THREAD on Trump’s Rant about the S Korean President calling Him, Correctly, a 'Failure' in the NYT

1. Moon Jae-In indeed throws T under the bus in the Times

Moon & his advisors quickly realized that T, like Fredo, was weak & stupid & wanted respect. M deluded T with visions

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of a Nobel Prize if he met the NK leader Kim Jong Un. M wanted that meeting, bc the SK left has long thought an apex summit was the best way to side-step the hawkish-on-NK US foreign policy community. All spring 2018, that hawkish FPC community indeed told T not meet KJU; T

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didn’t listen to us of course; and then made a colossal hash out of negotiations, bc he is an idiot: . M then called T a failure last week. Harsh

2. T’s response illustrates yet again that he is totally unfit for public office

It’s petty, mean-spirited

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unnecessary, and filled w/ inaccuracies:

a) SKs are not laughing all the way to the bank. They’re just happy T is gone, like everyone else

b) T did not prevent NK aggression. Peninsular deterrence is stable over decades now. T had no impact on that.

c) T did not get a great

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agreement with SK on USFK payment. Yes, T demanded a lot, but the ROKG held out until he left office, & there will likely be a more normal deal now.

d) T’s renegotiation of the Korea-US trade deal was minor.The big change was pushing back a few more years when SK could export

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light trucks to the US, which is only a ‘far better’ if you think a free trade deal should be more protectionist

3. M should not have manipulated T

I’ve little sympathy for T getting conned, as he conned so many others his whole life, but this SK gov't really played him like

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a useful idiot for its own goals. Those goals – a major concessionary détente with NK – are not shared by most of the US FPC. Even the Democrats were attacking T from the right over NK. Yet M exploited T’s stupidity & weakness to push him into summit he was grossly unqualified

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for. Moon should not have done that. And I bet Biden will keep his distance now from Moon bc of this. Moon’s ‘Trump whispering’ will create bad blood in the US over SK as an ally and was a serious mistake.

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More from @Robert_E_Kelly

21 Apr
Exactly. This is a language game. To my mind, it’s pretty simple:

We should do the best we can to avoid a cold war with China. But we’re not, and neither is the Xi government. So we’re all sliding into one anyway. Bad.

And far too many Beltway types are fine with that bc:

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a) The natsec community draws influence and a salary in an environment of strategic competition; China hawkishness will pay.

b) 30 years of unipolarity has impoverished American thinking about diplomacy. We’re too used to knee-jerk belligerence.

Consider, eg, that much GOP

2
hawkishness on China is simply to cover-up for Trump’s massive incompetence on corona. Trump and MAGA would happily risk dangerous cold war competition rather than admit that Trump is a colossal idiot who didn’t care if Americans died.

So yeah, stumbling into a cold war with

3
Read 7 tweets
29 Mar
I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it’s fairly outlandish: Would not a disaster so massive that it wiped out the cops, Guard, and military also send gangsters fleeing? When Katrina hit and the police disintegrated, didn’t the bad guys run also?

The American state is far

2
more capable than these apocalypse scenarios - to justify long gun ownership - admit. The US is NOT on the brink of anarchy, about to be invaded, about to collapse under the national debt, and so on. The American state has multiple levels and multiple agencies which use force.

3
For them ALL to collapse so badly that you’re on your doorstep fighting off Mad Max with your AR-15 would require something like a nuclear strike to bring about. This is the scenario of the movie ‘Amerigeddon,’ not, um, anything remote plausible.

The smart play for personal

4
Read 5 tweets
29 Mar
Consider the extremely low probability of Graham’s scenario:

- a natural disaster so massive that

- the police/National Guard/military are so overwhelmed that

- gangs have take over the streets like Death Wish 3

Versus the far greater likelihood of an armed lunatic in a store
I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it’s fairly outlandish: Would not a disaster so massive that it wiped out the cops, Guard, and military also send gangsters fleeing? When Katrina hit and the police disintegrated, didn’t the bad guys run also?

The American state is far

2
more capable than these apocalypse scenarios - to justify long gun ownership - admit. The US is NOT on the brink of anarchy, about to be invaded, about to collapse under the national debt, and so on. The American state has multiple levels and multiple agencies which use force.

3
Read 6 tweets
27 Mar
THREAD

3 Issues/Problems in S Korean Foreign Policy unrelated to the usual ‘shrimp among whales’ narrative

1. Sharp Partisan Polarization, particularly regarding NK

The result is abrupt right/left swings in foreign policy across partisan changes in the presidency, plus NK

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fantasies on both sides: the right’s strangelovian paranoia about NK infiltration and NK manipulation of the SK left; the left’s adamant refusal to admit that NK is '1984' and similarly adamant insistence that NK is a normal country & brother Korean state whose inherent

2
cooperativeness is undercut by the Americans and sanctions.

2. Not Enough Grand Strategy

The Lee and Park governments produced rudimentary national security strategies; the Moon gov’t hasn’t even bothered. And MOFA white papers are more boosterish about Korean pop culture

3
Read 8 tweets
23 Mar
What otherwise terrible movie is an unacknowledged classic in your mind?

I’d have to say Starship Troopers
‘Starship Troopers’ really came into its own when Fox News turned into the movie’s jingoistic news network after 9/11
Hudson Hawk? Jaws 4?? Good grief.

Don't choose the worst dreck ever, but dreck that has some unrecognized awesomeness.

"Commando," e.g. Idiotic beyond belief, but with the best one-liners of Schwarzenegger's career and non-CGI action sequences which still hold up pretty well
Read 4 tweets
11 Mar
Since it's the 4 year anniversary of the BBC Dad video, here are some answers to typical questions and a few new pics:

A. You staged the whole thing to get famous!

Good grief. Please stop sending me your 'BBC Dad Truther' emails. I can't imagine how one could stage something

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like this. It is genuinely the comedy of errors you see in the vid.

B. You didn't stand up to usher out your kids, bc you weren't wearing pants.

I have no dignity left🤦‍♂️. I remained seated, bc the show must go on. I'd done enough TV by then to know that.

2

Pic: James at Xmas
You just have to push through. I also thought the interviewer, @BBCJamesM, or the producers, might end it. (We are very grateful to James for handling it all with such aplomb.) And also, it all happened so fast, I didn't really know what to do. But yes, I do wear

3

Pic: Marion
Read 6 tweets

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