TICK TOCK

On the one hand, it is still a month until the Inauguration, and Trump has not actually done anything yet as President.  On the other hand, his loose-lipped [or twitchy fingered] remarks about nuclear weapons scare the living daylights out of me.  I do not believe he has a clue what he is saying, but I am damned sure some of the people whispering in his ear, like Steve Bannon, do.  As I have on several occasions explained on this blog, I have been openly and vocally critical of the fundamental orientation of American foreign policy since 1960, and there has in all time not been a single President [with the possible exception of Dwight Eisenhower] who exhibited what I consider an appropriate hesitation to project American military power abroad.  But for most of those fifty-six years, the men in the White House have treated nuclear weapons as essentially unusable [I say most, because the sainted John F. Kennedy brought the world within a hair's breadth of an all out nuclear war, a fact for which I could never forgive him.]

For all his bluster about being unpredictable as a tactic, I do not think Trump has any idea how destructive nuclear weapons are, nor do I think he cares, so long as they do not damage Trump properties.  Trump poses an existential danger to the world, and anyone ostensibly on the left who imagines that his unorthodoxy holds out the possibility of a better American world posture is being seriously delusional.