Of Loyalty, Fate, and Shame
To those U.S. military veterans who were once friendly readers of my writing but turned against me when they fell under the spell of the dumbest and most corrupt man ever to run for commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, and who pooh-poohed my criticisms of said dunderhead with refusals to accept his own frequent pro-despot words (and later policies) at face value, instead palliating their consciences by accusing me and everyone else who didn’t fall into the abyss with them of having succumbed to the conveniently all-encompassing (but inconveniently non-existent) ailment “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” I offer the latest evidence in the case. Let’s call it, to be conservative, Exhibit ZZZZ.
WASHINGTON—President Trump said Sunday he would “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with South Korea, touting his “very good relationship” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump’s social-media post comes as the U.S. and South Korea are scheduled to begin an 11-day exercise, dubbed Ulchi Freedom Shield, to strengthen the two countries’ ability to defend against a potential North Korean attack.
“These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful,” the president wrote. “Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises!”
The president criticized South Korea in his social-media post for not helping with the U.S. operation against Iran. Trump also said the move was “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea.”
North Korea has been “unthreatening and respectful” — towards whom? This is the same North Korea that has sent tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine to die alongside the Russians in support of Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Europe. The same North Korea that terrorizes, censors, and mass murders its own citizens under a communist-starvation regime. The same North Korea that has continued to expand its nuclear and other internationally-sanctioned weapons progams throughout both of Trump’s terms in office. The same North Korea, obviously, whose constant threats and instigations the U.S. has been constraining for decades by way of these joint military drills conducted alongside the legitimate half of the nation that was torn asunder by the communists during a three-year war in which the U.S. fought for Korean sovereignty before signing away the northern half of that nation in a shamefully compromised armistice, the indignity of which America has been assuaging all these decades by at least remaining stalwart allies of the faction they ultimately failed during the shooting part of this ongoing conflict.
But Donald Trump, in his infinite vanity, face-saving mendacity, and sheer, utter idiocy, has ordered his bootlicking, spineless defense secretary to ramp down America’s overt military alliance with South Korea on the grounds that he has “a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un.” (Imagine how a Secretary Weinberger or Cheney would have responded to such a presidential folly.) A very good relationship indeed; certainly very good for the communist dictatorships of North Korea and China, for the oligarchic despotism of Russia, for the victory-lapping mullahs of Iran (how many more ways can Trump discover to amplify America’s most recent and humiliating defeat?), and thus, overall, for the general cause of global tyranny and for our era’s most determined international warriors against national self-determination, constitutional government, human civilization, and individual liberty.
To my former U.S. military readers: That’s your man. That’s his cause. Those are the life-and-freedom-destroying despots whose boots he continues to shine with American polish, because he is too monumental a coward to face down a single threat to his weak little ego, let alone to face up to the serious threats to the survival of human dignity on this Earth.
Trump will rot in the end, right along with the men whose evil he enables and encourages with his weakness and self-deluded hero-worship. But what about you? Will you join him in that infernal and eternal decay? Will you show yourselves to be as delusional and duplicitous as he is in the face of folly and failure? Or will you finally rediscover whatever pride you might once have had, and realize that you have spent the past ten years rationalizing the slow death of your country and everything it ever stood for — not to mention the abandonment of the allied countries where you once lived, whose food and culture you once enjoyed, and whose people you once vowed to support and defend as a matter of national duty, a matter of the strategic maintenance of American preeminence and global threat-deterrence, and a matter of the goal, both personally and politically righteous, of fostering good faith relationships with the anti-despotic, non-aggressive peoples of the world. You, unlike Trump, once understood those purposes, and apparently aligned your life with them. Are you prepared to sacrifice them all forever, out of a pathetic, Trump-scale desperation to save face by denying your error? Will you go to your graves with that face-saving denial, aquiescing to the shameful defeat and defiance of all that you once believed in, or claimed to believe in?
I have to confess, revealing here at the end that none of the above was really the pleading argument it might have seemed to be, that my question is purely rhetorical, as I have no doubt whatsoever what your answer will be. And that is why I have no doubt whatsoever that your country is in its death throes, and that there will be no recovery. Unfortunately, fatefully, or however we might put it, your country’s willful demise will not be confined to itself. Too much of our modern world depends on America’s fate. That fate, I believe, is now sealed, for all of us. It was not forced upon you. It could have been reversed several times, and could perhaps be reversed even now. But it will not be reversed.
DAUPHIN
Mort de ma vie, all is confounded, all!
Reproach and everlasting shame
Sits mocking in our plumes.
— Henry V, Act IV, Scene 5.
