For the Record: In the Bank

Stock photo via Rosenblum Law New Jersey.

South Korea pays close to a billion dollars a year to US in "host-nation financial contributions" and US is asking them to quintuple that. https://t.co/kWq2AuHpSE Pentagon tries to carry out Trump's wishes, but Trump doesn't know, as these obviously out-of-his-ass numbers show.

— Perfect Particularity (@Yastreblyansky) January 11, 2020

The mercenary subject only comes up because that's how Trump thinks of it--he lacks any concept of national interest or international cooperation, so the only thing he can imagine is that foreign deployments should make income. Either we "take the oil" or they write a check.

— Perfect Particularity (@Yastreblyansky) January 11, 2020

But anyway the US deployment to Saudi Arabia really does seem mercenary-like to me, based on secret negotiations between Kushner and MbS, and something clearly not in national interest (backing KSA's massacre of Yemenis--Congress voted in April to end US support but Trump vetoed)

— Perfect Particularity (@Yastreblyansky) January 11, 2020

While he focuses on his TV performance as president and whatever crimes are hidden in his financial records, the government has to work around his ignorance, hoping he doesn't hear something about them on Fox that he doesn't like and assault them with a Twitter howler. It's bad.

— In the Bank (@Yastreblyansky) January 11, 2020

Guess who just found out the Korean War isn't over yet?

In the Demilitarized Zone,via CNN; can't find a name for the bird.

Yesterday's story in The Times:

But analysts said South Korea was aiming for a comprehensive deal, in which the North agreed to give up its weapons in return for a security guarantee, including a peace treaty. Mr. Trump’s comments suggested he backed that effort.

“They do have my blessing to discuss the end of the war,” he said. “People don’t realize that the Korean War has not ended. It’s going on right now. And they are discussing an end to war. Subject to a deal, they have my blessing.”

You know what he means when he says, "People don't realize". That's what he always says when he's gobsmacked by some revelation, like Lincoln having been a Republican

I'm not going to lie, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself for prognostications since at least January as to what was going on from the "my button is bigger than your button" tweet through the Winter Olympics, which is that the South Korean government has realized that Trump's ignorance and mercuriality mean it can take over the 64-year-old peace process from the AWOL United States. Which may not be the way it looks to you, with these crazy events in which somebody with no more official status than Dennis Rodman, in between jobs as Director of Central Intelligence and Secretary of State (if he can get confirmed by the Senate, which has been looking very iffy), travels to negotiate with the Cute Leader or whatever they're calling him to arrange a meeting for him with Emperor Bigbutton. You may think that the US is not merely actively engaged but hyperactively engaged.

But that's my point, really: hyperactivity isn't coherently directed at anything. Trump doesn't know whether he wants a war or wants peace, or care, as long as he's acclaimed the winner of whatever it turns out to be. He's not in charge, and President Moon Jae-in is.

The news today that DPRK and ROK truly are talking about a peace treaty is just astonishing, though, and I'm not even sure what to think. The upshot may not turn out exactly the way Pompeo expects, but it sounds like progress from here for the moment.

The Fire-and-Fury Next Time

Carl von Clausewitz, via ZenPundit.

As I've been arguing, the best thing that could have happened in the North Korea issue was that South Korea should take command of the diplomatic process, and this has happened in more spectacular form than I could have imagined, with intrepid South Korean negotiators wangling Kim Jong-un into inviting Donald Trump to hang out some time in the spring and Trump into accepting.

Congratulations President Moon Jae-in and people of the Republic of Korea, delivered, at least for what's probably quite a long moment, from the threat of devastating war! And shame on the US press for continuing not to notice them, and the real responsibility for this achievement, from Moon's New Year démarche inviting a DPRK delegation to the Pyeongchang Olympics and persuading the US to postpone the annual ROK-US military exercises, to South Korea's national security adviser Chung Eui-yong getting the invitation from Kim on Monday, passing it to our dotard emperor yesterday, and managing, as they say, to be the last person to talk to him and get the word out to the press before some courtier had a chance to change his mind, although that seems to have been Trump's own idea, as if he was afraid any delay at all might break this moment of lucidity:

One Billion Dollars

From March 2017, via The Wrap.

Trump over the weekend, as reported by The Hill, seemed to be letting an awfully big cat out of his bag:

President Trump said late Saturday that North Korea must “denuke” before any talks with the U.S.

“Now we are talking and they ... called up a couple of days ago. They said that ‘we would like to talk.’ And I said, ‘So would we, but you have to denuke, you have to denuke,’ ” Trump said at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., Reuters reported.

“We will be meeting and we’ll see if anything positive happens,” he said.

“I won’t rule out direct talks with [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un. I just won’t.”

He took a phone call from North Koreans? They discussed entering formal talks and he made a proposal? Actually no, it seems this did not happen. As explained by an unnamed National Security Council official and confirmed by the White House and noted in Newsweek, the president misspoke:

For the Record: Windy Olympics

Mr. Vice President and Mrs. Pence in their matching jackets in Pyeongchang, painfully aware that the baleful eyes of Madam Kim Yo-jong may be on them. Screenshot via Fox.

It's a good thing that the South Korean and North Korean athletes are competing together, as a single country in a slightly half-assed way, and an even better thing that the South Korean president Moon Jae-in is contemplating a meeting with mad North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. To say that is not to say that Kim Jong-un is a good person, and I'm getting a little cheesed with rightwingers suggesting that it is (though I'd agree with them that CNN's crush on the dictator's sister Kim Yo-jong is, ah, unnecessary):

1. Since people are being willfully obtuse in interpreting this tweet, I'm going to delete and spell out, slowly, why North Korean charm offensive is surprisingly successful. pic.twitter.com/io7hN1PuXw

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 11, 2018

To me, it is the South Koreans who are especially winning this initiative, and last night I tacked on a couple of additional details to Jeet Heer's thread:

This gives the political maneuvers a transcendent emotional value for the public. It's not just maneuvering. US always fails to understand this, but this time much worse than usual.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

And then spent the rest of the evening happily watching non-Korean skaters, and in the morning there was sour-assed Ben Shapiro, still whining, and his fans:

Preventing the President of the United States

By Giphy.

Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 1, 2018

And the heart (big, fat, and beautiful) is in the delivery!

There's an answer to Steve's question! We were looking for the heart in the wrong place, in the formation and implementation of policy. Trump's heart isn't in that; the man is a born trouper. It's in the greasepaint and the greenrooms and that connection with the crowd, and the ratings of course, although that seems a little backward—the fact that you turned it on, if you did, doesn't prove that it was good, because you didn't know whether it was good or not ahead of time. Ratings are a measurement for advertisers, as you know, advertisers are interested in whether you get the eyeballs, not their critical esteem, and you can get the eyeballs with a slow-motion train wreck. Also Fox didn't make any money on it, since you don't interrupt the SOTU with commercials, although they did presumably benefit from the before and after color commentary.

Nevertheless Trump achieved his personal goal, of whacking his way through reading the text without a fail and achieving more applause breaks—turns out all you have to do is ask for them, leading the applause yourself from the dais!—than any of his predecessors, stretching a thin speech out to an astounding 90 minutes and making the Republicans do all the work. I didn't hear him say, "Believe me," or fluff any difficult words, at all, though I wasn't listening attentively all the time. Paul Ryan blew more lines than he did, I thought, even though he only had one, which he began, "I have the high honor and distinct privilege of preventing..." before pulling back.

And the ratings were tremendous! Well,

Not too scared

Moon goddess from the Ohoe tomb no. 4, 6th-7th century, Goguryeo (or ancient Goryeo). via Wikipedia.

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

I'm going to say it again: as you know, there's no button, and the procedure you need to follow to order that strike is a fairly complex one, which I think Donald Trump in his current psychological state might have a hard or even impossible time following:

From phone call to phone call — and his day, beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely phone calls — you could lose him. He could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He neither particularly listened to what was said to him nor particularly considered what he said in response. (Michael Wolff)

And whatever they tell you, our military are trained carefully that they must not follow an illegal order, and I don't think there's any doubt about this one, as Marjorie Cohn was explaining a couple of months ago at the HuffPost:

Don't panic, Tom!

Breakfast in Korea. To the surprise of one Vice reporter, it's what's for dinner!

Seems like a long time since he's hit one out of the Friedmanian lunacy park like this:

Solving the Korea Crisis by Teaching a Horse to Sing

And the exotic (not that exotic) dateline:

SEOUL, South Korea — Some stories have to be experienced to fully grasp — the Korea crisis is one of them. I arrived in Seoul on the evening of May 28. As I was dressing for breakfast the next morning, I was jarred by a news alert ringing on my phone: North Korea had just fired a short-range ballistic missile that had landed in the sea off its east coast.

Grammar salad in the first clause ("stories" is the subject of passive "be experienced" but not the active "grasp" that follows it, and when you're trying to parse it you start wondering if stories have to be experienced like Jimi Hendrix—"Has this story ever been experienced, well I have"—and you're in a state of collapse before you get to the first dash), and the implication, because we do know what he means, that he doesn't expect us to understand the story he's about to tell.