Haute Diplomatie

 

Russia Pyotr Veliky missile cruiser makes port call in Tartus, Syria, 2023, via Countercurrents.

Let me get this straight? Trump dithers on about the situation in Syria and his concern is what's best for Russia?

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— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:31 AM

Here's the rest of it. It is ironic, of course, that he criticizes Obama for staying out of Syria and then calls for the same course of action. But his focus is on Russia. Not the US. Not the Syrian people. Russia.

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— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:33 AM

Couple of thoughts:

Obviously, Trump did not write this. The thinking is banal, but it's moderately complex and coherently designed toward a single main idea, as Vance notes, the question of how the Syria events will affect Russia. Completely different from Trump's "weave". Also not a subject to which our narcissist-in-chief is likely to devote that much consideration, with participants who aren't his own enemies—and while Russia might be considered one of his friends, he doesn't usually talk about his friends in this tone, as having made a mistake. He's usually "saying nice things" about his friends in return for their saying nice things about him, not speculating about them in this detached way.

C'est la faute à Rousseau

Just ten years ago, when the blog was just getting going, Rectification Central was all excited over a French presidential election, in which the Socialist Party's François Hollande defeated the corrupt conservative Nicolas Sarkozy. I appear not to have written a post claiming that all Europe was coming to its senses in acclaiming a triumphant left, but I'm pretty sure that's what I thought.

Sadly, no. Five years after that, the Socialist Party had virtually vanished from contention, and so had Sarkozy's Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the last gasp of the former UDF, or whatever that thing was that was equally opposed to socialism and Gaullism, an exhausted iteration of the French version of Christian democracy that wasn't particularly Christian or democratic, or anything really.  Rather, the contest seemed to have altogether personalized itself at last, among a collection of new characters rather than parties with ideologies: Marine Le Pen, daughter of the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, representing a neofascism "with a human face", so to speak; Jean-Luc Mélenchon, representing a kind of nationalist left more worried about "globalism" than anything else (though he has been pretty positive about immigrants, which I consider good, of course, and a bit brave as well); and Emmanuel Macron, representing some kind of ideal of bureaucratic competence, which won, not because anybody liked it very much but because they were less frightened of it than the others, a pattern that seems to be replicating itself this year.

When I find myself wondering if this is going to be the new party system in France after all, an essentially two-party system that weirdly resembles some of the stupidest takes on our own situation here in the US, polarized between an authoritarian conservatism that identifies itself as "populist" or "working class" (meaning of course "white working class") and a kind of authoritarian liberalism that identifies itself as smarter than you, technocratic, unapologetically elitist. While the left properly speaking is permanently sidelined, in its inability to recognize that it needs to adapt to flourish in a "center-right" country.

The Empire Strikes Out

Drawing by Kal for The Economist via Politico.

So it's a thing that seems pretty trivial in itself:

During a breakfast with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the sidelines of the Group of Seven meeting in this picturesque seaside town, a reporter asked Trump whether he had any “second thoughts” about his escalating trade war with China. Trump responded, “Yeah, sure. Why not.”

“Might as well,” he said. “Might as well. I have second thoughts about everything.”

Trump then claimed that talks were going well with China and that he planned to back away from some of his recent threats, such as seeking to force companies to leave China.

But back in the White House, it's a fatal error! How can this be? First thoughts are all our emperor needs!

So they start spinning:

“The president was asked if he had ‘any second thought on escalating the trade war with China.’ His answer has been greatly misinterpreted. President Trump responded in the affirmative — because he regrets not raising the tariffs higher,” press secretary Stephanie Grisham said.

Right, While the president's chief economic adviser trots out an alternative, though even more transparent, lie:

Patriotism and nationalism

This is such a shot for a 1950s movie poster, isn't it. From the White House state dinner in April, photo by AFP/Getty.

Trump's making the US irrelevant, forcing the rest of the world to figure out how to do things without us. It's a good thing in some places, as I've said with reference to South Korea, which has taken to managing its own foreign policy because they can't trust Americans to be consistent or coherent, but I'm not sure about others. Very cool column by David Ignatius/WaPo interprets the Armistice Day events in Paris in this light:

Last weekend’s events in Paris offered a dramatic demonstration that “other things being equal” is not a safe assumption. The world is moving to adapt to the reality that Donald Trump is president of the United States. Our friends and allies may hope his election eventually will be reversed, and maybe they think the United States turned a corner with the 2018 midterm elections. But they can’t count on it, so these countries must consider that the United States may be a different country from what they had believed.

French President Emmanuel Macron articulated this reality last week. In one of his World War I remembrances, he told a French radio station that Europe needs a “true European army” at a time when the United States is a less reliable ally. “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” Macron said.

Trump blasted Macron’s comments as “very insulting,” and he continued to complain in tweets Tuesday about French ingratitude and claimed that Macron was trying to distract from his “very low” approval ratings. But joining Macron on Tuesday was German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who told the European parliament that she shared others’ view that “a common European army would show the world that there would never again be war in Europe.”

That—Macron suggesting a "European army"—seems to have been a major part of what triggered Trump's weird behavior beginning over the weekend, alongside dawning realization that he just lost an election, bigly, and as we're told that Corsi and Stone and apparently Junior himself are getting busted, and that his brilliant maneuver of planting his own personal agent at the attorney general's desk to protect him is a failure, and maybe even, Steve suggests this morning, a crash from some prescription high.

For the Record: Mystery

Undated picture of the Aisne-Marne (spelled wrong by me below, with an extra -s), Belleau, France, via.

This is such a weird dance that's been going on since Bolton announced on October 23 that this meeting would take place. This was just after Trump's decision to abrogate the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty because, he said, the Russians were violating it. https://t.co/jL0b5WOTTQ

— Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought (@Yastreblyansky) November 11, 2018

Yet there they were planning a summit in Paris, on Veterans Day no less. Putin complained about the treaty getting broken, but he couldn't stop smiling and telling jokes. What, in the first place, was up with that? https://t.co/52fvxH8nLd

— Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought (@Yastreblyansky) November 11, 2018

Nothing Happened

Nuts of Fury Breakfast brown ale, made with local grain from Appalachian Malting and fresh Vienna Roast coffee from Iron Star Roasting Company, from the Fury Brewing Company of Huntingdon, PA, via untappd.

So it was all bullshit. The Breakfast of Fury was a performance, as Steve notes, for Trump's base in the United States to watch their God-Emperor filling the hearts of the foreigners with fear and trembling, and what actually happened at the NATO summit in Brussels was, precisely, nothing.

That's not what he said at his own press conference, of course (via Telegraph):

Mr Trump refused to deny that he had threatened to pull the US out of the organisation, and said the atmosphere in the meeting was "a little tough for a little while," but cordial after the spending commitments went up "like a rocket ship".

"Everyone in the room thanked me," he said. "There is a great collegial atmosphere in that room, that I don't think they've had for many years."

Asked directly whether he had threatened to withdraw, he replied: "I told people I'd be very unhappy if they didn't up their commitment. Yesterday I let them know I was extremely unhappy."...

"Nato is much stronger than it was two days ago," Mr Trump declared.

"We had a fantastic meeting at the end. Germany has increased very substantially what it is doing. I brought it up, no one brought it up but me.

"And frankly maybe everyone is going to have a good relationship with Russia."

It's just nonsense, as we learn from the AP report of the press conference of the president of France:

West of Eden: Mission Accomplished

Mission Accomplished banner, Arrested Development, via Arrested Development Wiki.

Screenshot just in case somebody tells Trump what he just did and the thing gets deleted. 

George W, in an undisclosed location, chuckles, remembering he's not the worst president in US history any more.

Meanwhile, special thanks from most of the world to Defense Secretary James Mattis and, I think, President Emmanuel Macron for satisfying our emperor's need to display his manly firmness and compassion at so little cost, taking no lives (apparently no casualties at all among Syrian troops or civilians, though hardly anybody seems to be asking, thanks BBC), and not making the Syrian situation markedly worse than it was before. Maybe even making it a little better, if it's true that facilities for making chemical weapons have really been damaged or destroyed.

I really do think there's something brilliant about Macron and the ability he's shown to mediate the behavior of the two emperors, Putin and Trump, with whom he's cultivated something like friendship, and I'm sure he deserves some credit for talking Trump down from demanding more war.

It was a scary moment last night when Trump (or the text written for him) suggested this might be the start of something big—

Literary Corner: There Is a Cooling, And There's a Heating

Long-term sea ice concentration for January 27 2018, compared to median value for this day, 1981-2010, as indicated by red line. Setting records! Via National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In his year at the heart of world political power, it's remarkable how much Donald Trump has retained his capacity for childlike wonder, as in the fresh, almost dewy trimeter lines of this lyrical response to a question on the 2016 Paris Agreement, which he has announced the United States will leave in November 2020, from his interview with British fashion icon Piers Morgan on ITV (see today's Independent story, "Donald Trump appears to misunderstand basic facts of climate change in Piers Morgan interview"), when he talks about his longing to rejoin the agreement, because of his fondness for the president of France, but fears he can't unless it's a different agreement, as if Mom had said he couldn't:

It Used to Be Global Warming

by Donald J. Trump

I. If Somebody Said, Go Back

If somebody said, go back
into the Paris accord,
it would have to be a completely
different deal because
we had a horrible deal.

Would I go back in?
Yeah, I'd go back in.
I like, as you know, I like
Emmanuel. I would love to,
but it's got to be a good
deal for the United States.