With the daily jackassery and moronic infighting, it’s important to remember that Donald Trump, no matter how foolish, still has his tiny fingers on some very important issues. Not only is he even now clutching a pen, eager to scrawl away health care for millions, he also has access to a crucial button he could press. At any time.
The commander of the United States Pacific Fleet was asked a hypothetical question during a talk on Thursday in Australia: If President Trump ordered a nuclear strike on China, would he comply?
“The answer would be yes,” the commander, Adm. Scott H. Swift, replied.
Civilian control of the military is an important policy. But you would like to think that rational control of the irrational might also play a factor.
“Every member of the U.S. military has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic and to obey the officers and the president of the United States as the commander in chief appointed over us,” he said.
And … that’s hard to argue with. Considering the state of modern weaponry, response times are measured in seconds. Short of debating the morality of the whole MAD strategem, it’s hard to argue that a military officer should ignore the orders of the president.
It’s just that the whole system is built on an assumption of sanity. Which only emphasizes why Trump can’t stay.
Six months into Trump’s occupation of the White House, America’s foreign policy ranges from erratic to nonexistent. Allies are discouraged, opponents feel like they’re playing a stronger hand, and everywhere there’s a mad scramble to rearrange priorities and alliances as the idea of American stability flies out the window.
In this Trump-induced chaos, there’s a greater possibility than ever that an actual large-scale crisis will arise. And how Trump and his team will respond is absolutely unpredictable.
And there’s a reason why the commander of the United States Pacific Fleet was asked this specific question.
In May, an American warship sailed near a Chinese-held artificial island in the South China Sea, a mission intended to demonstrate international vessels’ freedom to navigate in an area China claims as exclusively its own. At the time, Beijing called those maneuvers a ”serious political and military provocation.” ...
On Thursday, Britain’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, committed his country’s newest and largest aircraft carriers to steam through the South China Sea.
If you forgot that Boris Johnson is now foreign secretary of the UK … we’re not the only country with a massive toddler pushing big ships around a map in an area where a misstep could have the worst imaginable results.