Just Politics

[12yearplan]

Do you think Trumpster had in mind the discussion put forth in “Base Nation” that David Vine put together and not follow the same policy of “vigor” from the Kennedy days? – how net effect/no longer helps anyone geopolitically and to step back from Clinton’s perceived tone of intransigence/aggression. His recent exchange with the Chinese if put in a positive light took the issues/stressor's out of the shadows and possibly towards diffusion .
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22320467-base-nation
http://www.americanempireproject.com/basenation/map.html
Arguably historic Russian and Chinese militarism has been about self-defense. Compared to the Colonizers at least. Immediate neighbors likely would see it differently of course.
Most dramatic example (of speedballin’ diplomacy) for da planet that Gods with names like “Thor” and “Jupiter” poised to reign down their thunder lead to Cuban Missile Crisis (CMC); Stop invading, assassinating but mostly get your nukes off our front lawn;
“sabotage, paramilitary assaults, and assassination attempts—the largest clandestine operation in the history of the CIA—and had organized large-scale military exercises in the Caribbean clearly meant to rattle the Soviets and their Cuban client.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban-missile-crisis/309190/

“The Jupiter missiles (Italy, Turkey) were an exceptionally vexing component of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Because they sat aboveground, were immobile, and required a long time to prepare for launch, they were extremely vulnerable. Of no value as a deterrent, they appeared to be weapons meant for a disarming first strike—and thus greatly undermined deterrence, because they encouraged a preemptive Soviet strike against them. The Jupiters’ destabilizing effect was widely recognized among defense experts within and outside the U.S. government and even by congressional leaders.”
Khrushchev explained his reasoning (CMC) to the American journalist Strobe Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.”)
“He ordered a blockade on Cuba, an act of war that we now know brought the superpowers within a hair’s breadth of nuclear confrontation.”
As the State Department’s director of intelligence and research, Roger Hilsman, later put it, “The United States might not be in mortal danger, but … the administration most certainly was.” Kennedy’s friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the ambassador to India, later said: “Once [the missiles] were there, the political needs of the Kennedy administration urged it to take almost any risk to get them out.”
“being allied with the United States potentially amounted to, as Charles de Gaulle had warned, “annihilation without representation.”
Da point:
“This approach to foreign policy was guided—and remains guided—by an elaborate theorizing rooted in a school-playground view of world politics rather than the cool appraisal of strategic realities. It put—and still puts—America in the curious position of having to go to war to uphold the very credibility that is supposed to obviate war in the first place.”
“Although Kennedy in fact agreed to the missile swap and, with Khrushchev, helped settle the confrontation maturely, the legacy of that confrontation was nonetheless pernicious. By successfully hiding the deal from the vice president, from a generation of foreign-policy makers and strategists, and from the American public, Kennedy and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, and the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, makes for a successful national-security strategy—really, all but defines it.”
“Certainly America’s security wouldn’t be jeopardized if other great powers enjoy their own (and for that matter, smaller) spheres of influence.”

“This esoteric strategizing—this misplaced obsession with credibility, this dangerously expansive concept of what constitutes security—which has afflicted both Democratic and Republican administrations, and both liberals and conservatives, is the antithesis of statecraft, which requires discernment based on power, interest, and circumstance. It is a stance toward the world that can easily doom the United States to military commitments and interventions in strategically insignificant places over intrinsically trivial issues. It is a stance that can engender a foreign policy approximating paranoia in an obdurately chaotic world abounding in states, personalities, and ideologies that are unsavory and uncongenial—but not necessarily mortally hazardous.”
Butt; da planet has odder mortal hazards too!: