FAFO
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand is renowned, even in this age of information glut and comprehension deficit, as one of the greatest masters of the art of diplomacy in Western history.
So amazingly clever and politically adroit was he that, though he was an aristocrat, he not only survived the French Revolution but became its Foreign Minister. He continued after it imploded with the Directory and when it fell, carried that portfolio for Napoleon to Waterloo, and represented France at the Congress of Vienna, where he shrewdly shaped the politics of Europe for generations.
His influence was so powerful, and the mystique of his devious subtlety was so pervasive that, when he died, Metternich was supposed to have said, “What do you suppose was his motive?”.
In The Empire, diplomacy—one winces at the term—is practiced in a manner Talleyrand would not have recognized. Negotiations between powers are the means to peaceably resolve all serious quarrels, even those that have devolved into open war, but to be productive there has to be a mutual desire for closure. Talleyrand warned that they must never be conducted with “excessive zeal”.
Evidently wanting to appear to be negotiating over the Ukraine meatgrinder, Trump sends his vacuous sycophants to carry his memos. Russia patiently marks time as the shameless fraud, knowing its original and final terms, tries to force an outcome that ignores them, making the process an exercise in futility.
After the Pearl Harbor style assault on Iran, as Trump oafishly described it, he had expected, based on the blather of his cluster of ninnies, total collapse and overthrow of its government. That wasn’t in the cards and, a month in, he can’t believe Iran meant what it said and is inflicting constant, major punishment on Israel, The Empire, and its royal Gulf whores and he begs for a “deal”.
These bastard varieties of negotiation are only conceivable by imbeciles and moral defectives. One is a flagrant attempt at intimidation, which only works if you’re stronger; the other is a hat-in-hand tactic only the abject weak and impotent employ.
That Trump operates this way does not surprise. His appeal to the clod ignorant is based on infantile magical thinking. Our electorate, after decades when nothing was done for it by either Capitalist party, consists, on one hand, of an irredeemably stupid underclass and, on the other, of a mass of sadly deluded, servile drones, certain our holy system exists to justly serve the people.
The first group is happy to back a transparent fraud and hustler who caters to redneck prejudices and hillbilly rage, as the second clings to a rotten, cynical cabal that has done nothing but stroke their jejeune vanity while betraying their every interest and hope.
In the Democrats feeble, simulated outrage at this lunatic’s raw, absolutist posturing, they serve not as a vital opposition, but as a cowardly, unprincipled enabler of his manic violence. Their timid, pathetic bleating and ethical asthenia toward his meat axe tactics are the very definition of Vichyesque treachery.
Given what amounts to absolutist control of all the levers of government, nothing exists to challenge Trump’s dominance, including the highly touted and anticipated mid-term elections, which multitudes of the fatuous regard as their mechanism of rescue. One has to wonder what all those palpitating faithful imagine a Democratic majority would accomplish?
Would they find the collective spine to impeach and remove him when there is so much of his bravo program they have always approved? Suppose they had a forty vote majority in the House, could they find consensus on that when there is so much on which they agree with him? Are they not really partners?
A Democrat President and Congress signed off on the genocide in Gaza, and backed Nazi Israel’s murder to the full. Democrats first spent billions financing the corrupt Nazi regime in Ukraine and, after provoking the Russian attack, prolonged the war with endless money, weapons and technological aid. When Trump and his hit men killed dozens of boat crews and then snatched Venezuelan President Maduro, Democrats supinely endorsed it.
Where is the evidence that Democrats have any truly critical issues with Trump beyond the fact of his power, and his ugly, stupid personal style that offends their privileged sensibilities?
Trump will continue with his odiously malevolent, wildly irrational adventurism, unchallenged and unimpeded, with both dead political appendages hanging from his belt like stinking scalps.
What gives this prospect its special horror is that our fate as a people is in his psychopathic hands. With no countervailing power, and with our civil liberties and constitutional safeguards long gone, we are at risk of societal and civilizational breakdown.
Meanwhile, Trump plays his lying con game with Iran, trying to sell his transparent, contemptible bullshit one more time after the whole world is on to the embarrassingly clumsy, blundering liar.
No one can be sure what kind of idiot fantasizing lies behind his word salad, but what is certain is that it does not reflect the hard facts of the power equation, and that his machinations will result in unforeseen catastrophe.
There’s an old saying among military men regarding the outcome of situations when action is taken with no sound basis in reality.
My old DI put it this way: Fuck Around and Find Out.