The Essense Of It All.

Actually, when this hit the news three weeks ago it barely registered with me and only then as some odd thing of an increasingly dysfunctional American political discourse, but several days ago I decided to re-visit this and it struck me today--here is all explanation one needs for US foreign policy or rather lack thereof. 

President Trump said Thursday that if he were to fight Joe Biden, the former vice president “would go down fast and hard.”

At an anti-sexual assault rally at the University of Miami earlier this week, Biden said that if he were in high school and heard Trump making lewd comments about women — like those captured on the infamous 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape — he would “take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”Trump responded on Twitter, escalating the war of words between the two septuagenarians.

“Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy,” he wrote. “Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!” Biden first expressed a desire for a fisticuffs with Trump at a rally for Hillary Clinton in October 2016, after Trump’s hot-mic comments on “Access Hollywood” were made public.

Don't you recognize it? That is American foreign policy doctrine of the last 25 years, in fact, longer than that in a nutshell--a mix of trash talk, hubris mixed with all anxieties of ever crawling in the back of the mind complex of inferiority. This is not a talk of statesmen--this is the quarrel of two provincial  semi-literate plumbers (sorry, plumbers, my deepest respect to your  important profession) not capable to split the turf. Today US is run by plumbers, or rags to riches uncultured and uneducated variations of used car salesmen. No amount of glitter, or, for that matter, lip-stick can hide the ugly truth. Basically, this is it--Trump is not a hostage, he is the driver, together with his enthusiastic enemies within the beltway, behind unfolding insanity which sees the US unraveling both domestically and internationally. I, of course, am not talking about a village idiot Joe Biden but who knows, Democratic Party may yet surprise us all by either nominating Oprah or, well... Joe Biden. Mike Pompeo's testimony to Senate Foreign Relations Committee today was also profoundly revealing--the barely hidden insecurity runs deep in Washington. It should. As Clausewitz' dictum goes--it is legitimate to judge event by its outcome for it is the soundest criterion (c). I guess Donald Trump is about to learn, if not already, how many updates and revisions his magnum opus The Art of the Deal will require. There will be plenty. In fact, he may consider rewriting it altogether.