(The following was originally written as a reply to comment by MNPundit on Booman’s recent post Trump is Trying to Corrupt the United Nations. It grew, so here it is as a standalone.)
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MNPundit wrote:
Re: Trump is Trying to Corrupt the United NationsIt’s a political win for everyone. World gets to stand up to the US/Trump which is popular at home. Trump gets to stick his tongue at the UN which plays well with his base. Palestinians are fucked, actual policy is fucked.
Precisely. Thank you.
We must all understand that Trump is playing hardball here. He wants to run things. Simple as that. Will his tactics continue to work? We shall see. I believe that he will ratchet up his threats in the hope that whomever is being threatened will back down. If they don’t? Then…if doing so is at all survivable…he will carry out those threats. This goes for Congress, the U.N., and any other situations where he is being opposed. That’s his M.O., and he has risen from being a local real estate salesman to being President of the United States of Omertica by consistently using that approach.
Read on.
Notice that he is not “threatening” China or Russia. Not in public, anyway. It’s the classic gangland script…three mob families divvying up the neighborhoods of a given area…in this case, the whole world. “Diplomacy” in the U.N. is now basically about keeping a balance of power among those three families. The most powerful family worldwide is the U.S. It controls almost all of North and South America, Japan, South Korea, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and large parts of the Middle East. It also has troops…clandestine and not so clandestine…all over Africa and in the area that the wonderful author Gary Shteyngart so accurately labelled “Absurdistan.” Neither Russia, China…or even an alliance between those two gangs…can really challenge the U.S. empire right now. They can take little potshots, push at some boundaries…witness Crimea, the whole Ukraine boondoggle/stalemate and China woofing about who owns the Asian seas…and they make occasional threatening gestures (mostly meant to keep their own people in line and enthusiastic), but that’s about it.
This has basically been the case since the end of the Vietnam war. Russia, China and the U.S. have all had their ups and downs since then, but the same balance of power has pretty much remained.
Until Trump.
Trump wants it all. He wants to be the Boss of All Bosses, and every move he makes…whether it’s domestic or international…is based on that one idea. Any opposition to that idea is met with lots of words and the threat of action. So far…including Congress…the only truly strong opposition that he has received is from North Korea. That’s still in the posturing phase, mainly because North Korea is a relatively small sub-gang in the Chinese mob. If the Chinese get to thinking that Kim Jong-un is a seriously annoying burr under their saddle…as was Crazy Joey Gallo to the Profaci/Colombo mob in the NYC area…then a contract of some sort will go out on him and his whole little gang. It’s probably out already; they’re just trying to figure out how to rid of him without nuclear war. Nukes are bad for business, don’tcha know. Good for threat, but very bad for business.
Now, back to Trump. The office of the presidency in the U.S. is almost unassailable in a legal sense. I mean…let’s get real, here. The politics of impeachment…real, successful impeachment…are simply too complex. That would be “bad for business” too. Is Trump’s lust for power so great that he begins to resemble Joey Gallo too? Most of the important members of both major gangs in the U.S…the Ratublicans and the DemocRats…see him as a threat to their own interests. So apparently does the Deep State…a third gang that keeps a very low profile but carries a lot of power. If they can force Trump to start issuing pardons…to others and to himself…then public opinion will finally turn so against him that he will essentially be powerless. But…so far…that war is still in posturing mode as well. We shall see. It’s been a year…
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…Trump is still president and he is still dominating the news cycle. So it goes. The “Write anything you want about me but be sure to spell my name right” approach has worked very well for him.
As he might say in an unguarded Twitter moment:
Kvetch on, suckers. I’m still here. Whatchoo gonna do about it!!!???
It’s been about a year now. Two years if you include the failure of the PermaGov forces to stop Trump’s nomination. So far?
All talk and very little walk from the neocentrist opposition.
We shall see…
Won’t we.
Later…
AG