Gongol.com Archives: March 2019
March 8, 2019
The President has his people "drawing up demands that Germany, Japan and eventually any other country hosting U.S. troops pay the full price of American soldiers deployed on their soil -- plus 50 percent or more for the privilege of hosting them", per a truly insane report from Bloomberg. ■ Even just floating a trial balloon on an idea this stupid is enough to undermine decades of mutual trust and embolden rival powers. That is just Game Theory 101, but yet it's clearly too sophisticated for him to grasp. We are trapped in the President's broken framework for the world -- everything, to him, is literally a one-off transaction. He has shown not a shred of evidence that he thinks any two parties remember what happened in their last interaction. ■ Our military servicemembers are professionals in service of a just and free world, not mercenaries. Our allies are friends, not clients. How he frames this issue is just so very wrong. Anyone who doubts the multiplier effects of alliances among friends ought to read Dwight Eisenhower's memoir of WWII. He makes it plain that accommodating friends was a means of saving resources. If we can't carry over some lessons learned from WWII, we're in huge trouble.
Chicago sportswriter Julie DiCaro says for International Women's Day, "All I want is to have a single day where a man doesn't try to explain something blatantly obvious to me." That seems like it shouldn't be much to ask, and yet it is.
