Saturday, January 21, 2017

Past Performances And Future Results


     Now comes the time of “prove you meant it.”



  • “Did he mean it?”
  • “Can he do it?”

     Those questions won’t be fully answered until January 20, 2021.










     There’s room for a lot of trouble there.







  • It assists in the effectuation of “earmarks;”




     There are no guarantees.





sykes.1 said...

First, from the Encyclopedia Britannica,


During that period, the French armies sent to arrest him crossed over to his side, as did most French officials. The term has been appropriated to describe the usually brief honeymoon a new President enjoys.

Second, Putin is obviously not expansionist. If he were, he would have occupied Ukraine and installed a puppet government by now. Crimea does not count as expansion as that was merely the correction of an historical wrong, and it was fully supported by the Crimeans themselves. You might also note Putin's restraint in eastern Ukraine, where he is satisfied to support the separatists' resistance to the Kievan government but not their actual secession.

Russia is not a problem; with Trump it is an opportunity. China is a major problem. China is expansionist. China's industrial sector is substantially superior to our own. China has absolute military supremacy around Taiwan and the East China Sea. Within a decade it will have absolute supremacy everywhere inside the Nine Dash zone, and it will begin to challenge us in the Pacific.

Our current policies towards Russia and China have forced them into an alliance that otherwise would not have happened. China is taking the opportunity we gave it to construct MacKinder's World Island, which will give it world domination, or at least relegate us to a regional power.

Francis W. Porretto said...

I take Putin at his word, Sykes -- and his words are expansionist. Which is not to say that China isn't also a threat, but I can't address the entire geopolitical environment in a 1300 word essay.

As for your "correction of an historical wrong" and "fully supported by the Crimeans themselves" business, I disagree completely. The agreements guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Ukraine, which Putin signed, were written and signed when Crimea was politically part of Ukraine. The large influx of Russians into Crimea that occurred after those agreements -- which, incidentally, robbed Ukraine of the ability to deter Russian aggression -- change nothing, any more than would the influx of Mexicans across our southern border.