together (want a grave matter? How about discussing how comfortable everyone is with NATO member Turkey invading two other countries for the purposes of genocide and seems to be intent on annexing their ill-gotten territory...are we cool with that? Hmmm....never came up). If any one of those leaders wants to grandstand and make it all about him/herself, they are free to do so because these meetings don't mean anything.

Now the Kim summit and Putin summit would appear to be different, right? These aren't annual meetings where nothing but a photo-op can possibly be accomplished. These are wildly out of the ordinary affairs where important stuff must be going on, right? Well, no. In the case of Trump, he clearly loves to engineer moments like these to grab the attention--and Americans love nothing more than giving Trump attention. Meeting with Kim felt like it was going to be a breakthrough, it was not; it was all whimper, no bang. And the meeting with Putin was meant to be confusing and anticlimactic, it was meant to produce an awkward press conference and nothing more because, again, these guys have nothing to offer each other except an ambiguous public appearance together.

Trump is really good at playing the American media. The media is a 24-hour beast that needs constant feeding and Trump loves to feed. Perhaps this is undignified of the office of President...meh, it is the media that devalues the presidency by failing to differentiate between the G7 (unimportant) and NATO (indispensable). It is the media that pisses in the pool by not differentiating between the presidency and some other attention-hungry celebrity (like, say, Stormy Daniels).

Trump is the effect, not the cause. We've been on this road a long time and Trump is the end of it. I don't know what comes next (at the moment it feels like another 4 year term for Trump, which is even more shocking than his original victory!) but after Trump all this shit will be different. I never really felt it before but a third party seems to be in the offing. The Republicans and Democrats are gradually skewing to their extremes, time for a middle way to emerge.

As for foreign policy, North Korea is the same problem it always was. Libya is a mess, Yemen is embarrassing for all thinking, feeling human beings, Syria is still a clusterfuck, Ukraine is no closer to resolution. Otherwise, not bad. Trade wars are not anyone's idea of a good time but the worst of it has yet to hit the fan and its not hard to imagine all this trade kerfuffle actually leading to new and improved trade relations for everyone. Our world leaders still have time for photo-ops and perhaps that is a good thing.

As for the state of Trump, here's the good news:

Trump just needs to not be the 6th guy, right?

North Korea

Growing up in the Cold War 1980s, my generation was steeped in the notion of Mutually Assured Destruction: the balance between world powers was that each side could obliterate the other thus it was the continual avoidance of suicide that motivated nations. When I went to bed at night the street light outside my window created a mushroom cloud shaped shaft of light in my otherwise dark room. Yes, I was properly terrified as a boy.

As I've gotten older and read up more on the subject, full-on nuclear war (imagined to be the Americans and the Russians flinging all of their missiles at each other all at once) was never really gonna happen. When you realize how long it takes to fuel the missiles, make the reactions to satellite input, make all the necessary notifications within the gov't, get the air force and navy readied for response, and just how many bombs and missiles were in play, etc., it would've taken several hours for this all to take place and one assumes that during that time someone would've had the sense to find a non-suicide solution (thank god, Ozzy Osbourne was never in charge!). Indeed, upon reflection all-out nuclear war doesn't really even seem possible--even by accident!

However, as I get older and more well-read, the concept of Limited Nuclear War seems very possible. Perhaps even likely. It only takes one bomb properly placed and then a measured response. And it could happen in the blink of an eye by actors with nothing to gain but chaos.

So as my terror of Mutually Assured Destruction has waned, my fear of Limited Nuclear War has stepped into the anxiety void. In the days of missile defense, we hope that this threat has been neutralized if not eliminated. But even if missile defense works perfectly (which I suspect it will not) you still end up with this nightmare scenario: a nuclear missile gets launched, the missile gets shot down, crisis is averted, nobody dies...but a whole planet wakes up the next day and says, 'Wait....What the fuck just happened?' The world would be a changed place, no?

Over the last month or so that scenario creeps ever closer. North Korea has tested numerous missiles in the last 30 days and exploded their largest nuclear weapon yet. Kim Jong Un (AKA 'North Korea') has threatened to test his next long range missile by tipping it with a nuclear warhead and flinging it at Guam. Theoretically, the Americans will be able to shoot it down before it threatens lives or infrastructure....right? So far the Americans (and the Japanese) have declined to show off any of their anti-missile capabilities, perhaps we don't have any, perhaps we simply don't want to show what we can do.

Obviously the Americans make everything about themselves, so we fear an attack on Los Angeles or Honolulu. But the real target is Tokyo. Us Americans are young, we're new at all this foreign policy stuff but the rest of the world is ancient, they've been doing it for centuries. And the animosity between Japan and....well, virtually all Asian nations...cannot be minimized. In the first half of the 20th century, Japan dominated the Asian Pacific from Australia to the Bering Strait, brutally attacking the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and even marched through the Korean peninsula into China (the Rape of Nanjing in 1937 is marked by some historians as the true start of WWII). Animosity toward historical Japan and the modern-day economic powerhouse (eh, sorta) is at play just as much as pissing off the Americans (though at bottom pissing off USA and pissing off Japan are pretty much the same thing).

What's the next move? President Trump has chided the South Koreans for 'appeasement', but what does that mean? What would it mean to appease the Un regime? Da fuck does that dude want?

Invading through the Korean peninsula is the traditional manner of attacking China, so creating a buffer state on the east side of the Yalu River has been China's defense against the rest of the world for decades. In the years after Mao's ascendancy North Korea was bred to be a cat's paw to scare away potential interlopers. Many say China has the power to shut North Korea down but I would suggest that's not as easy as it looks at this point. I suspect the Chinese are truly irritated by Kim at this point but don't really know how to pull them back.

China's failing here is ignoring the Kim regime. Clearly they have let the danger rise, perhaps even encouraged it. But to what end? China wants the buffer, they don't really want much more. China likes the Korean situation just the way it is: a rubber stopper firmly placed in China's one weakness. The fact that the North Koreans are frustrated in their aims to control the entire Korean peninsula is actually probably a delight to the Chinese: the rubber stopper itself has another rubber stopper on the opposite side to keep it firmly in place. The Americans/Japanese/South Koreans frustrated on one side, the North Koreans frustrated on the other, the Chinese happy that its enemies are played off against each other. The Chinese mistake is they have forgotten about evolution: by letting the North Korean nuclear program steadily advance, the Chinese are stuck with a well-armed madman right next door. How is that a good thing? (*)

There's a detail in the reportage on North Korea that I think has been not been well considered: if the Kim regime can hit Tokyo with a nuclear tipped missile then it can hit Beijing with a nuclear tipped missile. The danger for China is not that North Korea sucks them into a war they don't really want to fight, it is that they are held hostage by their own attack dog. They bred the dog to attack the west but the dog can just as easily turn on its master. And rather than ransom USA, the 20th century superpower, why not ransom China, the 21st century super power (and the center of the universe in much of Asian mysticism)? China has way more power over Kim Jong Un than USA does, wouldn't the weaponry be better pointed West than East? To my mind, this is the one opening USA and its allies have. I kinda thought that Donald Trump was (strangely enough) the one guy that might have success dealing with North Korea.

But the Trump presidency has led only back to the aforementioned scenario of shooting down the threatening missile. It appears it is on its way...

China would have to recognize that Kim has gone too far. China has no interest in war so close to its border, no interest in the North Korean refugees that would flood in, no interest in completely losing the Korean peninsula to infidels. China likes the status quo of a divided Korean peninsula (much like USA likes the status quo of independent Taiwan). But if this Guam business goes down, USA would have to step up and flatten the Kim regime. China should be as eager to avoid all of this as much USA. And yet Xi Jinping seems more interested in purging his military than getting it ready for Americans on the doorstep.

So where is all this coming from? Well, Kim Jong Un has been bred to be bellicose since birth and he's got the keys of the kingdom (much earlier than anyone anticipated), this is what he was built to do by father and grandfather. But China should be able to mitigate that, if forces within North Korea itself could not.

I think its Vladimir Putin. I think Putin is in pure chaos mode: Trump in the White House, Islamic Jihad at a fever pitch, Saudi and Iran are talking about banging, India and China are talking about banging, the Israelis are itching for a fight and the internet is bringing it all together. North Korea is the perfect cherry on top for the forces of weirdness. I think Putin has a bug in Kim's ear, I think he's telling the kid to keep firing because the Japanese will wet themselves, the Americans will bluster around like idiots and the Chinese won't do anything to stop it.

Yeah, all this stuff is real. But don't mistake North Korea for the main course, its just the hordoerve (god, why invent such a hard word to spell?). War with North Korea would just be the first step of much longer war. From the Sinai to the Korean Peninsula, Asia is shedding its skin. The prospects of a very big, civilization-size war is looming. There's no mutually assured anything at the moment. If USA is lucky we'll be able to sit this one out (but how likely is that?).


(*) Another ill-considered detail in all of this is South Korea's position vis-a-vis nuclear powered North Korea. The long range goal of the South Koreans is to reunite the Korean peninsula under their rule. Perhaps they might like having nuclear weapons. Perhaps they like the idea of absorbing the North's nuclear arsenal and being able to threaten China and Japan. So have the South Koreans ever really tried to stop the ongoing weapons development of the North? Or the Americans? It doesn't look like it to me.