Chickens coming home to roost department.

The Trump administration has made it crystal clear that they are prepared to call the bluff and a nuclear armed North Korea, especially one with ICMB’s capable of striking major U.S. cities, will not be allowed. [James] Rickards continues:

We relied on deterrence, containment, sanctions, diplomacy, and eventually arms treaties to avoid a nuclear war. Why not do the same with Kim?

President Trump’s National Security Advisor, General H. R. McMaster answered that question at our Washington conclave also.

He said acceptance of a nuclear-armed North Korea is ‘unacceptable’. The U.S. will stop North Korea from acquiring its nuclear capability in the first place rather than learning to live it.^[1]

Regarding “a coming war between the U.S. and North Korea, probably in the next twelve weeks” Mr. Rickards asks:

“How can I be so sure about the timing? The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency told me.”^[2]

This is from Rickards who is someone it’s safe to say is a connected man and he’s quoting some very senior officials as wired into the national security establishment as anyone could hope to be short of being a New York billionaire.

Let’s just file all this under “be that as it may” for now and try to reach for a little perspective. Successive American presidents, not some formless “administrations,” have kicked this N. Korea can down the road at every opportunity and Bill Clinton even unburdened himself in 1994 of a speech about N. Korea that was a boat load of horse feathers from “hi” to “goodbye.”

This was state of the art U.S. military and diplomatic thinking when the U.S. still had pretty much a free hand and Chinese objections to stern American measures could very likely have been dismissed in the interest of overriding American national interests.

HowEVer, it was the stuff of school girl “dear diary” imaginings and since even earlier we’ve done our best to (1) transplant industrial America to China, a communist dictatorship and strategic competitor and (2), thanks to Bill Clinton, improve their missile guidance systems. How much of that missile technology China transferred to N. Korea is anybody’s guess, but I’m guessing ever damn last bit of it. That Bill! Such a strategic thinker. Bill had us charge off into the Balkans to vindicate some vital American interest or another but even that was a failure as Hillary had to brave sniper fire during a visit many years later. So much for pacification.

Europe has decided to turn itself into a third-world African and Muslim hole with vast strategic consequences to the U.S., not least because France might become an Islamic country and its nuclear weapons would fall into Muslim hands. No one loses sleep over this in Foggy Bottom and no one in the U.S. government, to my knowledge, has said “boo” to the Eurotwits about this. No, the Great Drift into Irrelevance placidly continues. Of course, we know why no alarm was raised. It’s because we’re busy importing our own millions of savage and murderous Africans and Muslims ourselves.

We also embarked on an open-ended Dudley Do-Right campaign to straighten out Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Ukraine, all or most of this costing us in the neighborhood of $250 million a day. We and the other morons in NATO effected the murder of Gaddafi who was doing great work to keep the migrant hordes from flooding Europe. Now we have a failed state with tens of thousands of pointless deaths, and the migrant flood.

What the U.S. thought would be the end result of its meddling in Ukraine is anybody’s guess but I’m guessing it didn’t include a referendum in Crimea that caused much heartburn in the ranks of those of the Deep State and neocon persuasion. And we’ve waged aggressive and unconstitutional war on Syria for no announced purpose, let alone an honorable one. Assad, Gaddafi, and Mubarak are precisely the kind of leaders a sane U.S. policy would want to see in place in treacherous and confused M.E. but the full weight of U.S. power was used against them.

At home, the federal and state governments and the MSM cannot bring themselves to say a discouraging word about Islam and the absurdity of its presence on any Western shores,^[3] perseverate about the holy sacrament of foreigner and more foreigners taking jobs from Americans, and cower before resentful blacks, hysterical feminist and kiddie street fighters. Electoral rolls are obviously padded and “one dollar one vote” reigns as the supreme operating principle.

So here we are at an inflection point where we’ve spent decades weakening ourselves, strengthening our enemies, undermining natural allies, ignoring international law, ignoring the Constitution, spinning our wheels in pointless and immoral foreign wars, worshiping homosexuals and horribly sexually confused people, attacking free speech, building the surveillance state, and making ourselves the laughing stock of the world with our pretensions of America “the indispensable nation” and the nation for whose “leadership” the world hungers.

We're the world’s preeminent military power, so we’re told, which poses the question of the hour, to wit, "For what purpose are we going to use this power now that we are faced with something that really is heart-stopping? Or can the can be kicked down the road some more? Does nuclear nonproliferation mean anything and does it matter that a vicious communist aberration nation is on the verge of presenting a threat to a United States of America hitherto unreachable by insignificant national jokes?

After decades of utterly un-serious foreign and domestic policies, are we capable of embracing serious ones? We spent and spend untold millions to “rid” the world of mild autocrats but what will we now do when it’s an honest-to-God, vicious communist dictatorship that, arguably, poses a real existential threat? Maybe the tough-talking Her Nikkiness will draw on her vast strategic insights gained as governor of S. Carolina and fan of the Home Shopping Channel and show us the way.

Notes
^[1] "Intelligence Insider Warns Of Imminent War: 'Likely In The Next 12 Weeks...'." By Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com, ZeroHedge, 12/29/17.
^[2] Id.
^[3] Samir Khan, a US citizen and Al Qaeda member . . . : “I am a traitor to America because my religion requires me to be. We pledge to wage jihad for the rest of our lives until either we implant Islam all over the world or meet our Lord as bearers of Islam.” Quoted in “Tariq Ramadan: 'Are You Swiss or a Muslim?'” By Michael Copeland published at "Tariq Ramadan: The Artful Dodger of Oxford." Gates of Vienna, 12/28/17 (formatting omitted).