... and then of course there is Iran and North Korea

 

While Vladimir Putin is going “Full Monty” exposing his Orwellian shortcomings…

 

…a few other countries, like Iran and North Korea, are carrying on in their usual manner. Naturally, Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo didn’t help matters with their incompetent foreign policy bumbling. Trump thought his “personal magnetism” would cow Iran and persuade Kim Jong-un, while Pompeo was just an arrogant far-right tough guy who had zero diplomatic skills, and only angered negotiators who were forced to deal with him.

We have been informed that Pompeo—who intends to join Ron DeSantis in the race to be more Trumpist than Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries—is allegedly the target of Iranian terror networks, according to the intelligence community’s 2022 threat assessment. CBS News reported that this alleged “threat” requires a “hefty” tax payer-funded security detail for Pompeo. Let us not forget why Pompeo is allegedly a “target”: after Trump’s impetuous desire to “erase”—as in “Orwellian”—Barack Obama’s legacy by cancelling the Paris Climate Accord and the Trans Pacific Partnership, Pompeo was the “face” of the cancelling of the Iran nuclear agreement. Instead of “renegotiating” the agreement with threats to re-impose sanctions, Pompeo stupidly announced the negating of the agreement and re-imposing sanctions before the possibility of renegotiating.

This is not how “diplomacy” is supposed to work when there is already a deal in place, and the Biden administration was left to clean-up the mess because no one trusted Trump or wanted to negotiate with a far-right extremist and former member of the equally so “Freedom Caucus” like Pompeo, whose tough guy stance impressed no one. The ship of “maximum leverage” sailed when Trump foolishly agreed to meet Kim without preconditions, and Pompeo was just seen as a third-stringer whose my-way-or-the-highway bluster only angered the other side. In April 2019, Reuters reported that “North Korea no longer wants Secretary of State Mike Pompeo involved in nuclear talks, calling for someone who is more careful and mature in communicating” and that further discussions were pointless "wherever Pompeo pokes his nose in.”

When North Korea thumbed its nose at Trump when it resumed launching missiles like this one in 2019

 

Trump’s response was basically “so what” and “it’s no big deal”: “I view it as a man, perhaps he wants to get attention, and perhaps not. Who knows? It doesn't matter.” This shocking response demonstrated that Trump was willing to walk away from a problem if he didn’t get everything he wanted, and carelessly letting it fester behind him and allowing it to become an even bigger problem. North Korea has since launched short-range missile tests threatening South Korea and Japan last year...

 

 

…and a few days ago…

 

…while satellite imagery shows the construction of new buildings at a nuclear facility, suggesting expansion of nuclear bomb-making capabilities. Although trade between China and North Korea declined during the pandemic, China continues to prop-up the communist regime as a dependable partner; China also apparently continues to do nothing to reign in Kim’s nuclear ambitions. 

Meanwhile in Iran, the Trump administration’s foolish actions led to the election of its current president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a sham election pre-ordained by the ruling religious clique. Raisi is himself a hard line cleric who can’t be trusted, and has no intention of agreeing to anything that does not allow significant increases in its ability to enrich uranium closer to weapons’ grade status.

This is the dangerous world we live in. A long list of U.S. administrations have made mistakes along the way, and no one should be under any illusions that the Trump administration was any better; in the case of North Korea it foolishly offered Kim the opportunity to strengthen his position while weakening the U.S. position, and in the case of Iran, it acted impulsively with no idea of the end game—much like Putin has done in Ukraine.