I wish I could fire the American President
 

Fer Cripes sake, he's pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal.

That is the only solid piece of Obama era foreign policy. And he's withdrawn from it.

The world just got a whole lot more dangerous. And as I am one that can deploy to the region, I am pissed. Where I lived in Lebanon and Israel have both gone into high alert.

What a fool?

Can the US sort out its act?

Believe me, there are a lot of us in the US who would like to join you in that.

My own personal feeling is that the major effect of this is going to be a further, and major, lessening of US influence in the world, and the Middle East in particular. One reason US sanctions are so important is that so much of world trade, at some point, goes through a US bank or dollar exchange. I won't be too shocked if some combination of European and Chinese banking/financial networks step up to keep this deal working -- Europe because they actually like the deal, and China (and Russia) because it lowers US economic power.

This of course assumes that Trump isn't planning to just plain attack Iran, which a lot of US hawks have had a hard-on to do for many years. But if he does, I don't think anyone but Israel will be inclined to support the action (and even they might not be too happy if it's not done as they think it should be).

I figured the US was going to be spending several decades cleaning up the mess from the invasion of Iraq, but Trump seems determined to have us stop being a superpower altogether. I know he thinks this will make us (read: him) more important, but he's just wrong. (Unless he's really just following orders from Putin, since any reduction in US world influence can only be good for Russia.)

And he's doing it for the shallowest, pettiest reasons.

I haven't heard many details other than the fact that he pulled out of the agreement, but I assume those reasons are basically "Obama did it, therefore it's bad."

We knew this was coming: Trump's been cleaning out all the vaguely intelligent people in his cabinet and replacing them with know-nothing chickenhawks who'll just tell him what he wants to hear, he's been talking about the deal since he started running for President, and last week we had those blatant lies based on ancient intelligence reports.

I’m not sure what bugs me the most about the Trump administration: the bigotry and evil, or the incompetence and pettiness. There’s some dignity in being bested by a competent villain like, say, Tywin Lannister. It still majorly sucks, but it still better than being defeated by an overgrown, seventy-something Joffrey. Competent villains put forth planning and effort; they don’t just kick and scream until they get what they want. Also if they can defeat any enemy via legal or nonviolent means or alliances, competent villains will often opt to go that route; violence and crime is risky and in the long run, it’s more profitable to build bridges, rather than burn them.

I suppose I should stop filtering everything via pop culture, but it helps me to understand how things work. Though the trouble with Trump, is there’s no fictional villain that adequately encapsulates him. Every villain, however badly written or however poor the source material, has better work ethic than Donald Trump. :mad:

There is one : Milton Krest in Ian Fleming's The Hildebrandt Rarity, a short story found in For Your Eyes Only. Except that, of course, Melania won't stuff a fish down his throat anytime soon.

I fear a competent villain far more than an incompetent one.

True, Cervus. However, this incompetent one is doing quite a lot of damage.

That only works if there's a means of stopping the incompetent villain and he's not prone to lashing out at anything he perceives as insulting or threatening to him.

In this case a competent villain who understood things like pragmatism when not to start a fight would be a significant improvement.

He's like a hot potato of incompetence.

Except we're not allowed to drop him, at least until 2020.

Maybe we can at least put gloves on at the midterms. Though I don't think that would have stopped this one -- can Congress override him? They have to confirm treaties; do they have the power to keep them in effect? -- I'm going to have to look that one up. But I don't think the current Congress will do it, even if they can.

The turnip and his supporters are all under the delusion that the US is the almighty power in the world. We don't need the rest of you so you better do our bidding or else. I'm not sure what the turnip heads think the US can do. I suppose they think we can take our army and march into any other country in the world and take over. Or maybe we can just buy them.

I suspect Trump thinks that if he just shouts loud enough everybody will do what he wants. That's the way his life has pretty much worked up until January 2017, after all. (I'm sure there have been people all his life who were in a position to roll their eyes and walk away, but due to his money I expect it was always possible to just get somebody else to do whatever it was instead, so he most likely didn't much notice.)

-- I'm kind of reminded of the BMOC in high school who gets to college only to discover that college is full of people who were also BMOC in high school, and are not particularly impressed. Except that ~18 is a better age to run up against that wall than 70; and college freshman is a much better position to be learning the lesson in than POTUS.

The reason Trump can do this is that the Senate never ratified the treaty. They wouldn't have, because Obama, so Obama issued an executive order to remove the sanctions as our part of the deal. New executive, so he can change the order.

I think Congress could pass a resolution to remove the sanctions, but whether Trump would comply is another question, and I don't know how the Supreme Court might come down on the question.

But yeah, not this congress. And even if the Dems get control in November, by then it will probably be too late to salvage this mess.

On Facebook last night, I noted that, once again, President Obama has proven himself a better man than I am. I don't believe I would have been able to release a statement on Trump's action that did not include the word "motherNFBSKer."

Ah. Thanks.


Indeed.

I ran into people after the election saying 'don't worry about it, we can just vote him out in 2020 if he messes up too badly.' Problem is, he can do a whole lot of damage in the meantime, not all of which is going to be easily fixable later, or in some cases fixable at all.

If the Democrats get the Congress at the midterms, that may significantly reduce the amount of damage getting done between January 2019 and January 2021. It won't stop it, unless they're able to impeach, and it might not stop it then, among other reasons because Pence; but it should reduce it.

Has the Turnip presented any evidence that the Iranians are not in compliance with the accord?

The only reason that I've seen that Trump has actually declared is that the agreement on nuclear weapons did not address Iran's conventional weapons program or sponsorship of terror groups.

IOW, they are not in compliance with parts of the treaty that never existed.

The closest thing to doing so seems to be referencing some Israeli intelligence reports that were published when Bush was in office, so not even close.