The Errant Armada
Sorry, it’s almost impossible to get through a day without some shard of Trump-inspired government wreckage getting lodged in your throat, to be expelled by laughter over folly so ridiculous that future generations will have to conclude that someone made it up. They would be viewing it through the cracked lens of Fake-News-Making that has become the paradigm for information dissemination in the Age of Social Media.
The ridiculous part was Donald Trump’s announcement of an “Armada” en route to the shores of North Korea, when it was at the moment actually headed in the other direction for a training exercise in the Indian Ocean. (Hapless White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was once again thrust into Alternative Facts Limbo, suspended between his clueless boss on one side, and on the other side a Press Corp hungry for the truth.)
Who What Where When How and Why All Scrambled Up
There are varying interpretations of just what the military was up to at the time—maybe the announcement really was a military ploy? If so, was Trump in on the game? For a 360-degree tour of the situation check out this piece by NPR national security editor Phil Ewing, and an interview by Merritt Kennedy (video at bottom of piece) here. Ewing as a true professional has to make allowances for the possibility that Trump was consciously engaging in a clever tactic of misdirection (ha ha), rather than simply committing a blunder of ignorance and/or misunderstanding.
My hunch: the military informs him that the strike force has been ordered to the Sea of Japan (although they know it is currently headed elsewhere), and Trump bolts to the cameras with the Armada-bearing-down-on-North-Korea scenario in order to show Kim Jong-un Who’s Boss. . . and the military and the White House staff are left to reorder the pieces. No one dares to admit that Trump was free-lancing a grave matter of national security just to puff himself up. That’s the kind of thing you might expect from a dictator such as—who’s that guy?—Kim Jong-un.
Meanwhile, after hearing Trump’s speech, Kim Jong-un is asking the Chinese, “where is this Armada that guy is threatening me with?” After checking every surveillance operation available, the Chinese answer, “uh, we’re not really sure. The closest carrier group is the Carl Vinson, now headed into the Indian Ocean.” Jong-un is left to wonder, are the Chinese conspiring with the Americans?
(Later, Jong-un has a good laugh when he discovers that the “Armada” is still days away with no specific mission to loom off of North Korea’s shores.)
Whatever the situation behind the scenes, the White House optics had resolved into: “this is dumb.”
In the end, the Navy made good on Trump’s “armada” announcement by sending the strike force toward North Korea, although evidently they were not happy having to reveal details about the destinations of their ships before they were good and ready.
Donald Trump is proud of keeping the world “off balance,” calculated to keep the enemy guessing as to what he will do next. This is a side effect of Donald Trump not knowing himself what he will do next, from hour to hour—there is no “calculation” about it. This being the case tends to put both our adversaries and our allies in the same state of uncertainty, tending to forge a fragile bond between them. You can just see Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin putting their heads together in a plan to minimize damages should Trump go completely off the rails.
Power Beckons, Trump Yearns
What interested me most about this ludicrous-yet-frightening episode was not the content but the president’s tone and phrasing in describing the Armada as “very powerful.” Not just “very powerful”—it was three “very powerfuls” in the space of a minute. First a hushed “very powerful” in regard to the carrier group. Next a portentous pause, a few words for the very powerful submarines, then more solemnly. . . “very powerful,” as if he were either talking to himself or addressing a child where you have to repeat yourself to get the message to sink in. “Very powerful, my son, very powerful. You understand, very powerful.” (Of course Trump talking to himself he is already talking to a child, so that might explain it.)
Two things revealed (the first may be only too obvious):
(1) Apart from Trump’s own ego, power itself is what obsesses him. Sure, all presidents crave power, but in most cases power is sought as a means to an end: “If I had enough power, I could make my people safe,” or “I could bring about world peace,” or “I could save the Nordic Race from impurities,” or “I could kill all the infidels,” what have you. Once obtained, power may corrupt, but the original goal for its attainment is not power for its own sake, it’s what you could do with it. “Making America great again” is not a goal, it’s a campaign slogan, as much of a sham as Trump’s alleged business success. If he really wanted to make America great again, he would have made infrastructure, not health care, the first priority in his legislative agenda.
Power in itself is the measure of success. “If I had enough power, I would be really really powerful. Totally. I could do anything. I could shoot an innocent man in Times Square with impunity. I could grab Meghyn Kelly’s pussy in front of the cameras and no one would raise a fuss. I could abolish CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and have their bosses strung up by the neck. I would have so much power I would be more than a king, I would be King of the World. The first! That would be so great and totally amazing and wonderful and unbelievable and fantastic and incredible. It would be the greatest thing that ever happened.”
(2) The magnitude of America’s military might is finally sinking in to Donald Trump’s randomly focused brain. Thus the reverential tone of “very powerful.” If we can assume that somewhere during this episode Donald Trump was informed of the capabilities of a naval carrier strike force plus submarines of three levels of lethality (the topmost being those with ballistic missiles belonging to the “Nuclear Triad”), he may have at last realized what most of the world’s leaders have known for the last forty years: the U.S. conventional military exceeds in capability the conventional military forces of all adversaries put together. It is only the possession of nuclear weapons by various parties (the roughly equal number of nuclear warheads between the U.S. and Russia being the most notable) that confers some measure of parity. Trump may be impressed with the knowledge that the U.S. military is not in a shambles as he had characterized it during his presidential campaign, time and time again (“The generals are rubble. . . . Our military is in the worst shape it’s ever been, etc.”).
Too bad any such edification will not lead to deflating the plan to pump up the Pentagon’s already bloated hardware budget. We need to be not just very powerful but very incredibly stupendously powerful. I just have to say.
Having exhausted my limited power of insight, I leave you in peace. Thank you for toiling through yet another turgid mélange.