Return of the Madman Theory

[mia]

Trump’s foreign policy is so erratic and unpredictable, it might just make the world more stable—for a very short time.

President Donald Trump’s most nerve-racking trait—his unhinged impulsiveness, driven more by random stimuli and shifts in mood than by careful study or long-held principles—might be having an oddly stabilizing influence in the world’s crisis-strewn regions, at least for a little while.

Consider what Richard Nixon called “the Madman Theory.” In the early years of his presidency, he told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to warn the North Vietnamese that Nixon was crazy. Nixon is obsessed with Communism, Kissinger was supposed to say. He can’t be restrained when he’s angry, and for God’s sake, he has his hand on the nuclear button. In two days’ time, Nixon predicted, Ho Chi Minh will be “begging for peace.”

The ploy didn’t work, in part because the North Vietnamese didn’t believe it. Whatever the many other eccentricities that Nixon had displayed in a quarter-century of public life, he wasn’t a madman, at least not in that way....

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/04/trump_is_inadvertently_putting_nixon_s_madman_theory_to_the_test.html

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. Too late, worldwide thermonuclear war starting within days in NK by Trump.

Fucking 3rd party voters, FUCK

[unblock]

2. donnie's more like the guy who keeps getting caught bluffing yet is convinced he's believable.

he's all flash and zero follow-through.
you just can't cash the checks his big mouth writes.

of course, the real problem, is that north korea has been steeped in saber-rattling and nuclear brinksmanship for far, far longer than donnie has.

donnie is a rank amateur.


most outcomes are horrible, particularly for the people of both north and south korea but not just them.

and in the end, the world will blame not just donnie, but the whole of the united states.

[mia]

3. He's playing with bombs as if they're tokens from a board game.

He's writing the rules as he goes along and all he cares about is that his little, plastic, trump-tower token wins the game.