Bolton Joins Trump Inner Circle

Bolton a Good Choice for These Times——————–

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s choice to replace Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster as national security advisor, frequently wears a mournful expression, sometimes viewed as angry, and made to appear more so by his thick white moustache. This undoubtedly contributes to his reputation among our liberal friends at home and abroad as a hardliner which, in fact, he is. But the intelligent and experienced Mr. Bolton is an excellent choice to join the president’s inner circle at this juncture, just as Mike Pompeo is to succeed Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.

 

Mr. Bolton is a no-nonsense realist who demonstrated as ambassador to the United Nations and as undersecretary of state that he will always put America’s security first. His appointment sends a message to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un that the U.S. will not waiver from its insistence on a de-nuclearized Korea and will do whatever it takes to ensure it. Bolton who had previously been considered for secretary of state, will not require senate confirmation for this post which is fortunate because he most certainly would have been “Borked” by senate liberals and doves.

 

Liberals and peace-at-any-price foreign diplomats fear that Bolton and Pompeo will have the president’s ear. They will, of course, but they won’t own it. Nobody does. Donald Trump likes to surround himself with advisors who are willing to present opinions contrary to his and he has demonstrated this repeatedly. But if they won’t support his final decisions, he will not hesitate to fire them which he has also repeatedly demonstrated. Besides, he still has plenty of advisors who will advocate a more restrained approach, such as Jim Mattis, his secretary of defense, whose “Mad Dog” nickname belies his cautious tendencies, just as Bolton’s stern countenance leads some to believe he is perpetually angry.

 

Hardliners like Peter Navarro on trade, Pompeo at state and Bolton as national security advisor will help Trump serve notice that the U.S. will no longer allow itself to be pushed around on matters of trade, foreign relations and security. They also allow Trump to play the “good cop” role should that be useful in advancing American interests. This is a welcome change after eight years of the previous administration’s retreat from world leadership.

 

Many European leaders and opinion makers fretted anxiously over the Bolton appointment, recalling his sometimes belligerent stance at the UN when criticizing its fecklessness and unfair resolutions against Israel and the U.S.  Let them fret. They are not the targets of Kim’s missiles. American forces, ships and bases in South Korea and Japanese and American cities are. We have no choice but to take them seriously. Only a fool would ignore threats of nuclear weapons attacks from a deranged dictator who murders opponents and starves his own people in order to maintain a huge and unneeded army and nuclear weapons program.

 

Bolton apparently believes that regime change in Pyongyang is necessary. That is simply facing reality. The Kim regimes have never kept their word and there is absolutely no reason to believe they ever will. Regime change is clearly needed and that simply won’t happen as a result of more diplomacy. But it needn’t require a preemptive attack on North Korea, either. The key lies with China and Russia who must shut down their borders with North Korea. That, combined with an American-led military quarantine can starve the Kim regime into agreeing to give up nuclear weapons and submit to unrestricted inspections to verify that they have.

 

With these appointments, Mr. Trump is signaling Mr. Kim that if the summit actually takes place he had better be prepared to discuss the logistics and timetable for surrendering his nuclear weapons, dismantling the means to produce them and submitting to unrestricted inspections by American, South Korean and Japanese inspectors to verify these things have been done. Otherwise, we will have nothing to talk about and the summit will be over.

March 25, 2018

Trump to Meet with Kim

Rocket Man Meets the Deal Maker-in-Chief————————————

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

President Donald Trump continues to surprise the world and his own administration by agreeing to accept Kim Jong Un’s invitation to a summit meeting. By finally achieving the long-sought goal and prestige of a face-to-face meeting with the chief of state of the world’s most powerful nation and largest economy, North Korea’s ruthless dictator will have won a major victory whether or not he wins any other concessions without giving up anything in return except a promise to cease nuclear weapons testing for now.

 

`               The U.S. has consistently insisted that North Korea give up its quest to become a nuclear power but that train has already left the station, thanks to the fecklessness of the previous administration which left the problem for Mr. trump to solve. Kim now feels emboldened to demand a place at the table with the big boys and a meeting with the biggest of them will win him more respectability, especially among his starving subjects.

 

If the meeting actually takes place, he will undoubtedly demand that the United States withdraw its forces from the Korean peninsula, perhaps in return for a freeze on further nuclear testing. He will never give up his current nuclear arsenal or he would risk losing the support of his generals. This would result in a Korean peninsula, unified or otherwise, dominated by Pyongyang. Without U.S. forces, South Korea’s army would be no match for the north. The Korean War, in which U.S. troops fought and died, would finally end with a U.S./U.N. defeat and South Korea’s loss of sovereignty. The U.S., of course, cannot agree to such terms and if this becomes Mr. Kim’s firm position, Trump must respond that it will never happen and we are done with negotiations. Sanctions will continue and will be intensified, enforced with a naval blockade or quarantine if necessary, until Pyongyang agrees to give up its nukes and submit to unrestricted inspections to ensure compliance. No more meetings.

 

Mr. Trump may be experienced in negotiating real estate deals but there is little correlation between those skills and conducting matters of state, especially where brinksmanship may be involved. There are serious military risks involved when adversaries with nuclear weapons at their command meet. Has Mr. Trump consulted with other stakeholders like Japan or even his own military advisors? Firing his chief diplomat, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in advance of the meeting would suggest some serious disagreements exist among his top advisors. Summit meetings are usually preceded by careful planning and preliminary meetings to set the agenda and determine if a summit is even warranted. Trump has a well-deserved reputation for being impulsive and emotional, traits that are not useful in meetings like this with so much at stake. He may feel obligated to come away with some kind of deal that he can call a victory.

 

What’s wrong, you ask, with the two men just sitting down face-to-face and trying to reach a solution to a serious problem that presents an existential threat to America’s security? Well, plenty because a lot can go wrong at a meeting between two emotional and impulsive men. Besides, there is really only one acceptable solution and it doesn’t require much negotiation or a summit meeting. That would be for Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons program and submit to unrestricted inspections to verify compliance. After that has been done, and only then, should there be meetings to end sanctions and establish normal diplomatic relations.

 

We have negotiated with the Kims before, albeit not at the summit. Those negotiations have only benefited Pyongyang by lifting sanctions and buying time to develop and test nuclear weapons. They have never kept their promises before and there is absolutely no reason to believe they will this time. If these talks prove fruitless, and they will, Kim will be hailed at home as a hero for standing up to the American bully and America will be criticized for being unwilling to make concessions.

March 21, 2018

Keeping Schools Safe

 

Making School Campuses Safe Zones———————–

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

The post-Parkland school shooting sequence of events has turned out to be pretty similar to those which followed previous school shootings. There has been much discussion, mostly demands, concerning the need to act to prevent future school shootings but little consensus regarding how to do it. Here are some incontrovertible facts. Laws prohibiting the sale or consumption of alcohol did not prevent either. Declaring drugs to be illegal did not prevent an ongoing drug addiction epidemic. Passing laws to prevent illegal immigration did not stop it. Legislation to prevent distracted driving did not stop texting while driving. I predict, therefore, that tougher gun control laws will not stop school shootings. Like drugs, we have an abundance of guns in the country and they will be available to those determined to get them. Even if you disagree with that prediction, do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to the safety of our children?

 

This time will be different, you say. People are fed up and are demanding action. Even the students are demanding action. But getting stricter gun control legislation passed will be difficult and time consuming because there is little agreement among the states and even within the states on what will work and there is widespread concern that law enforcement can only react to such crimes, not prevent them. What the voters in, say, liberal California or New York may accept in the way of gun control legislation is quite different from what could pass in, say, Texas or Georgia and gun control legislation is largely a state matter.

 

The federal government might be able to get a few laws through Congress like prohibiting the sale of fully-automatic, military style weapons that fire a continuous stream of rounds while the trigger is depressed or the sale of bump stocks which convert semi-automatic weapons, which fire one round for each trigger squeeze, into fully-automatic weapons but even that may be a hard sell. That shouldn’t stop Congress from trying, however. Congress should also try to enact legislation to increase the minimum age for owning a firearm to 21. Opponents will argue, of course, that a person old enough to vote or serve in the military should be permitted to own a firearm. It’s a bogus argument. Members of the armed forces are trained to use firearms in combat or security scenarios, normally under some degree of supervision, not in public. With respect to voting, that’s an apples and oranges comparison.

 

Clearly, something needs to be done now so let’s focus on what can actually get done now. The objective here is to save the lives of our students, not to cater to adult biases regarding the pros and cons of gun ownership and what the Second Amendment really means. Gun control legislation takes time and may not work. Consider how well it has worked in the murder capitals of the U.S. like Chicago and Washington, D.C. We must deal with the dangers our students are exposed to the same way we dealt with security at airports and some public facilities, to wit, by controlling access and providing trained security guards. Yes, we all hate the idea of turning our campuses into armed camps but that’s the world we live in today, folks, and we helped make it that way. Now we need to protect our kids by whatever it takes.

 

Please don’t tell me that arming teachers who agree to be armed and undergo training will destroy the student-teacher relationship or increase tension and fear in the classroom. There’s already fear in some classrooms and among parents who wonder if their child may be the next victim or traumatized survivor. Having some pilots armed and air marshals on board some flights didn’t increase tension among passengers. It made them feel safer. The kids can handle this. They are resilient. They will welcome a trained security guard and they don’t need to know which teachers may be armed.

 

A potential school shooter will be far less likely to target a school with controlled access, metal detectors, one or more trained armed guards and the possibility that every classroom just may contain armed, trained teachers who will act to defend their students. Yes, it will add to the cost of operating schools and yes no one is happy about doing this but it isn’t about us. It’s about the kids and their safety. They deserve a safe space and that wouldn’t be a so-called gun-free zone.

March 13, 2018

(Kelly is a freelance writer based in Coronado. He is a former teacher and instructor with undergraduate and doctoral degrees in education.)

A Dangerous Path

A Real Clear and Present Danger——————

                A commentary

By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

The Wall Street Journal is a conservative newspaper and its opinion pieces usually reflect a conservative philosophy. Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened my daily copy to the opinion section and found a column bearing the headline “The Clear and Present Danger of Trump” by William A. Galston who authors the Journal’s “Politics & Ideas” column.

 

Galston is the Journal’s token liberal columnist but still, I never thought I’d see a headline like that even in the newspaper’s opinion section. Mr. Galston calls into question President Donald Trump’s ability to discharge his powers as president. He refers specifically to a recent weekend twitter outburst during which Trump downplayed the significance of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Says Galston, the president regards any affirmation of such meddling as an attack on the legitimacy of his election, not surprising given the Democratic obsession with Russian meddling and alleged Trump collusion.

 

When the president’s own national security advisor stated that “the evidence is now incontrovertible” that the Russians did, in fact, meddle, he therefor incurred the wrath of Mr. Trump and so Galston declared that Trump repeatedly takes the word of Vladimir Putin over the judgment of the entire U.S. intelligence community. “That Mr. Trump thinks this way,” writes Galston, “poses a clear and present danger”. This is a leap to judgment of heroic proportions, even for an opinion writer.

 

The question, continues Mr. Galston, is what to do about it. It is time, he says, for the secretaries of state and defense, along with the national security advisor, to confront the president and threaten to resign unless he publically affirms the reality of the Russian threat and authorizes “the strongest possible response to it”. While Galston doesn’t specify what that might be, I should think that it would involve armed conflict, perhaps war. Journalists are often prone to overstatement but isn’t that a bit extreme, especially when there is a lot of disagreement over the severity of the Russian threat. Powerful nations, including the U.S., have meddled in the elections of other nations throughout modern history. Moreover, the investigators have made it clear that there is no evidence that the meddling affected the election results, much to the disappointment of the anti-Trumpsters.

 

Mr. Galston says that 46% of the American people made a mistake electing Trump to the highest office in the land and that he is incapable of discharging his duties. This is, to put it mildly, a harsh and unsubstantiated judgment about a man presiding over a booming economy with full employment and the world’s strongest and finest military; a country which most of the world’s downtrodden would choose over all others to migrate to if they could. He goes on to say that there is another alternative to confronting Mr. Trump with an ultimatum. Section 4 of the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution gives to the vice-president, with the concurrence of a majority of the cabinet, the authority to declare the president unable to discharge the power and duties of the office, leaving it up to the Congress to resolve the matter.

 

Let me be clear. I did not vote for Donald Trump. During the popularity contest that was the GOP nominating campaign, I referred to candidate Trump as a buffoon and wrote repeatedly that it was time to dump Trump. That political preference, of course, did not prevail and enough Republicans, desperate for a change in Washington, nominated a colorful but unqualified TV celebrity as their candidate for the world’s most powerful office. Against all odds he won, not because of Russian meddling but because of a terrible campaign by a deeply flawed Democratic candidate plus some last-minute meddling by the then-FBI director. I am not a Trump supporter but I am a supporter of the office of the president and the democratic election process.

 

Mr. Galston says that invoking Section 4 of the 25^th Amendment is a “starker alternative” which would trigger a political crisis and no one should contemplate it lightly. I’ll say they shouldn’t. If we were to pursue that route, many of the 46% that voted for Mr. Trump would not take kindly to having their votes nullified and I am afraid that we would witness something far bigger than a political crisis. I’m thinking it would actually present a real clear and present danger.

February 28, 2018