The knives were out for Iran again this week … not that that’s all that different from other weeks in America. Trump dropped an open threat on Twitter, his preferred channel for delivering such messaging. I know he’s never read it, but his little all-cap tweet is a blatant violation of Article 2 (principle 4) of the U.N. Charter, which, ratified by the U.S., is the supreme law of the land:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
Of course, this principle gets violated all the time without consequence, particularly by our own leaders and those of our allied nations. Not sure how, exactly, this prohibition made its way into this document back in the day when the United States was the sole remaining power and the first-ever superpower in world history. We had an enormous hand in erecting this international order, putting ourselves at the very top of the global power structure in as much as we were the only nation to have emerged from the ravages of World War II stronger than before. Why would we include this principle only to violate it consistently for the next seventy years?
My point, I guess, is that this reckless sabre rattling is nothing new. What’s new is the fool in command. Trump is offensive in every manner you can name. I think he particularly grates on me because I’ve always hated reality television, and that more than anything else defines his public persona. After decades of avoiding reality shows like the plague, my fellow Americans elected a reality star president of the United States, and he is now doing his level best to turn our very reality into reality television. Now we not only have to watch the lousy show every day – we are bit players in the freaking show! From my perspective, it’s like drinking a pint of urine the moment you get out of bed in the morning. Pleasant.
What’s worse than that, though, is the empire crap. Posers like Pompeo and Bolton will use Trump to get their beloved war with Iran. That – and not so much the reality show BS – is what we need to concentrate our energy on.
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jp
As Bruce Cumings and others have pointed out for many years, the South Korean military is essentially under the command of U.S. generals. That is, in the event of a war, South Korean commanders would take orders directly from our military. Add to that the fact that the U.S., South Korea, and North Korea have technically been in a state of war since 1950, and you have a sense of how this works. Think about it – what does it say about South Korea’s sovereignty that they are not in control of their military? Recall, too, that the country was under the rule of generals and assorted dictators into the 1980s, all backed by the U.S. So when a president threatens the sanctity of “military exercises”, essentially admitting that they are, in fact, war games and, as such, “provocative,” as Trump accurately described them, national security reporters and consultants on every network start spinning like crazy.
Bolton appears to have leveraged the fact that our credibility is shot in order to foment this crisis. The world doesn’t need reminding that in Libya, we talked Qaddafi out of his nuclear arsenal, then supported an uprising against him that ended with this murder. They don’t need reminding that both Iraq and Afghanistan, non nuclear states, were both invaded by us and are still under the partial control of our military. So, they know that we are liable to attack if you don’t have nuclear weapons … or if the U.S. manages to talk you into relinquishing your arsenal. What lessons would you draw from this kind of behavior?