Foreign . . . policy?

Vulcan mind meld?

 

Can Tr*mp even find Qatar on a map?  Pretty clearly, "his" generals neglected to mention the two enormous American military bases there before he launched the tweetstorm that created his latest international dumpster fire.

To anyone who has been paying attention, the Saudi problem with Qatar is clear: Qatar maintains lines of communication with Iran.  Saudi accusations that the Qataris "support terrorists," including IS and al-Qaeda, are the height of hypocrisy.  Al-Sisi may be more justified in his dislike of Qatar, based on Qatari support for the Muslim Brotherhood: after brutally overthrowing the Brotherhood's democratically elected government in Egypt, al-Sisi might not feel much confidence in the organization's renunciation of violence back in the 1970s.

So, Tr*mp's profound geopolitical ignorance has left America's military and foreign policy establishments scrambling to clean up his mess, even as they scramble to close the rifts he created with NATO allies on his recent European trip, and his alienation of the British arising from his responses to the terrorist assault on London.  He's already antagonized Mexico and Canada — even Australia!  Who's next?  (Probably not Russia.)

It helps to remember what "America First" meant the last time it was a popular political slogan: isolationism — and "peaceful co-existence" with the Nazis.

Strongmen

Surprising his State Department, Our President got it into his head to invite the irrepressibly murderous Rodrigo Duterte for a White House sleepover.  To Tr*mp's surprise and chagrin, I'm certain, Duterte said he might be "too busy" to come over and play.

So what is it with Tr*mp and his passion for authoritarian bad boys like Duterte, al-Sisi, Ergogan and, of course, Vladimir Putin?  Hell, he was even saying nice things about North Korean meatball Kim Jong-un the other day!  Is it time for our Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to have a peek at the Presidential brain?

It's hard to believe there isn't something psycho-sexual involved in Tr*mp's bizarre infatuations, uncomfortable as it may be to entertain the imagery afflicts the imagination while entertaining such thoughts.  Fred Trump, one imagines, was the kind of father who could generate psychiatric fortunes over the generations — except that none of his sons ever could be so weak as to need a therapist.

I hope we don't have to bomb the Philippines.

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More shit, quoted from the Times:
In a discussion last year about the cost of the Marines in Darwin, The Australians came in with a data-heavy presentation asserting that United States Marines eat more that typical Australian soldiers, and therefore strain sewage systems more, and argued that the Americans should pay more of the costs of improving wastewater lines on military bases.

Mubarak acquitted

It should come as no surprise to anybody that murder charges against Hosni Mubarak were dropped.  After all, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is considerably more murderous than Mubarak was, and one wouldn't want to set a bad precedent — would one?

Fucking Egypt

A couple of days ago, John Kerry was in Cairo "reconfirming" America's "relationship" with Egypt.  Yesterday, the al-Sisi courts sentenced three al-Jazeera journalists to seven years in prison on trumped up charges without even bothering to trump up any evidence.

So, what's up?  Well, as we all know, we have to maintain our "relationship" with fucking Egypt to maintain our "relationship" with fucking Israel.  Israel, at the moment, is using the matter of its three missing teenagers to destroy the remaining Hamas presence in the West Bank.  We're told that the "evidence" of Hamas responsibility will be produced later this week, but it seems it has not been thoroughly "trumped" yet.

Morsi

Well, at the moment, it appears that Mohamed Morsi's gone.  Yes, it was another military coup, and we still can't be sure how it will turn out.  Since it's the Middle East, there's a high probability that it will turn out badly.

Look at the component parts.  Up there on the podium with General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi were a bunch on non-Brotherhood Muslim clerics, some Coptic Christians, and the ever ambitious Nobel laureate, Mohamed el-Baradei.   I suppose there may have been a couple of populist secularists up there too, but I'm betting they were way off in the wings.

There were a few major problems with Morsi, the foremost of which was that he is incompetent.  Another was that he moved entirely too fast to implement Islamist ideology, and cuddled up way too close to the Salafists.  Moreover, I don't recall that he ever had an economic policy.

So we're back to two years ago, waiting to see what the military will do.  They've cancelled the Islamist Constitution the Brotherhood pushed through, put a Mubarak era judge in charge of the executive, and are telling us they plan for early presidential elections.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.