Improving our foreign relations likely would require dumping the isolationist nitwit chief executive we now have

What are the chances that the recently-completed Winter Olympic Games held in South Korea will kick off a process that could someday result in improved relations with the Communist North Korea?

TRUMP: Gets in the way of solutions?

Probably about the same as the notion that Mexico will some day take on the cost of actually building that ridiculous barricade that President Donald J. Trump has long fantasized about erecting along the U.S./Mexico border!

AS MORE EVIDENCE of how vacuous our nation’s president is when it comes to foreign policy, both issues are in the news these days, with Trump’s stubborn streak standing out as the reason nothing is likely to happen on either front.

Take the ongoing fight between the United States and Mexico over the border wall – the one that Trump foolishly thinks would have any impact on the flow of people between the two North American nations and which he insanely thinks the Mexican government would pay to have built.

Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s president, was planning to make an official visit to Washington, D.C. sometime in March to have a one-on-one meeting with Trump. But Peña said he’s cancelling such a trip because of a 50-minute telephone conversation the two presidents had last week.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that Peña doesn’t see the point of antagonistic rhetoric, and Trump let it be known he’d likely use such a Mexican presidential visit to the White House as yet another excuse to spew his trash talk about how those crooked Mexicans were going to be forced to pay the construction cost of a border barricade that many Mexicans feel is blatantly offensive.

THE TWO OF them haven’t had an official meeting, unless you count the face-to-face meeting the two had at an international conference held in Germany.

It also seems there won’t be any real progress made in terms of relations between the two because Trump seems to value having antagonistic relations as a way of getting his ideological nitwit backers all riled up in support of him.

PENA NIETO: Won't meet w/ Trump

Get them to “Blame Mexico!” for whatever, and maybe they won’t pay attention to how little of worth is being accomplished by a Trump presidency, or how much harm is being caused.

Which is how I view the whole situation of the Koreas, where on Sunday South Korea President Moon Jae-In had a meeting with North Korea general Kim Jong-Chol – with hints it could be the first step toward talks that could include the United States.

NOT THAT THE United States had any interest in being part of the token gestures made as part of the Olympic Games in Peong-Chang – Vice President Mike Pence went out of his way to not be a part of anything.

Now I can comprehend the need to be wary – I’m sure that whatever actually occurred from any future talks, North Korean officials would try to spin it into the capitulation of the evil U.S. But talks have to begin somewhere.

And considering that we’re long hearing horror stories about how a North Korea with nuclear weapons and rockets capable of unleashing them on U.S. cities, you’d think this would be a priority.

But I suspect that just as Trump wants a Mexican “problem” so his politically-ignorant followers can have someone to complain about, he also wants a North Korean “villain” to keep people distracted from the many inactions of his presidency.

KIM: Who'd be the crazier in a meeting w/ Trump?

BECAUSE WITHOUT THESE gross exaggerations, we’d have to focus our attention on the fact that while Trump claims to have repealed 67 federal regulatory actions while only enacting 3 new ones, the New York Times reported this weekend that it’s an exaggeration.

More spewing of news as “fake” as anything the National Enquirer ever concocted.

That is, unless you’re all worked up over their recent How the Philly Mob Fixed the Super Bowl report?

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Wishing we, the people, could pick up a history book every now and then

I don’t doubt that North Korea leader Kim Jong-un has a screw or two loose in his

Wishing this were just a debate ...

mindset – he may very well believe his place in history is to be the guy who gives the “go” order that unleashes a nuclear weapon on a city or two within the United States.

Although when I hear our nation’s president, Donald J. Trump, spew out rhetoric about “fire and fury” being unleashed against North Korea, it makes me wonder which world leader’s instability is more likely to cause the problem?

 

... over who has the sillier haircut?

AND I DON’T particularly care if such rhetoric plays well with the 46 percent of the U.S electorate that actually voted for Trump to be president. That only proves our overall ignorance of history and world events.

For all I know, Trump may well want to give the order to unleash an attack on some part of the world so as to enhance his credentials as a world leader in the same way that Kim thinks he’s appeasing the rest of the world by saying he’d only consider use of nuclear weapons on the United States.

I also don’t doubt that Trump’s rhetoric is being played in such a way that Kim is making sure everybody currently trapped into living within North Korea thinks that Trump is the ultimate demon who is threatening to annihilate their country.

Similar to how Fidel Castro had a generation of Cubans thinking the reason their nation had become so impoverished was because of generations of U.S. presidents imposing imperialist policies through the trade embargo that in the end wound up depriving our nation of economic opportunities more than it hurt Cuba.

Kim trying to top Fidel on crazy scale? Image provided by Library of Congress collection

YES, I’M VIEWING this whole situation developing between the United States and the nation with which we technically have been at war with for nearly seven decades with some trepidation. Although the broadcast pundits who now are spewing cheap talk that we’re approaching a sequel to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 may be overstating it.

We’re not there, yet. Although I’m wondering if the cooler heads who need to prevail for such a situation to never develop will wind up being drowned out by the nonsense talk of Trump and Kim.

I heard one such pundit make a comment Wednesday about how it is possible that U.S. military interests could “take” North Korea in a fight. It’s just a matter of how much carnage we’re willing to put up with, and how much we’re willing to sacrifice South Korea (our ally and a nation in which we have a military presence) in the process.

I think too many people are willing to ignore that last aspect, even though they shouldn’t.

BECAUSE IF WE want to be realistic, we would have “taken” North Korea a long time ago if it were at all practical. But the fact that China would not want to see a reunified Korea if it means that the part of it historically allied with itself were seen as the “loser.”

And I definitely don’t want to see a situation where we have a U.S./China conflict provoked by a long-forgotten military conflict of the early 1950s. Cold War politicking has the potential to create too many headaches.

Yes, I use the phrase “long-forgotten” to describe the Korean conflict because I really don’t believe most people have a clue about it. They either get it confused with the later actions in Vietnam, or they think it’s something about hospitals and “M*A*S*H” on television.

NOT what Korea was about!

Which means they’re dredging up comical images of actor Jamie Farr in his Scarlet O’Hara dress or swinging a purse while carrying a rifle on guard duty.

CERTAINLY NOT AN image with any bearing in reality. And certainly not one that should be taken into account by anybody with a hand in setting our public policy.

Which is why I do take some comfort in the comments of people like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis who says North Korea needs to “stand down” in its desire to get a usable nuclear weapon. We can only hope that such sensibilities prevail, and that fantasies of South Korean military troops marching in to Pyongyang to occupy the capital of the North do not.

It reminds me of a professor I had in college who liked to say of Harry Truman’s use of atomic weapons to end the Second World War that it was “Harry Truman 2, Rest of the World 0.”

I’d hate to think that we’re headed for a day when his line will have to be amended to read “Truman 2, Kim 1 and Trump 1.”

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Harry Truman - 2; Rest of World - 0

That hedline was a phrase used by a professor of mine back when I was in college.


Admittedly, this particular history professor was not a fan of the man who happened to be in office as U.S. president at the point when World War II came to an end.


LARGELY BECAUSE OF the actions that took place 70 years ago this weekend that were authorized by Harry S. Truman. He gave permission for the atomic bomb to be used, first in a test so Japanese authorities could see for themselves what hell could be wrought upon themselves.


Then, 70 years ago Thursday, the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Followed up by the one dropped 70 years ago Sunday on Nagasaki.


In theory, U.S. officials were prepared to keep "nuking" Japanese cities until an unconditional surrender was reached. It only took the two cities to be destroyed before that happened -- which was fortunate because it would have taken some time for the U.S. military to come up with more atomic devices.


Now the point my old history professor was trying to get at was despite all the rhetoric of the cold war and the tensions between the United States and Soviet Union (and the near bombings of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962), nuclear weapons were never used.


NO MATTER HOW much some people wanted to think of the U.S.S.R as a warmonger and evil state, they never actually gave the "go" order to unleash nuclear war.


Not on the United States. Not on anyone.


Truman was the only one who ever gave the order to unleash the terror and destruction that goes along with nuclear devices -- where it may be that the most fortunate people are the ones who are killed instantly by the blast.


The lasting radiation that contaminates all the resources necessary for life and causes more death and destruction in future years is worse.


IT TOOK MANY decades before we truly realized how many people were "killed" on those days 70 years ago this weekend. It certainly wasn't something anybody appreciated at the time.


Now I know some people are going to want to rant and rage at this point. The more irrational will get all worked up over "dirty little Japs" (or whatever slur they prefer to use) and claim they got what they deserved.


There also is the argument about how the militaristic mentality that took hold in Japan in the 1930s (and turned Emperor Hirohito into a virtual puppet) would have had the Japanese people fight to the death -- resulting in millions more casualties of U.S. soldiers and sailors if an invasion of Japan had been required.


There probably are people who are only dying now whose lives would have been lost 70 years ago!


BUT PERHAPS WE should remember that the reason those scientists worked for a time under the grandstand at the old Stagg Field at the University of Chicago was the fear that German scientists were coming up with an identical weapon that could have been used against the United States.


There actually is a novel entitled "Fatherland" that purports to offer an alternate history of World War II, one in which it ends as a draw between a Nazi German government and the U.S. (when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Adolf Hitler retaliated by dropping his bomb on New York, according to that story line).


There are those who think the ultimate war victims were the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although those places as targets were all so accidental. This was a weapon designed for use on Berlin.


And when we debate the soundness of nuclear weapons and the desire to keep them out of the hands of Iran, perhaps we can wonder what would have been if they had never come into play anywhere on this planet.


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