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Monnina's avatar

I can not but wonder just how much of this grandstanding by Trump is related to his economic conflict with China. Being of simple historically ill informed mind, perhaps he sees shutting down Iranian oil exports to China, which would be an immediate consequence of any US conflict against Iran, as a proxy pressure point. His China tariffs have not delivered automatic submission by Xi the way he thought they would.

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James Quinn's avatar

I have been inevitably taken back to the first time that we decided that it was unacceptable for another nation to have nuclear weapons - Cuba in 1962 - the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war. I was seventeen at the time, and I can still remember all too clearly the terror with which I waited for resolution or Armageddon. The end result was a worldwide upsurge in anti-nuclear protests resulting in the SALT talks and all the rest of that. But we’re long past that time of relative sanity, and the swords are being rattled all around us.

Then, of course. it was a Democratic administration full of men who had fought in WWII in that other time before nuclear weaponry. President Kennedy’s very sober and utterly unTrumplike speech announcing the situation to the nation and the world was, nonetheless, not unlike what Trump and his myrmidons are proclaiming now. "Get rid of the weapons or else”.

Then, too, there was a history of opposition to the Castro regime, including attempts to assassinate him at the behest of Bobby Kennedy as well as to topple his administration (the Bay of Pigs fiasco planned by the Eisenhower administration but carried out under Kennedy’s aegis) in spite of the fact that for a time during his early uprising Castro had been seen as a revolutionary hero overthrowing a corrupt and dictatorial regime.

Failing to learn that lesson, the Kennedy administration and its Johnsonian successor got us into the first of our futile ‘forever’ wars, still the most costly and divisive of all our military adventurism. Besides that catastrophe, Iraq and Afghanistan pale in cost. And our pullout from Vietnam was a far more costly, messy, and humiliating experience than Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan, despite all the Republican rhetoric.

My point here is that neither Republicans nor Democrats have any legs to stand on when it comes to foreign folly. The fact that on the face of it, the Kennedy administration was packed with far more thoughtful, competent, and experienced people than Trump’s collection of lickspittles does not excuse their failure to recognize exactly what they were getting us into or to prolong it through deception and lies. .

I’m nowhere near wise enough to know exactly what we ought to do in regard to Israel and Iran. In point of fact, the Middle East is and always has been a cockpit of conflict, going back to the dawn of civilization when organized warfare itself was born in the hot wastes between the Tigris and Euphrates. Sometimes in my fantasy world, we expand Israel’s Iron Dome over the whole area, leaving the whole mob trapped under it to either destroy themselves at will or learn to get along without involving and endangering the rest of us.

But in more sober moments my greatest concern is that whatever we do now, we do so with a firm understanding that once the dogs of war are loosed, the consequences cannot be calculated with any degree of certainty except they will almost certainly exceed whatever estimate which may have been made during the initial phase. This was the wisdom of the Biden administration in regard to Ukraine. It was crucial to attempt to contain Putin’s imperial ambitions for the sake of all Europe and the US, but not to trigger a wider conflict (or god help us, a nuclear war) if at all possible. As the Canadian war historian Gwynne Dyer once put it, “There’s nothing in the world worth blowing it up for”

Not that I have any confidence at all in Trump and his myrmidons. It is hard to imagine that there could be a more incompetent bunch in control at this fraught period.

I’m just over 80, and at times it seems that I’ve lived my whole life in the midst of one political storm or another. I’m also a plank owner in the first human generation to live under the threat of mushroom clouds. There were not a few times during the height of the Cold War when I was convinced I wouldn't survive my teens. Clearly I did so, and that thought gives me some hope that we are still at least wise enough to avoid ending the world over “some damn fool thing in the Balkans' or the Middle East or the Ukraine of the Straits of Taiwan (speaking of echoes, anyone out there old enough remember how much rhetoric was spend on Quemoy and Matsu. during the 1960 campaign) or anywhere else.

But my god, for a species with the hubris to name itself Homo sapiens, we have sure proven our selves to be anything but.

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