Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge The thread formerly known as: Maybe 45 ...

Thanks for taking the time, effort and thought to provide the details. I'll try to stay within the dotted lines in responding and keep our discussion moving forward....

Let me open with totally agreeing that our last president did many things on the world stage with which I took issue. He misused the military as an international police force and gave away more of the US leadership role in so many ways as to be nearly uncountable, however, this was meant to be a discussion of our current president's strengths and weaknesses, so rather than trying to make one look better by comparing him to the other I'd like to focus more on actions versus results for our current president.

I disagree that almost anyone would have been an improvement....we needed a world statesman in office to lead our nation back into a position as world role-model. Someone who could unwind and repair the damages created by past presidents (who shall remain nameless). Someone who could take input from a well-balanced staff of people holding the knowledge and experience that he might not have personally held. Someone who chose the higher path when confronted with conflicting inputs. Someone who wanted to present a consistent message to the world on values, integrity and ability. Someone who understood the deeper impacts of actions and who could anticipate the consequences before the action was presented as a "fait accompli". Someone who could be outraged in private, yet be calm in public.

The Chinese have always taken the long view....on everything. I personally was shot at in the South China Sea as a young sailor, on a US Naval vessel, nearly 50 years ago when our ship transgressed what they felt was their territorial waters (while still in International waters, by the way). Building up those same atolls to become man-made islands, then populating them with military facilities is an action that they have been planning for decades....and we have known about it and had contingency plans in-place for just as long.

Diplomacy regards the status quo as a starting point, not an ending point....and views the pace and scale of change with very cautious regard to consequences. Our current president has not yet shown any regard for the law of unintended consequences in his actions toward other nations, other political entities, his chosen staff, or even the underlying laws and standards that guide him in his duties as the leader of this nation....and when confronted with advice on how to better deal with the very real challenges that he faces, he has chosen to publicly "shoot the messenger". The level of apparent chaos and discord that is publicly displayed in the current administration has hamstrung many long-standing and effective international relationships to the detriment of our nation.

North Korea is and has been an extremely complicated situation....they are still in an active war (an armistice is NOT a treaty) with South Korea and to approach that rogue nation's loose cannon leader while being perceived by the leaders of the the rest of the world as if he too were a loose cannon leader holds way more potential for disaster than any of us want to imagine. I've spent considerable time in Korea and have seen how seriously they take the fact that the peace there is fragile....very fragile.

The Middle East....where to begin? The Western world has been interfering with and attempting to change things in that part of the world for centuries. It remains different from the Western world for a good reason....they want it to be different. Changing national boundaries (Pakistan / India / Jordan / UAE / Israel / all the rest) and assuming that all of those entities in that part of the world will follow the same cultural norms as the Western world is a huge mistake. Most folks here in the US who have never traveled outside of their home nation have a false sense of expectations for how the Middle East thinks and responds. It is different. Recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli capital was not done in the past for some very good reasons.....there will be consequences for that action as a result. Most of those potential consequences were clearly recognized and considered in the past by knowledgeable advisors to past presidents, who were then expected to make an informed decision regarding what action(s) to take.....I'm not convinced that our current president was open to such advice.

Our current president did NOT defeat and eliminate ISIS....any more than any of his predecessors were successful in defeating and eliminating the Taliban or Al Qaeda. We as a nation created the environment where the ISIS movement could flourish and expand in the view that through their actions (or inactions) as a nation, the US was a weak and inadequate outside influence to their region. We as a nation were responsible for creating the diplomatic alliances needed to bring effective military action into the region to overcome our past mistake(s). How we are viewed as a nation by other world leaders, European, Pan Asian, Middle Eastern, et al (BOTH our allies AND our adversaries) is critical to how effective our efforts might be when confronted by such things as ISIS.

I lived and worked in Turkey and one of the most common questions that I was asked was "What do you feel about your new President?".....to be culturally sensitive, I had to bite my lips and remain very neutral in my response while suppressing my urge to offer the same question to my Turkish friends about their "President". When the political climate there became too unstable, I had to turn my back on further work in Turkey....theirs is a challenging time, far more so than ours.

As to NATO, while I may not agree with his actions regarding our NATO relationships, I do agree with our President's analysis that our relationship, as a nation, with NATO is out of balance and change is needed.....I just think that there might be better ways to approach that need than I've seen demonstrated so far.

I really regret that we, again as a Nation, have been unable to present a consistent face to the rest of the world as we address the issues currently confronting us.

One of the predecessors to our current president once declared that, "The Buck Stops HERE!".....it wouldn't hurt my feelings to see that level of leadership once more in my lifetime.