Bob Woodward, collaborating with Robert Costa on this one, has a third book on the Trump presidency coming out. Woodward is a standard-setter for investigative journalism, but some question aspects of his pursuit of truth. To my knowledge, though, there hasn't been any credible refutation of the material in the Trump books. If someone - besides the Very Stable Genius himself or any of the drool-besotted members of his cult - had attempted to discredit the gist of Woodward's reportage on that era, it would have made a significant splash.
The pre-release excerpt from Peril, the latest in the series, that is garnering buzz is about Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Mark Milley's concern about Trump's deteriorating mental state in the last few months of Trump's presidency, and the measures Milley took to mitigate possible policy results.
That Trump was coming unglued is something we were all able to verify with our own eyes and ears. His mega-boorish behavior at his October debate with Biden, his statement in the wee hours of November 4, the phone call to Brad Reffensperger begging him to "find" 11,000 votes, the tweet about how the rally scheduled for January 6 would be "wild," his inaction as the attack on the Capitol unfolded, and his big-baby refusal to attend Biden's inauguration all testify to it. Woodward's book adds some new details, but Trump's dangerousness was already established.
Two wrongs don't make a right, however, and Milley cultivating a back-channel relationship with his Chinese counterpart and assuring him by phone that Milley would give him a heads-up if the US were going to attack China is a violation of the chain of command that warrants immediate investigation. There are procedures in place for countering bad moves being considered by a commander-in-chief; Milley's approach isn't one of them.
Milley isn't any great shakes generally speaking. His attempt to push back on charges of fostering woke-ness in the military at a House Armed Services Committee hearing in June was pretty lame. And where was his concern for how a president under whom he was serving was handling a major foreign policy matter as Joe Biden allowed the Afghanistan withdrawal to be fatally botched?
Milley's buddying up to General Li takes on a particularly disturbing cast in light of how US-China relations have gone so far in the Biden era. There was the dressing-down of Blinken and Sullivan by their Chinese counterparts at the Anchorage meeting in March. More recently, China has violated Taiwanese airspace in the conduct of "invasion war games."
So far in the twenty-first century, we have not been electing presidents with the foreign-policy chops this country has needed.
Trump wasted a great deal of time and jet fuel holding summits with Kim Jong-Un. His sleazy phone call to the president of Ukraine got him impeached. He famously insulted leaders of allied nations in person and on the phone.
Barack Obama's apology tour, his entering into a patty-cake agreement with Iran concerning its nuclear ambitions, and shameful little episodes such as letting Hugo Chavez present him with the gift of a Noam Chomsky book in front of the world's cameras all confirmed that he meant what he said about America needing fundamental transformation.
George Bush's naive notion that the Middle East and Central Asia, comprised of decidedly non-Western cultures, were ripe for Westernization did much to undo what he was right about - namely, that the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Baathist regime in Iraq were rogue entities. He also pursued appeasement with North Korea, repeatedly sending Christopher Hill to East Asia for Six-Way Talks aimed at getting North Korea to change its stripes.
The prospects for righting this state of affairs aren't encouraging. With both of the country's major political parties vying to out-ridiculous each other, it seems unlikely that either will nominate a presidential candidate for the 2024 race that will instill confidence in his or her seriousness about the stakes on the world stage.
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