An Australian reporter explains what we learned about Donald Trump from the G20 meeting. Unfortunately I cannot embed the video for copyright reasons, but click through and page down a bit. The stuff about North Korea is especially apt. Was there anything like it in US media, or are all their sources domestic?
The video fully lives up to Crooks & Liars’s title, BRUTAL: Australian Journalist Sums Up Trump’s G20 Visit In 2 Minutes, which is where I came upon it – except it takes two minutes and eleven seconds.
UPDATE: NYT sez the video has gone ‘viral’ (hate that term, oh well).
Where was this commentary when Obama made a red line that he did not keep, did nothing about North Korea, and entered into the JCPA. I know– it was on Fox News, seems like you are sharing that narrative now…and I know that you would not want to share anything that was created by Fox even if its against Trump. So I guess I am confused
I’m not sure exactly what you are talking about, but I’ll try to respond. No question the Obama ‘red line’-that-wasn’t was a failure, one of many the US has had in Syria. But it came in the context of a general pattern of relative foreign policy success elsewhere, at least as we conventionally measure that thing, not the current foreign policy of malevolence and random ineptitude that seems designed to hurt us, embarrass us, and make the US less relevant.
I don’t know what the TV coverage was like back then, because I didn’t watch any then, but the commentary in print was pretty savage and not without reason. My sense though is that US TV coverage is NEVER EVER like this on the major news networks (and that clip ran on a major mainstream broadcast network in Australia, not a cable propaganda outlet like FOX). Having lived in and visited the UK, I’m aware that their interviewers and commentators are much less deferential to the government than ours our. Both the BBC and the private ITV have been far more willing to savage a politician than anything I ever saw on broadcast TV here.
Then again, if you bluff and your bluff is called, it may not always be wise to follow through if that makes you worse off.
I don’t remember the JCPA foreign policy issue – help? Only JCPA I know of is a private domestic body.
Much more seriously, arguments of the form tu quoque are pretty much always losers. Is that the best you have? For shame.
The JCPA foreign policy issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Action. My post was not so much of an argument as it was a sarcastic comment related to your (maybe rightful) hatred of Fox. Fox bashed Obama for eight years claiming that his foreign policy weakened America’s standing in the world–the very same argument that you liked in this story. And here is a sampling of a similar argument as the Australian journalist in American media: “Instead, they are learning to live with a sometimes capricious American President keen to redefine the West in his own nationalist image, who goes against the consensus of centrist, multilateral international politics, and who is not afraid to pull at the divisions existing within the European Union.
The United States’ step back has left other nations, especially Germany under veteran Chancellor Angela Merkel, to take up the banner of traditional Western leadership — a stunning scenario given Washington’s decades-long role as the most prominent player in global diplomacy.” See http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/08/politics/donald-trump-g20-club-of-one/index.html.
Also, your rationale related to bluffing may be true with your children–but on the world stage, I think its better to act on the bluff even if it makes you worse off in the short run, because it will likely make you stronger (better off) in the long run. But that is a realpolitik theory that you may dislike even more than Fox.
Re the bluffs. I will grant you that you have stated the conventional view. I am not sure, however, that it is always correct, especially from a realist viewpoint. That is the thinking that got us into and kept us in Vietnam for so long; I do think the US would have been much better off it it had pulled out years earlier, bluffs or no bluffs. You get respect for being hard-nosed in realistic defense of your interests, not for doing dumb stuff because you rattled a sabre.