North Korea, you're up next

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North Korea, you're up next

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 14, 2017 8:05 pm

continuance from General Discussion




Trump and The Problem of Militant Ignorance

Evan Vucci
ByJOSH MARSHALL
PublishedAPRIL 14, 2017, 2:36 PM EDT
30380Views
It is what we might call ‘the consensus judgment’ that President Trump is a deeply ignorant man and perhaps a profoundly ignorant President. But it is worth stepping back and considering just what this means, the different kinds of ignorance that exist and how they differ.

Without making a direct comparison, it is worth remembering that each of the last three Presidents came to office with a steep learning curve about the modalities of the presidency and many aspects of the challenges and issues they would face. Clinton, Bush and Obama were each, in different ways, pretty green. Bush’s father, since he had served in Congress, as head of the CIA and especially because he had served as a fairly active Vice President for the previous eight years, came in knowing quite a lot about the specifics of the Presidency.

Some of the difference with Clinton, Bush and Obama (let’s call them CBO) is that they had good staff or at least knowledgable staff who could help them understand what they didn’t know and advise them on the almost infinite number of details they could never hope to understand in depth. But there’s another key issue. You don’t become President by being excessively humble. Yet CBO each had a sense of what they did not know. At a bare minimum, they didn’t advertise it when they learned something they later realized a lot of other people knew.

What is endearing, terrifying and hilarious about Trump is not simply his ignorance, really his militant ignorance, but his complete lack of self-awareness about his ignorance. Trump told a reporter for The Wall Street Journal that his understanding of the problem of North Korea changed dramatically after hearing ten minutes of history from the President of China. Needless to say, Trump didn’t need to admit this. But neither was it candor.

So far the Trump Presidency has been a sort of Mr Magoo performance art in which the comically ignorant Trump learns elemental or basic things that virtually everyone in the world of politics or government already knew – things that the majority of adults probably know. Health Care: “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” North Korea: “I felt pretty strongly that they had tremendous power. But it’s not what you think.” There are perhaps half a dozen examples equally stark.

In other words, President Trump is open about his discoveries and even eager to share them but universally projects his previous state of comical ignorance onto the general public or whomever he is talking to. In other cases, this would make sense. If Trump discovered that humans could fly if they hold their nose, close one eye and say “Shazam!” I’d want to know. Because that’s awesome. And I wouldn’t think worse of Trump for not knowing it before. Because this is new and amazing information. But learning that health care policy is complicated is a different kind of discovery.

Remaining ignorant is probably a good adaptive strategy for him because it allows him to pretend that everything is obvious, that he can solve any problem and generally act like he can do anything – in a way, this allowed him to become President.

What is key though is to understand that this is not just ignorance. Ignorance is just the first stage of Trump’s fairly advanced problem. He is not only ignorant but clearly unaware of his level of ignorance. This is compounded by a seeming inability to understand that everyone else isn’t equally ignorant to him. Those of us who are parents know the wonder of discovery experienced by small children. They find out there were things such as dinosaurs or close primate relatives called lemurs. As loving parents we indulge them, sometimes feigning ignorance of things we actually already knew to support a child’s joy in discovery.

But Donald Trump is a 70 year old man. And not a terribly nice man.

His ignorance is not endearing. We don’t need to lie to him to make him feel good about himself. Still it is good to understand his condition. Ignorance is just lack of information. But there’s something wrong with Trump’s brain – maybe cognitive, perhaps simple entitlement or just broad spectrum derp – which appears to make it genuinely impossible not to project his own ignorance onto everybody else.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/tru ... -ignorance
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Re: North Korea, you're up next

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 19, 2017 7:19 am

Nuclear anxiety grows with North Korea standoff
BY REBECCA KHEEL AND ELLEN MITCHELL - 04/17/17 06:10 PM EDT 9,059

Anxiety over nuclear weapons is rising as President Trump deals with growing volatility on the Korean peninsula.

Trump’s past statements in support of a buildup of nuclear weapons, combined with North Korea’s increasingly bellicose rhetoric, have stoked fears about how the situation will unfold.

“I think there’s a cycle of concern and anxiety that comes when North Korea is conducting tests,” said Alexandra Bell, senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “But I do think there’s a little more concern now because this administration has a different approach to dealing with and talking about North Korea.”

The president’s unpredictability has sharpened the public’s attention on the standoff, with fears of a nuclear crisis made evident by nervous posts to social media and gallows humor on “Saturday Night Live.”

The sketch show, which frequently jabs at Trump, twice joked Saturday about nuclear war with North Korea. In the opening sketch, Alec Baldwin as Trump joked that “this could all be over by Monday.” Later, Melissa McCarthy as White House press secretary Spicer advised that “the president’s probably going to bomb North Korea tonight,” so people “should just eat as much candy as you want because this is probably our last Easter on earth.”

Tensions on the Korean peninsula have soared amid satellite imagery indicating that North Korea is preparing for its sixth nuclear test.

Though the test has yet to happen, a celebration in the country over the weekend included several displays military might, including a failed missile launch. On Saturday, missiles were paraded in front of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Vice President Pence separately visited the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, where he declared that the Obama administration’s policy of "strategic patience" was coming to an end.

Trump has done little to lower the temperature. In a Twitter post Tuesday, he said that the United States would be willing to engage with North Korea if it’s “looking for trouble.” And in a post Thursday, he wrote he expressed confidence that Chinese leadership will rein in North Korea, but “if they are unable to do so, the U.S., with its allies, will!”

Spicer insisted Monday that Trump’s comments and tweets haven’t added to the tense situation with North Korea.

“I don't think that that's there,” Spicer said at the press briefing. “I think we're taking all the appropriate and prudent steps.”

Spicer also said he doesn’t anticipate Trump drawing “red lines” in North Korea, a statement that appeared to be aimed at tamping down concerns of Trump taking military action.

“Drawing red lines hasn’t really worked in the past,” Spicer said.

But Spicer declined to spell out what steps the administration is considering and, like Trump, would not take military options off the table.

“He holds his card close to the vest, and I think you’re not going to see him telegraphing how he’s going to respond to any military or other situation going forward,” Spicer said. “That’s just something he believes that has not served us well in the past.”

North Korea, meanwhile, was strident in its rhetoric on Monday. North Korea’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Kim In Ryong, said at a news conference that the United States was turning the Korean peninsula into “the world’s biggest hot spot” and creating “a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment.”

He said his country “is ready to react to any mode of war desired by the U.S.”
North Korea conducted more than 20 missile tests and two nuclear tests last year.

Many nuclear experts found it worrisome during the campaign when Trump insisted in multiple interviews a need to be “unpredictable” with nuclear weapon use. He also refused to rule out using such munitions on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and in Europe.

During a town hall with Chris Matthews of MSNBC in March 2016, Trump said he would be very, “very slow and hesitant to pull [the] trigger” on using a nuclear weapon. But when asked whether he would ever use nuclear weapons in Europe, he said he’s “not taking any cards off the table.”

In addition, Trump has moved away from past administrations’ stated goal of reducing nuclear arsenals around the world.

Trump has said instead that the United States “may well be better off” if more countries — including Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia — developed their own nuclear weapons instead of counting on the U.S. to protect them.

Jon Wolfsthal, a member of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board that manages the famed Doomsday Clock, said Trump’s comments have contributed to greater anxiety even as the threat posed by North Korea remains the same.

“Anxiety is up, but the threat is not,” said Wolfsthal, a senior director for arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council under former President Obama. “People are right to be worried, but it’s not as if a parade or a missile test or even a nuclear test fundamentally changes the nature of the threat.”

The group moved the Doomsday Clock 30 seconds closer to midnight after Trump took office, in part because of Trump’s past comments about nuclear weapons. The clock now stands at 2.5 minutes to midnight, which is nuclear destruction.

Wolfsthal said Trump advisors such as Defense Secretary James Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster are likely explaining the high risks of conducting a military strike against North Korea.

“To date, everything he’s done suggests he’s going to talk to big and then fall back,” Wolfsthal said. “Donald Trump rhetorically likes a big punch line, but then adopts a more reasonable, centrist approach.”
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/32919 ... a-standoff



How Did the Trump Administration Lose an Aircraft Carrier?
The White House said the USS Carl Vinson was headed for North Korea as it sailed the opposite direction—the latest example of a communications failure inside the executive branch.

A certain amount of unpredictability is a virtue in foreign policy. When one’s adversaries—and perhaps one’s allies—don’t know precisely what a country will do, it gives that country a little extra power in the relationship. Like all virtues, it turns into a vice when used in excess. Donald Trump, Fred Kaplan recently argued, offers an extreme test of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” the Vietnam-era approach of letting enemies think Nixon might really be insane and do anything.

As my colleague Kathy Gilsinan wrote last week, the hazards of this approach are on display in the latest American standoff with North Korea—a contest between two leaders who delight in bellicose rhetoric and erratic action. “When two leaders each habitually bluster and exaggerate, there’s a higher likelihood of making a catastrophic mistake based on a bad guess,” she wrote, including the threat of nuclear war. Even for those who espouse unpredictability, the presumption is that at least the putative madman has some sense what’s going on, even if no one else does. The point is the appearance of unpredictability, not true chaos.

That brings us to a baffling news item on Tuesday.


On April 9, as tension between the U.S. and North Korea over missile tests rose, the U.S. announced it was dispatching the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier, and its retinue, toward the Korean peninsula. “U.S. Pacific Command ordered the Carl Vinson Strike Group north as a prudent measure to maintain readiness and presence in the Western Pacific,” a Navy spokesman said at the time.

There was one flaw in the plan, as The New York Times reports:

The problem was, the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the four other warships in its strike force were at that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.
The result is the sort of thing that would comical if it didn’t involve nuclear brinkmanship. The announcement of the Vinson’s movement jacked up the tension between Washington and Pyongyang, which called the travel “reckless” and thundered, in a statement to CNN, “We will make the U.S. fully accountable for the catastrophic consequences that may be brought about by its high-handed and outrageous acts.” Had the North Korean government, unsure how to interpret Trump’s tough rhetoric, actually started a hot war, the Vinson would have been 3,500 miles away, rather than ready to act.

How did this happen? Was it Trump’s vaunted unpredictability? Nah:

White House officials said on Tuesday they were relying on guidance from the Defense Department. Officials there described a glitch-ridden sequence of events, from a premature announcement of the deployment by the military’s Pacific Command to an erroneous explanation by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis—all of which perpetuated the false narrative that an American armada was racing toward the waters off North Korea.
The confusion might never have become public if not for another miscue: The Navy posted a picture of the Vinson steaming through the Sunda Strait in Indonesia, far from where the White House had placed it—a case of the government failing to take simple steps to cover its own tracks.


The boat blunder is only the latest example of how failure to communicate between units is undermining the Trump administration’s ability to articulate and execute a policy. In this case, the White House blames the Pentagon for providing misleading information and a premature press release, though a fuller story will probably emerge over time. (It’s important to remember that Mattis, a decorated and respected Marine general, was supposed to be one of the more competent figures in an administration full of thin government resumes.)

On Monday, it was the White House and the State Department that were odds. Even as State was expressing concerns about the apparently tainted referendum process that handed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sweeping new powers, Trump was calling Erdogan and offering what appeared, from the White House’s official statement, to be full-throated congratulations on the result, devoid of any concern for electoral legitimacy or worries about Erdogan’s increasingly repressive governance.

Last week, the administration was also making a hash of its messaging on another hotspot, Syria. In the wake of missile strikes against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the world wanted to know what Trump’s strategy in Syria would be. Answers were hard to come by. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said, on the one hand, that “any and all” crimes against innocents would be subject to U.S. punishment and yet that the U.S. expected the political process in Syria to decide Assad’s fate. Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley was saying elsewhere, at the same time, that there was no political solution in sight, and suggesting that the U.S. would pursue a strategy of regime change. Flustered, a spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry asked journalists for help deciphering the American line. “We have to figure out what this country’s strategy is,” Maria Zakharova said. “No one understands it right now. If you do, share your appraisal with us.”


These are not the hallmarks of tactical unpredictability. They are a sign of a government that cannot decide what its strategy is, in which different figures are attempting to make policy via public statements; they are the sign of an administration that cannot effectively communicate within its constituent parts, perhaps because of lack of experienced staff, or perhaps because so much of the executive branch remains badly understaffed. They are, perhaps most importantly, an indication of how Trump is trying to employ his “fake it ’til you make it” campaigning style as a governing technique, too.

But the consequences once you’re actually in office are different. In March, my colleague James Fallows wrote that a credibility crisis hung over Trump’s head like the sword of Damocles:

Something has happened to every new president, and something will happen to Donald Trump. It is inevitable. And when that something occurs, it is also inevitable that his administration will need to say, Trust us on this. That’s in the nature of foreign emergencies.
That particular moment has perhaps not arrived yet, though North Korea seems like one strong contender for the eventual theater. Incidents like the Vinson misdirection show the problem that Trump faces. It’s not just that Americans or other leaders may not take Trump’s honesty for granted; it’s that he risks being unable to follow through and prove himself credible.

As it happens, President Obama faced a somewhat similar situation in 2010. Responding to North Korean provocations, the U.S. was sending the carrier USS George Washington toward the peninsula. Some officials, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wanted to send the Washington close to China, as a way of showing strength to Beijing as well. Obama, Mark Landler reported, overruled them. The ship was already on course; he didn’t want to go around changing that.

“I don’t call audibles with aircraft carriers,” Obama told Clinton and Gates.

Trump, by contrast, is content to call audibles with aircraft carriers. That’s a risky strategy in the best of times, but it’s even more dangerous when the quarterback tends to fumble the snap and his offensive line isn’t working from the same playbook.
https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... er/523458/


The US said this aircraft carrier was near North Korea. Turns out it was 3,500 miles away.
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Apr 18, 2017, 5:11pm EDT

On April 9 — nine days ago — the Trump administration announced that it was sending an aircraft carrier and four accompanying vessels to Korean waters. The strike group was supposed to be doing exercises near Australia, but the administration was diverting it in anticipation of a possible North Korean missile test. The scary implication: The US was putting its warships in place in preparation for a possible strike on North Korea.

Except it turns out there was a bit of an oopsie: Despite Trump’s boast last week that he was “sending an armada” to North Korea, as of Saturday, the carrier group in question was still hanging out with the Australian navy off the coast of Indonesia — 3,500 miles from North Korea.

We know this because the Navy told us. On Saturday, as Defense News’s Christopher Cavas reports, the US Navy publicly released photos of the USS Carl Vinson, the aircraft carrier in said carrier strike group, going through Indonesia’s Sunda Strait. Cavas called up Defense Department officials, who told him that the Vinson had indeed been in Indonesian waters that day. A subsequent piece by the New York Times, released on Tuesday afternoon, backed up Cavas’s work.

The carrier group is now — finally! — heading to the Korean Peninsula. But the whole bizarre incident is a useful reminder not to overstate the risk of military conflict in North Korea.

Calm down about North Korea, people
It’s not clear, as of right now, how the Trump administration and the Defense Department got their wires crossed on this one. The Times story puts the blame on the Defense Department, though in somewhat vague terms.


“White House officials said on Tuesday they were relying on guidance from the Defense Department,” the Times’s Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt write. “Officials there described a glitch-ridden sequence of events, from a premature announcement of the deployment by the military’s Pacific Command to an erroneous explanation by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — all of which perpetuated the false narrative that an American armada was racing toward the waters off North Korea.”

It’s worth noting here that the Trump administration has not yet appointed a Pentagon press secretary. If that position had been in place, it’s possible this snafu could have been corrected much more quickly than it was.

Regardless of how the bizarre error happened, however, it’s a good opportunity for a deep breath — and to take stock of what’s actually happening with the North.

While there’s been a lot of noise, both from Washington and Pyongyang, the truth is there’s no tangible evidence that the two countries are at risk of imminent conflict. The only such piece of evidence so far was a thinly sourced NBC News report last Thursday claiming that the US was preparing to launch a preemptive strike on North Korea — a report that was quickly shot down by numerous defense and intelligence officials and dismissed by essentially everyone else who covers the issue.

News reports on North Korea tend to sound a whole lot scarier than the situation usually turns out to be. The Kim regime is notoriously secretive, which makes it very difficult to ascertain its real thinking on any key issues.

“THE MEDIA-DRIVEN WAR HYSTERIA OF LATE IS LIKE NOTHING I'VE SEEN BEFORE”
The North also likes to make absurdly over-the-top threats that it has no intention of actually carrying out but that sound really scary — like the time it threatened to “mercilessly destroy” Seth Rogen for making a comedy film about assassinating Kim Jong Un. And the international press has a longstanding habit of relying on dubious sources to relay outlandish tails from the North, because hyping up North Korea’s scary weirdness is a great way to generate clicks and sell papers.

Combine this with the fact that the situation on the Korean Peninsula is genuinely worrisome, and what you get is constant sense of doom and imminent war. This is especially true now that Donald Trump, who has said threatening things about North Korea and made unpredictability into a major part of his geopolitical strategy, is in the White House.

The carrier group being suddenly diverted to North Korea was thus taken as a sign that we were on the brink of war.

Yet it wasn’t: When war fears were hitting their peak late last week, the carrier group wasn’t sitting in the waters off North Korea prepping for a military strike — it was 3,500 miles away doing a planned military exercise with the Australian navy and having its picture taken.

This was yet more misinformation about a conflict that’s already full of it — another reminder that information about the Korean conflict is often wrong, misstated, or misleading (a warning that goes double when you have a dramatically understaffed Pentagon PR team).

That’s not to say that there’s no risk when it comes to North Korea: An insular, nuclear-armed rogue state is a scary thing. But genuine experts do not believe we’ve yet reached a point where military conflict is likely, let alone imminent.

“The media-driven war hysteria of late is like nothing I've seen before,” writes Joshua Pollack, a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Relations who studies the Koreas.

This whole incident is a good reminder for all of us — journalists, analysts, and news consumers alike: Next time you hear scary-sounding reports about being on the brink of war with North Korea, take a deep breath and make sure to check what sober-minded experts are saying before hitting the panic button (or the Facebook share one).
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/4/18/1534 ... -korea-not


Was everyone lying about the "ARMADA" or were they unaware?

Unpredictable. Unhinged. Dangerous - Asian Countries Look Warily At Trump

Alex Brandon
ByKIM TONG-HYUNGPublishedAPRIL 19, 2017, 8:58 AM EDT
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Unpredictable. Unhinged. Dangerous.

Many South Koreans are using those words to describe the president of their most important ally, rather than the leader of their archrival to the North. They worry that President Donald Trump’s tough, unorthodox talk about North Korea’s nuclear program is boosting already-high animosity between the rival Koreas.

No matter whether Trump succeeds at getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons and missile programs, his actions, comments and tweets are changing how the region views the long-running conflict. Senior North Korean officials see their relations with Washington as even more volatile than before. China is appealing for calm, and possibly re-examining its role. Japan is weighing a retaliatory strike capability against the North.

___

CHINA

After decades of failure to stop North Korea’s march toward a nuclear arsenal, some see Trump’s bluster as a shrewd attempt to press China, the North’s most important ally and trading partner, into pressuring North Korea more aggressively over its nuclear program.

Trump has said he’s willing to make trade and economic concessions to China in return for its help with North Korea. “A trade deal with the U.S. will be far better for them if they solve the North Korean problem!” Trump said on Twitter, recounting what he told Xi while hosting him this month at his Palm Beach, Florida, resort.

Pulling back from a campaign promise, Trump has also said he would not declare China a currency manipulator, as he looked for help from Beijing.

The rhetoric seems to be blurring the lines between North Korea and economic ties with China, issues that previous U.S. administrations had kept separate.

If such persuasion falls short, Trump has suggested he might use more coercive methods. So-called secondary sanctions on Chinese banks that do business with North Korea could also be in the offing, officials have said.

“Trump is posing a hard choice to Beijing — do something, something about North Korea and hope it generates some effects, or face American economic retaliation,” said Dean Cheng, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “Whether that works or not, it’s a very different strategy from the last three presidents.”

Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University, said that the way U.S. officials describe “maximum pressure and engagement” suggests that the Trump administration wants to ease Chinese fears about a collapse in North Korea, something that prevented Beijing from aggressively pressuring the North in the past.

“If the United States and China can set the tone, there will also be more opportunities for dialogue. It seems Trump could be more willing to cut a deal with North Korea than Obama was,” Koh said.

___

SOUTH KOREA

South Koreans may be uneasy about North Korea’s expanding arsenal of weapons, but many doubt that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, wants to start a war that would likely end in the destruction of his government and the ruling elite. Donald Trump is another story, judging by widespread concern posted on Twitter.

Some see him as a hot-tempered, unpredictable leader who might attack North Korea before it masters the technology to build a nuclear-tipped missile that could hit the U.S. mainland. North Korea is moving steadily toward that goal, and some experts believe it could achieve it during Trump’s presidency.

U.S. strikes earlier this month against Syria, coupled with Trump’s dispatching of what he called an “armada” of U.S. warships to the Korean region, touched off fears that the United States was preparing for military action, though it was revealed this week that the flotilla was taking a roundabout path to Korean waters and has yet to arrive.

Lim Eul Chul, a North Korea expert at South Korea’s Kyungnam University, doesn’t think Trump wants to attack North Korea but said he appears eager to send a message that war is possible.

That has driven North Korea to issue its own threats and begin preparations for “even a 1 percent chance that the U.S. will launch pre-emptive strikes,” Lim said. “That’s just how the authoritarian Kim government survives.”

The Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper said recently that Trump is playing a “dangerous card” with his verbal threats, risking a miscalculation by Pyongyang and a war on the peninsula.

“Trump seems capable of doing anything, and he might choose to strike the North before it’s technologically able to strike back,” said Ray Kim, a 39-year-old Seoul resident. “Even if a war breaks out, it’s not like that war will take place on U.S. soil. Trump has much less to lose.”

___

NORTH KOREA

Trump is clearly on the mind of the North Korean leadership.

A senior Foreign Ministry official told The Associated Press last week that Pyongyang has been watching Trump’s actions — including his recent order for the strike on a Syrian air base and his many tweets about North Korea — and determined that his administration is “more vicious and more aggressive” than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama.

In response, Pyongyang is promising it will continue to build up its “nuclear deterrent” and respond in kind to any hostile moves, perceived or real.

North Korean fury at Washington was rising well before Trump took office, in particular over reports that annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises now include training for precision strikes on the North’s leadership or nuclear and military facilities. Pyongyang’s regime has called that “a red line,” and has since begun its own training for pre-emptive strikes and speeded up its testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

___

JAPAN

Japan is drawing up emergency responses in case of a North Korea missile strike. A number of municipalities are testing community alarm systems and planning evacuation drills as concerns run high around U.S. military bases. Both Japan and South Korea are home to tens of thousands of U.S. troops.

The rising tension has opened the door to debate about once-taboo subjects in Japan, where the disastrous World War II experience and a postwar constitution that renounced the right to use military force have created a strong pacifist streak.

Japan’s ruling party recently urged the government to introduce advanced missile-defense equipment such as a land-based Aegis or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, which is being introduced in South Korea.

Ruling party defense experts have even proposed that Japan lift a self-imposed restraint on conducting a retaliatory strike if attacked, rather than relying solely on the U.S. military.

The steady turning up of the heat on all sides has increased the possibility of a miscalculation that could result in an incident that escalates too quickly to be contained, or even outright conflict.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/asia- ... wary-trump
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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