Posted on 09/13/2019 7:30:36 PM PDT by rintintin
President Donald Trump ousted John Bolton in part due to frustration with his third national security adviser’s guidance to pair military power with economic pressure against Venezuela, according to current and former administration officials.
One senior administration official said that Trump had grown weary of repeated vows from Bolton that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be out of office in short order. A second official said that they had clashed over Bolton’s efforts to advance planning for military intervention.
That official pointed to the administration’s national security strategy, which predated Bolton’s tenure and called for “strong diplomatic engagement” to isolate rogue nations in the Western Hemisphere. “That has been and remains the policy,” the official told McClatchy, although officials across the administration insist that all options are on the table.
Bolton left the White House on Tuesday over several bitter disputes with the president and Cabinet members.
“I disagreed with John Bolton on his attitudes on Venezuela – I thought he was way out of line,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
(Excerpt) Read more at mcclatchydc.comhttps: ...
“The difference with the Cuban Missile Crisis is there were serious men in charge of the situation on both sides.”
The other REALLY BIG difference is that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba aimed at the U.S. and which would take just a few seconds from launch until landing on U.S. targets, thereby making them indefensible ... this was a direct, gigantic, and unacceptable threat to the security of the U.S. ...
Isn’t there a stockpile of M1-Garands in South Korea that need a new home?
That’s true, but once again that story usually misses the fact that Soviet action was reciprocal to the deployment of similar US PGM-19 missiles in Turkey aimed at USSR. And the crisis ended exactly the moment Kennedy agreed to remove it.
The situation is exactly the same now.
“There are millions of people there that voted against both Chavez and Maduro that are suffering.”
it is NOT the responsibility of the U.S. to alleviate suffering in the world, especially when said suffering is the consequence of free, democratic elections as was the case with the original Chavez election ... a majority of voters in Venezuela voted for an avowed socialist and reaped the miseries that always come with socialism ...
it is NOT the responsibility of the U.S. to effect “regime change”
it is NOT the responsibility of the U.S. to foster “nation building”
it is NOT the responsibility of the U.S. to act as the “world’s policeman”
it is NOT the responsibility of the U.S. to impose our morality on the world
Ditto and ditto
True enough. If US wants its soft power back it should lead by example. The ongoing coup in DC makes poor background for lecturing the World about democratic values.
> The other REALLY BIG difference is that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba aimed at the U.S. <
And the U.S. had nuclear weapons in Turkey. That was right on the border with the USSR. Now, I’m not saying that JFK was wrong here. Quite the contrary. He played his hand perfectly.
But if you want to talk about Cuba in 1962, you should also consider how the Soviets viewed things: The U.S. has nuclear weapons in Turkey. Many a war has started because one side did not understand how the other side thought. World War I is a good example of that.
It seems to me that "US bases everywhere" was a result of WWII and Europe's inability to defend itself. It wasn't a violation of the Monroe Doctrine to come to the rescue of Europe or lose it to Nazism. The same for AsiaPac and Imperial Japan.
Setting that aside, there is the real issue of EuroAsia incursion into the Caribbean via Russian support of Cuba as proxy into Venezuela. This is what the Monroe Doctrine was supposed to guard against, right?
American hegemony over the North an South America, NATO hegemony over Western Europe, and Soviet hegemony over Asia?
Liberals like Clinton, Kerry, and Obama have blurred the lines in the sand over the past few decades, and we've seen the rise of China, the fall of Egypt, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, the rise of terrorism in Europe, the loss of national identity across the EU, and now Russian incursion into Cuba and Venezuela.
So, I don't fault Bolton for raising a concern. Hopefully, President Trump has a vision, if not a coherent plan, for how to deal with this. Maybe he's thinking that time is on his side, that he has other more pressing needs at the moment (like the border, the Democrat coup, righting the court, 2020...).
Let's hope that's the case, that the President can stall incursion into Venezuela long enough to get some stability at the border, to flush out the Democrats, to get China to play nice for awhile, to win in 2020, and then take on the Venezuela Problem.
Anyway... that's my top-of-mind though on this.
-PJ
Kerry officially ended the monroe doctrine. So time for a new one.
You just liked his stash. And you thought he could kick some ass. I could go on, but then we would be in a poem.
No nuclear anilalation yet. Must be doing something right.
> It seems to me that “US bases everywhere” was a result of WWII and Europe’s inability to defend itself. <
I agree, to a certain extent. But I recently read an article that said much of America’s current foreign affairs problems stem from the year 1945. We defeated the Axis so decisively that we thought ourselves to be invincible. We could - and should - be a major force everywhere.
The Romans felt the same way. And so did Napoleon. And so did the British. And those folks all ended up the same way.
So I think America should pick and choose its interventions carefully. There is a mistake in doing too little. But there is also a mistake in doing too much.
Russia agreed to neutral Europe around 1990 making NATO absolete. It doesn’t have resources to try to dominate Europe militarily or establish dependent walfare states in East Europe nor it wants any of this because trading with neutral Europe is just more beneficial for Russia than trying to enslave it even if Russia had the means for the latter. Neutral Europe in its current form pose no military threat to Russia as well.
There is no source of tensions if not for NATO which is now a self-liking ice-cream cone and a drain on US resources.
Western Europe realizes it full well.
I care, but not enough to send troops or really anything else. The country’s people need to learn their lesson the hard way and then rebuild and never again go down this path.
They need their “rock bottom” and need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They’ve already spent everyone else’s money and confiscated everyone else’s property. That was the rest of the world’s “caring,” done up front.
Let them deal with it.
The problem of 1945 was that US assumed to role of British Empire and entered a Cold War picking the ungoing ‘Great Game’ from UK which was a strategic rivalry between UK and Russian Empire over the control of Middle East and South Asia since 18th century.
Alternative history is a tricky thing and it is hard to argue was it right or wrong but it was at least justified by the fact that Russia was running an ideologically hostile bloc at the time.
Although it is a big ‘if’ would the Soviets be that assertive at the time if not for the Cold War declared by Churchill and not by them. Stalin has pulled the plug on Commintern early in the war and global dominance wasn’t on menu. The only inportant international goal was to force US and UK to agree to the creation of Israel which was his way to reward support from Hollywood and NYC Rosenbergs types.
The Roman Empire arrived around 1992 with Wolfowitz Doctrine when checks and balances were off. The US diplomacy started to die about that time. If you are to look closely the result is that US don’t have allies anymore. Only puppets or enemies. And it is a very costly setup. And the nation is basically hijacked by globalists with their vision of the brave new world.
Concur. Squash those nazis, fascists, and commies like cockroaches
If history tells something the big war is on horizon. The way things are going currently won’t end peacefully
Well, the “world’s policeman” thing, and the “impose our morality” thing were US policy for several decades after the second world war, like it or not.
That you deny this says far more about you than it does about the rest of the world, and the United States.
Good catch.
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