It’s time once again for the nightly Twitter bluster from our embarrassing president-elect.
China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters – rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 17, 2016
What do we learn from this, other than that Trump can’t spell? What we should learn is that the world now thinks that America is weak. That was not a science vessel: it was a military ship probing submarine access points to and from Chinese ports. This was in international waters, so I’m not defending the Chinese seizure…but I can understand it, and most importantly, isn’t it obvious that China is confident the US will do nothing about it? They know we are soon to be lacking a serious head of state, with a clownish buffoon who is the product of foreign meddling in our politics, and so hey, sure, let’s poke the dull-witted twit a bit.
Expect more of this. It isn’t just terrorists — established world powers have been annoyed at American dominance for the past century, and they don’t mind tormenting the world’s biggest bully.
OK, last 50 years. Maybe last 30.
It’s been a very brief ascendancy.
Symbolic payback for the Taiwan phone call perhaps?
I wonder what The Trump’s reaction would be if a Chinese naval research vessel was using drones to ‘study currents’ fifty miles outside of Kings Bay, GA? Yes, what the USN research vessel was legal (in international waters), but it was also extremely provocative. In the past, this has been handled through some diplomatic notes. Now? Just poke the President elect with a sharp stick and listen to the tweeting.
On a side note, terrorism creates an eternal spiral of reward for incompetent leadership.
If security sucks, attacks happen, and the public gives their fearless leader lots more power, which he squanders on fucking the public. Rinse repeat.
But if you’re good at security, attacks don’t happen, and you get voted out of office.
Slippage of a Freudian nature, methinks.
Without the hypothetical: Russia tried that on Cuba in the early 60’s, leading to the famous “crisis”
Or base in Phillipines looks a lot to China how Cuba looked to us.
One who fails to learn from history is doomed to repay it (literally, not just metaphorically)
Tpyo alert :
* our not or
* repeat not repay
slithey tove:
I figgered you were trying for ‘replay’ and lost an ell. Though ‘repay’ is amazingly apropos.
Re@8
Exactly why I needed to clarify
I didn’t want to be thought so clever
Precedent-elect. More to follow.
More like precedent – erect
It’s all fun and games if all he does is send out angry tweets. I’m worried that once he has control of the military, he could escalate the situation. “Tormenting the world’s biggest bully” does have risks…
This stuff happens every time a new US president comes on the scene. Only now it’s _before_ inauguration, and Trump’s trampling in Obama’s official territory. He’s commander in chief for another month yet. It’s his job to deal with it and Trump should sit down, shut up and listen just this once.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/china-exploits-presidential-transitions-to-test-us-835527235577
Just to point out, China has a history over the last few decades of pushing the boundaries when a new president is taking office to see how he will react. Rachel Maddow aired a piece on this last night, showing that similar things have happened when GW Bush and Obama took office. So this is not unique. It also isn’t so much, IMHO, trying to show the US is weak, but to gauge the resolve of a new president.
Unfortunately with Trump, it is highly unpredictable just how he will respond.
?☠️????????????????????⛈☕️
At this point, provided that ordinary citizens aren’t harmed, I don’t mind if the US government becomes an international whipping boy. Our current regime richly deserves to be obstructed and kicked around a bit. I actually hope that the international community tormenting Trump and his cronies helps to hold off their worst plans from coming to fruition.
re 16:
in spirit, me too. yet…
that usually doesn’t work. Too easy for things to go a little further than we’d like.
Slapping Drumph to get him back in line, I doubt would be isolated to Drumph, and severely affect all of us, no matter how innocent or remote.
We are screwed
regardlessirregardless [to mimic Drumph’s skill at spelling].That’s what he apparently thinks his role is, this mantra, .
His personal value (of wealth) is all that matters to him. Everything else be damned.
Re: comment #5
Spot on! Or, as Hitchens (can anyone believe the 5th anniversary of the war-mongering old chancer’s death was just a day or so ago!) used to say it – a Freudian slit!
OK, China stole one of our underseas drones. This is not good.
1. So what can we do about it? Nothing much that I can see.
2. We could steal one of their drones. Except, AFAIK, they don’t have any. Especially, ones cruising off of our submarine base in Bremerton, Washington or San Francisco.
Or we could sell more arms to our new friend in SE Asia, ironically enough, which is…Vietnam.
3. We could just slap that 35% tariff on Chinese imports. And they could just dump their trillion dollar pile of US Treasury bonds.
This is a lose-lose strategy and would be a disaster for both countries.
4. I believe game theory in this case says the optimum move is tit for tat. We should respond in an equal manner and not do nothing or over overreact.
As a zillion people have already pointed out, there is one class of soft targets all over the world.
Properties with a prominent Trump (something, Hotel, golf course, resort) all over the world.
How long will it be until some terrorists bomb one of them? Soon, I’m guessing.
Brace yourself, it will be quite the Twitter storm.
There is one way to deal with this stolen drone problem.
Have a self destruct explosive device on them.
They would only steal one once.
I’m not advocating this though. It would be an escalation and it isn’t the time for an escalation.
@16,
the world would be a much better place if the ARC Of Evil (=America, Russia, China) were to be stripped of their military and nazi party-funding monies.
raven @21: Depends on how the self-destruct device operated. IIRC, on modern equipment it’s supposed to function to destroy sensitive technology to prevent it from being analyzed by hostile powers, not serve as a booby-trap to kill whomever grabs it.
raven @ 21, a self-destruct device, as stated above, need not be a device that causes external harm.
A small thermite charge would more than neutralize any sensitive components, while limiting any external damage beyond perhaps a scorched deck plate.
Even if he had spelled “unprecedented” properly, he’s completely wrong in the literal sense. There’s plenty of precedence for this sort of thing. What about the time we salvaged a sunken Russian nuclear submarine and tore it apart? I’m sure there are plenty of other examples as well.
@#6, slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))
And why did they do that? Because we had put missiles in Italy and Turkey, aimed at the USSR. When cooler heads prevailed, the promise was that “we” would never put nuclear weapons so close to Russia again.
In the last couple of years, NATO, led by the nose by the saber-rattling factions within the US as always, has announced that they were going to put nuclear weapons in Poland — and unlike the ones in Turkey, there was not even a pretense that they were going to be anything other than a way to launch a first strike at Russia. At the head of those factions were the same neoliberals who pushed for war with Iraq, Libya, and Syria, regardless of the consequences, and who have been semi-explicit about actively desiring a “new cold war”, the same way they had a project for a “new American century”. The politician who most recently was the public face of this movement was — well, I’ve been warned to stop bringing up that name, but it was someone who lost an election lately.
It’s kind of interesting that Trump may well set off a nuclear war by letting his stupidity or his pride take over, but he seems to have no actual plan to do so, while his opponent and their supporters, even now when they have lost, are doing all they can to gin up actual military conflict which endangers us all. With every day that passes I realize more and more that, despicable though the Republican Party is, and horrifying though the next four years are going to be, the Democrats no longer represent me in any way, either.
Re 25
Yes, that’s why most execs have admins to correct their spelling and grammar and make their dictation into something comprehensible. Instead of just off the cuff gibbererish. I think Trump eschews staff to appear more casual, shooting himself in the foot by not handling it more rigorously. ?
raven@#19:
I believe game theory in this case says the optimum move is tit for tat. We should respond in an equal manner and not do nothing or over overreact.
The problem with tit for tat or “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” is that everyone winds up blind and toothless. It’s very easy for either side in this kind of situation to point and say “they started it!” And that may or may not be true – how do we tell?
The problem with tit for tat is that, as long as nobody escalates, you have an endless sequence of tittings and tattings. But if anyone escalates then you need TITTINGS and TATTINGS and it just cycles out of control. Bear in mind that the wizards of war at RAND, who were behind the application of game theory to warfare during the cold war, never figured out how to de-escalate from a nuclear exchange – and virtually all of their nuclear negotiation simulations resulted in the world’s “inevitable” destruction.
The Vicar@#26:
NATO, led by the nose by the saber-rattling factions within the US as always, has announced that they were going to put nuclear weapons in Poland — and unlike the ones in Turkey, there was not even a pretense that they were going to be anything other than a way to launch a first strike at Russia
The US hasn’t reneged on the post Cuban Missile Crisis agreement regarding no medium-range ballistic missiles in Turkey. They have F-16-deliverable bombs at Incirlik, but no missiles.*
(* I am really really hoping the US got those out of there when Turkey started turning into an unstable dictatorship, but I am not sanguine; the US likes dictatorships. As long as they are stable.)
@#29, Marcus Ranum:
That kind of “letter of the law” thinking is extraordinarily foolish. What if Russia somehow put nuclear missiles at the north end of Mexico, on the grounds that Cuba was off-limits but there was no agreement about any other countries? We would, quite rightly, denounce the move and take action against it. For us to say “well, Turkey is specifically mentioned but Poland should be okay” is disingenuous and foolhardy — a dangerous, dishonest move.
I realize that there are a lot of really incredibly stupid people in my country who think America is “exceptional”* — so we can do horrible things and somehow still be innocent of any wrongdoing — but putting nukes in Poland, which was an American idea, is deliberately provoking a reaction. And Russia no longer has the options it once had — which means that there are fewer steps than ever between ignoring our actions (which they can’t afford to do) and making a nuclear first strike.
It’s disturbing, the way the Democratic Party has become so weirdly and so militantly (in a very literal sense) anti-Russian. Just a few years ago, Obama was mocking Mitt Romney for being a Russophobe, and now whenever anyone at DNC headquarters stubs their toe it’s a Russian plot to undermine democracy by attacking our feet, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a puppet of Putin and probably actively a spy, and we need to launch an immediate counterstrike against Russia for daring to put that table there so innocent Americans could stub their toes on it! Just like the Republican paranoia of the 1950s, it would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous and evil.
*I would be completely in favor of passing a law which called for the immediate jailing, without parole, of any politician who suggests America is “exceptional” in any way. Nobody who thinks that way can be trusted for an instant.
The Vicar@#26:
NATO, led by the nose by the saber-rattling factions within the US as always, has announced that they were going to put nuclear weapons in Poland — and unlike the ones in Turkey, there was not even a pretense that they were going to be anything other than a way to launch a first strike at Russia
Do you mean this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_missile_defense_complex_in_Poland
Sorry, not nuclear. Kinetic kill vehicles and standard missile 3’s.
That would make it a first strike preparatory tool, as any retaliation would be intercepted during boost phase.
The Vicar @ 31, so you’re against freedom of speech for politicians?
Just bar them from office under the grounds of being dangerous stupid, rather than act like a totalitarian state.
As for Turkey, we pulled those missiles out of Turkey shortly after the Cuban missile crisis ended (JFK had already ordered them removed and was surprised to learn that they remained in place).
Now, for brilliant moves, do look up the Pershing missile program and realize what an escalation Pershing 2 was and the long range, ground launched cruise missiles that were deployed or to be deployed to Germany under Reagan. Mobile missiles with an 1100 mile range for the Pershing II, 1600 miles for the Gryphon.
Fortunately, the lot of those products from the madness factory were withdrawn under the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty and the Soviets withdrew the SS-4 Sandal, SS-5 Skean, SS-12 Scaleboard, SS-20 Saber, SS-22 Scaleboard B, and SS-23 Spider MRBM/IRBM/LRBM ballistic missiles, in addition to the GLCM’s most direct counterpart: the SSC-4 or RK-55 (dubbed the Tomahawksi in the Western press) and its supersonic follow-on, the SSC-X-5 cruise missiles.
Would that they’d render the lot of those suicide devices undeliverable (one might need to use a few to ablate a troublesome asteroid).
I am sorry, but this information is in error. The reports are that the drone was seized fifty-seven miles outside of Subic Bay. That location is over 700 miles from the nearest Chinese port. The distance from Subic Bay to the disputed Spratley Islands is over 300 miles. And while Subic Bay is regularly visited by US vessels it is no longer a US base.
@#31, wzrd1
Nope. As far as I know, the proposal to put nukes in Poland has not been carried out — yet. It’s still being discussed by NATO, because there still remain a few members who are relatively sane, and realize that blindly doing whatever the U.S. wants is not acting in their own best interests. (Victoria Nuland’s “fuck the EU” revelation opened a few eyes, I think, although here in the U.S. it got downplayed as unimportant.)
@#32, wzrd1:
Tit for tat. When both the major parties have started having “free speech zones”, and both parties attack whistleblowers, and the “Constitutional Scholar” president uses the Espionage Act of 1917 against journalists, and Black Lives Matter is deliberately drowned out by noise machines, “freedom of speech” is already toast. Maybe we can reconsider after the politicians have stopped leading the charge against it.
If politicians who were dangerously stupid were barred from office, both major parties would have to disband because they would have nobody left to run.
@PZ #1:
The general rule is that the shorter the ascendancy the greater the crash. A long, slow decline is easier for a people to get used to and in response to not give reactionary thugs any power. Oops.
The Vicar @ 35,
Now, you see the beauty of my plan. :)
So, let me get this straight. The U.S. government is defending itself by saying that it was only literally testing the waters? And the Chinese government’s response is that it’s not safe for your toy to be here, take it back home. Lots of subtext in both of those…
ck @ 38, yes. Thermocline data is very important for submarine operations.
So, operations like this are quite interesting to the PRC, who still claim the Spratly Islands and a sizable part of the South China Sea.
They’re giving back the drone.
Merriam-Webster’s Twitter is interesting. (Last month, they tweeted about the words people were looking up since the election, noting that “sex” and some others remained perennial popular choices; someone tweeted back something like “Used to be you could look up ‘sex’ in the dictionary without the dictionary tattling on Twitter.” Made me laugh.)
Egad, Vicar is back and already dispenses false information in order to stick it to dem darn establishment Democrats who don’t subscribe to his purity politics…
Should’ve banned that dimwit ages ago. He’s just another Harban.
I dunno, Harban at least had the shame to go from “We need to sit on our hands no matter the consequences because voting for a democrat gives them moral sanction for not being perfect, and you people who are trying to tell me all along that we should vote for the least worst electable candidate and then hold their feet to the fire are just blind supporters of democrats no matter what!” to “We need to elect the least worst people and then hold their feet to the fire, and you people who’ve been saying that all along are just blind supporters of democrats no matter what!” even if they were totally “We have always been at war with Eastasia!” about it…
Yep, their both assholes , who on a bell curve of US political beliefs, with the average voter being in the 50th percentile, a communist at the 0th percentile, and a liberturd at the 100th percentile, would be in the <10th percentile, far leftists, if not radicals.
Most of us liberals are in the 20-40th percentiles, with those less leftists and radicals. From their position, they delusionly think they are in the middle, and that we who are to the left of center, but right of them, should adopt their idiotlogical purity, or we are right wing reactionaries. I’m liberal (approximately 25th percentile) pragmatist. I want publicly paid healthcare for all. But, there is no way it would pass the present congress. So, sneak it in the back door by offering a competitive public option for states that lack private insurance competition for the ACA. Once industry sees what the costs of a public option (no need for profits, taxes, dividends, and overly inflated executive salaries) is compared to a private insurance, I believe they would get on the bandwagon for their employees, including themselves.
@ 17
Well then, I think that we know what we have to do. By “we”, I mean everyone who opposes Trump. Trump hasn’t given up his business empire. That means he has a conflict of interest, but it also means he has a weakness. If we could possibly find a way to threaten his business interests, we may be able to keep him in line. If nothing else, we could punish him by hurting his businesses if he does anything we don’t like.
There’s no reason to pay attention to Jake Harban, The Vicar, or applehead. It’s a waste of time.
Nerd, you’re creepy as hell sometimes – like a time capsule from the Eisenhower era.
*Jessie Harban.
No. Same person?
Yep. Announced it on recent (within the last week) thread. Been using Jessie since.
Well, I was in elementary school during Ike’s administration.
Nerd of Redhead, #43
Come now, Communism doesn’t imply any form of liberalism nor authoritarianism. The C.C.C.P. was incredibly socially reactionary, and many Marxists are democratic (since they so want for the means of production to be controlled by society rather than some autocratic state).
On the other note, I don’t see an issue with his spelling. The PRC doesn’t have a President.
#51
Though, I certainly agree that Harban, etc. are a nuisance, but not because they’re so much more liberal than us. I believe that they’re just as left, but with a libertarian obsession with destroying the establishment.
@#41, applehead
I forget, was it you or dianne who was repeating the claim that Wikileaks falsified the Podesta e-mails? The claim that turned out to be “fake news”?
@#43, Person who does not deserve to have their name quoted:
You seriously think the Democrats were going to do that, ever, under any circumstances? Barack Obama sure wasn’t going to do it, Hillary Clinton said during the primary debates that universal coverage was unfeasible for budgetary reasons (not political ones), which means she doesn’t believe a public option would actually be cheaper, and the party is full of people like Joe Manchin who are not likely to rein in healthcare costs.
I like the color of the sky on your planet. Let’s move there.
For the sake of the US and the world can Trump please be unpresidented as soon as possible?
I’m awaiting evidence that either is truly attached to causes other than petulance for its own sake.
It’s going to be a long 4 years.
The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) wrote:
Keep on flogging that dead horse. At this point, it doesn’t matter what her health care plan was or would have been, because we know what the Republicans have planned: Step 1: Repeal Obamacare (ACA). Step 2: Maybe introduce new legislation somewhere around 2020, maybe (which is likely to only consist of making it difficult to impossible to sue for medical malpractice and tax benefits for the already wealthy while simultaneously robbing the working class).
Because her plan wasn’t good enough for you, Americans can now get the worst possible plan.
# PZ
OK, last 50 years. Maybe last 30.
It’s been a very brief ascendancy.
Well, I’d date it from about 1947 when the US made a strong bid to replace the UK in Saudi Arabia and refused to help the UK with war debts (dates approx.) or from 1956 and the Suez Crisis. Roughly 69 or 61 years and the Cuban missile crisis (54 years) saw an already strong ascendancy. And the US’s only even partial win against Cuba.
@ 6
If the Chinese arranged with El Salvador to build a huge naval base and military air base capable of launching bombers into the US homeland.
Grenada anyone? Keystone cop invasion and the US finished the “Soviet” air port to encourage tourism. God, it was amazing how fast the threat of Soviet Migs disappeared when one built a couple of hotels and needed an airport.
@ 26 The Vicar
At the head of those factions were the same neo-liberals who pushed for war with Iraq, Libya, and Syria, regardless of the consequences, and who have been semi-explicit about actively desiring a “new cold war”, the same way they had a project for a “new American century”. The politician who most recently was the public face of this movement was — well, I’ve been warned to stop bringing up that name, but it was someone who lost an election lately.
Exactly. I was vaguely hoping the Democrat would win because she still seemed somewhat attached to reality but the Republican was okay because he was not firefighting a 25 or 30 year old cold war that no longer reflected reality, hell, was not even close to the Wizard of Oz as reality.
As a non-USAian, I really didn’t care just how badly Hilary or Donald might screw up internal conditions. Well, I do, slightly, but not enough to really get upset.
I really only care about their international behaviour and both of them scared me half to death. I am not sure if I am relieved or even more frightened that Trump won. The Russians understood a crazy woman like Clinton but Trump is so far off the map that analysts in Moscow and Beijing and in London and Paris and Ottawa and Brazilia and Cairo and Ulan Bator are all likely to be using Ouija boards to plot policy.
@42 Nerd of the Readhead
I want publicly paid healthcare for all.
Well, now that you mention it, it is rather nice and saves us money overall.
Heck of a lot cheaper and usually better than the US (well I’d say model but I don’t think mad capitalist chaos is actually a model).