Wishing for a Tank-Free Fourth
It could be worse. There’s always James Buchanan.
By Gail Collins
July 3, 2019
Happy Fourth of July, everybody. I want you to have a great day. No moaning about the state of the nation.
Don’t obsess about Donald Trump! It’s true he thought watching a bunch of tanks roll through Washington, D.C., would be a great way of celebrating our national character. Fortunately, it turned out the city streets couldn’t support his vision. The military came up with a compromise, dragging in tanks and other tanklike vehicles on flatbed trucks, in a very expensive show totally unrelated to their actual function.
Some people might think of this as a metaphor for the whole Trump administration. Feel free. It’s Independence Day.
This is a moment when we’re meant to think about our founding fathers, and it’s good to remember the warts along with the heroics. We celebrate Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence, who risked everything to throw off the yoke of British tyranny. But he was also a rich kid who inherited a fortune from his father and then lost most of it due to business ineptitude.
Pause to contemplate whether that reminds you of anybody we know.
The Declaration of Independence was actually written by a committee of five — besides Jefferson there was John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York. Franklin was 70 at the time — younger than Joe Biden! We don’t remember much about the last two, and perhaps you could look them up as a holiday project.
As a start, I can tell you they were both great citizens who would never have staged a parade in their own honor with taxpayer money.
Besides being a military hero, George Washington set the country on its course to democracy by quashing talk about making him king after the Revolution and refusing to allow his fellow citizens to call him “Your Excellency.”
We will stop here for a second to recall that Donald Trump’s friendship with Kim Jong-un got a big boost when Kim wrote Trump a letter referring to him as “Your …” Well, you can guess.
Although Trump has taken only a few steps into North Korea, he must have seen those massive military parades in Kim’s honor and maybe gotten a little jealous. Back in 2017, when he made his first official visit to France, Trump was wowed when he got to join President Emmanuel Macron reviewing the Bastille Day parade. There was something about all those guys with guns marching past you.
We’ve been careening toward tankification ever since. It’s really a shame he didn’t start his presidency with a visit to Indonesia, where they celebrate Independence Day with pole-climbing contests.
Trump is sort of the anti-George Washington, a president who thinks everything should be about him, including holidays. Last year, when he was asked the traditional Thanksgiving question about what he was most grateful for, the answer almost instantly turned to, um, himself. (“I’ve made a tremendous difference in the country. This country is so much stronger now than it was when I took office that you wouldn’t believe it.”)
Well, he did pardon the turkeys.
Maybe we should feel lucky that the special parade plans weren’t a lot worse. Imagine the possibilities. We could have Ivanka skipping along in front, tossing flowers to the common folk while Jared follows behind on a leash.
The president doesn’t think the whole affair is going to be very expensive — after all, the government already has a bunch of tanks and planes. “All we need is the fuel,” explained the man whose first term is going to run up a $5 trillion deficit.
We’ve had Independence Day celebrations at the White House since Jefferson’s time, and some have worked out better than others. In 1845, when James Polk was president, wayward fireworks killed two bystanders. Polk was not really a lucky guy. When he was a teenager, he was operated on for a urinary stone removal without anesthetics, and it’s possible the procedure left him impotent. I am telling you all this as a reminder that there’s a whole lot more to our national history than military hardware.
Exactly 50 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day. They had been huge rivals, but in retirement they started exchanging letters and became friends. It’s a lovely story, right? And I believe it’s true, even though it was a lot easier to manipulate political legends back in the days before the Freedom of Information Act, which was signed into law on July 4, 1966.
We’ve had a lot of great moments and national heroes, but the best thing about the American story is how we’ve moved forward even through totally terrible administrations. This is a country that elected Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But it also survived Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and Warren Harding.
Enjoy the fireworks and drink a toast to awful presidents. If we got through James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Watergate, we can probably get through anything.
Which is pretty much our current challenge.
Happy Independence Day.
Democrats Childishly Resist Trump’s North Korea Efforts - By Nicholas Kristof
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/opinion/north-korea-summit-trump-kim.html?emc=edit_th_180607&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=599149230607
June 6, 2018
Shock! Horror! President Trump is actually doing something right.
Sadly, Democrats in Congress are responding in a quite Trumpian way: They seem more concerned with undermining him than supporting a peace process with North Korea. They are on the same side as National Security Adviser John Bolton, quietly subverting attempts to pursue peace.
While international security is complicated, here’s a rule of thumb: When you find yourself on the same side as Bolton, go back and re-examine your position.
Sure, we all wish that Trump treated Justin Trudeau or Angela Merkel with the respect that he now shows Kim Jong-un. Yes, it seems that Trump has been played by Kim. Yet another way of putting it is that Trump is finally investing in the kind of diplomatic engagement that he used to denounce, and that we should all applaud.
Trump’s newfound pragmatism is infinitely preferable to the threat of nuclear war that used to hang over all of us, so it’s mystifying to see Democrats carping about any possible North Korea deal.
“Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal,” seven Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer, warned in a letter to Trump this week.
The letter also insisted on “anywhere, anytime” inspections of suspected North Korean nuclear sites, as well as those linked to its chemical and biological warfare programs.
It’s almost unimaginable that North Korea will allow such intrusive inspections — any country would resist having an enemy poke around its military bases, underground bomb shelters and border fortifications. So these Democrats are essentially saying that no plausible deal will pass muster.
“The Democrats have gone overboard in the conditions they listed in the letter,” said Joel Wit, a North Korea watcher at the Stimson Center in Washington. “If they’re serious, it’s a prescription for failure because no one could achieve the conditions. It’s maybe payback for everything they were dealt in the Iran deal.”
“It’s like role reversal,” Wit added. “For years Democrats criticized Republicans for not wanting to engage North Korea. Now that Republicans want to engage North Korea, the Democrats are preparing to criticize them.”
Aside from Schumer, the Democratic senators who signed the letter are Sherrod Brown, Richard Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Robert Menendez and Mark Warner.
I appreciate that it’s galling for Democrats to see Trump present himself as a great strategist who has forced North Korea to knuckle under. White House aide Larry Kudlow boasted on Fox News: “North Korea coming to the negotiating table has a lot do with President Trump’s very firm stand.”
Poppycock. North Korean leaders have been eager for decades to meet with an American president; it’s just that no previous president agreed for fear of legitimizing the regime. It’s actually Trump who has made stunning compromises — holding a get-acquainted summit with Kim without any prospect of near-term denuclearization.
The real hero here is South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who shrewdly used the Olympics to kick-start the peace process. Trump and Kim won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize, but if the peace process survives, Moon will be a worthy recipient.
For decades, especially after Bill Clinton’s 1994 “Agreed Framework” with North Korea, it was conservative Republicans who were the spoilers on nuclear deals with North Korea and Iran alike.
This G.O.P. petulance was bad for America. Bolton helped kill the Agreed Framework, so that North Korea hugely expanded its weapons program. Similar petulance led Trump and Bolton to try to destroy the Iran nuclear deal this spring; as a result, Iran this week announced that it was increasing its uranium enrichment capacity. Boy, that went well.
Now a similar partisan petulance seems to be turning some Democrats into spoilers. Trump’s engagement with North Korea has been chaotic and should have begun with working-level talks, but it’s still better for leaders to exchange handshakes than missiles.
Granted, there’s plenty of reason to be nervous about Trump’s deal making with North Korea, and plans can still collapse. How will Trump manage Kim when he can’t even manage a summit with the Philadelphia Eagles?
Still, even if North Korea won’t hand over nuclear weapons in the next few years, I can imagine it committing in coming months to a sustained moratorium on nuclear tests and long-range missile tests, on production of plutonium and uranium fuel, on transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, such as Syria. North Korea might also destroy an ICBM or two and accept inspectors at its nuclear sites in Yongbyon. Trump and Kim might agree to exchange liaison offices and to declare peace on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea might well cheat, and these are half-steps, not rapid denuclearization. But half-steps toward peace are better than full strides toward war.
June 6, 2018
Shock! Horror! President Trump is actually doing something right.
Sadly, Democrats in Congress are responding in a quite Trumpian way: They seem more concerned with undermining him than supporting a peace process with North Korea. They are on the same side as National Security Adviser John Bolton, quietly subverting attempts to pursue peace.
While international security is complicated, here’s a rule of thumb: When you find yourself on the same side as Bolton, go back and re-examine your position.
Sure, we all wish that Trump treated Justin Trudeau or Angela Merkel with the respect that he now shows Kim Jong-un. Yes, it seems that Trump has been played by Kim. Yet another way of putting it is that Trump is finally investing in the kind of diplomatic engagement that he used to denounce, and that we should all applaud.
Trump’s newfound pragmatism is infinitely preferable to the threat of nuclear war that used to hang over all of us, so it’s mystifying to see Democrats carping about any possible North Korea deal.
“Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal,” seven Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer, warned in a letter to Trump this week.
The letter also insisted on “anywhere, anytime” inspections of suspected North Korean nuclear sites, as well as those linked to its chemical and biological warfare programs.
It’s almost unimaginable that North Korea will allow such intrusive inspections — any country would resist having an enemy poke around its military bases, underground bomb shelters and border fortifications. So these Democrats are essentially saying that no plausible deal will pass muster.
“The Democrats have gone overboard in the conditions they listed in the letter,” said Joel Wit, a North Korea watcher at the Stimson Center in Washington. “If they’re serious, it’s a prescription for failure because no one could achieve the conditions. It’s maybe payback for everything they were dealt in the Iran deal.”
“It’s like role reversal,” Wit added. “For years Democrats criticized Republicans for not wanting to engage North Korea. Now that Republicans want to engage North Korea, the Democrats are preparing to criticize them.”
Aside from Schumer, the Democratic senators who signed the letter are Sherrod Brown, Richard Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Robert Menendez and Mark Warner.
I appreciate that it’s galling for Democrats to see Trump present himself as a great strategist who has forced North Korea to knuckle under. White House aide Larry Kudlow boasted on Fox News: “North Korea coming to the negotiating table has a lot do with President Trump’s very firm stand.”
Poppycock. North Korean leaders have been eager for decades to meet with an American president; it’s just that no previous president agreed for fear of legitimizing the regime. It’s actually Trump who has made stunning compromises — holding a get-acquainted summit with Kim without any prospect of near-term denuclearization.
The real hero here is South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who shrewdly used the Olympics to kick-start the peace process. Trump and Kim won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize, but if the peace process survives, Moon will be a worthy recipient.
For decades, especially after Bill Clinton’s 1994 “Agreed Framework” with North Korea, it was conservative Republicans who were the spoilers on nuclear deals with North Korea and Iran alike.
This G.O.P. petulance was bad for America. Bolton helped kill the Agreed Framework, so that North Korea hugely expanded its weapons program. Similar petulance led Trump and Bolton to try to destroy the Iran nuclear deal this spring; as a result, Iran this week announced that it was increasing its uranium enrichment capacity. Boy, that went well.
Now a similar partisan petulance seems to be turning some Democrats into spoilers. Trump’s engagement with North Korea has been chaotic and should have begun with working-level talks, but it’s still better for leaders to exchange handshakes than missiles.
Granted, there’s plenty of reason to be nervous about Trump’s deal making with North Korea, and plans can still collapse. How will Trump manage Kim when he can’t even manage a summit with the Philadelphia Eagles?
Still, even if North Korea won’t hand over nuclear weapons in the next few years, I can imagine it committing in coming months to a sustained moratorium on nuclear tests and long-range missile tests, on production of plutonium and uranium fuel, on transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, such as Syria. North Korea might also destroy an ICBM or two and accept inspectors at its nuclear sites in Yongbyon. Trump and Kim might agree to exchange liaison offices and to declare peace on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea might well cheat, and these are half-steps, not rapid denuclearization. But half-steps toward peace are better than full strides toward war.
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