February 16, 2019
This Administration* Is Playing Russian Roulette for Idiots
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26112390/nuclear-arms-control-treaty-russia-trump-administration/?fbclid=IwAR17xkV0jZfqqAWRPWqxZkBPfVq7bL1wvCIQhkdT98QTLhLT_H5ePqUvrzA"(Can we pause here for a moment and remember that Mike Pompeo is a jumped-up Tea Party congressman from Kansas who is in the upper levels of the national executive only because he climbed aboard the Trump Train and was standing there when it was determined that Rex Tillerson needed to go? He has enabled all of the president*'s worst instincts on foreign policy, and this move is only the latest example. There is no "good" member of this Cabinet—only fools, grifters, and incompetents. It is quite striking in its uniformity in this regard.) I'm not sure how giving Vladimir Putin everything he wants is supposed to hurt him, but I am not the Secretary of State. This is an odds-on decision to start another nuclear arms race in Europe, which can only hype up the ambitious Russian ganglord's dreams of a gangster-capitalist new USSR. The INF Treaty was one of the Reagan Administration's shining accomplishments, and one of the first indications that Mikhail Gorbachev was a real reformer. It was the first arms-control agreement that required a reduction in nuclear weapons rather than simply freezing the number of them in place. It brought Europe out from under a dark shadow. (These were the days in which nuclear war was again thought to be feasible, if not imminent.) It allowed people in Europe to breathe a little easier. For all his faults, Reagan made the INF Treaty a landmark in nuclear diplomacy, and it led directly to President George H.W. Bush's START treaty which cut in half the nuclear arsenals of both countries."