Donald Trump’s infantile temper tantrums — and how they are breaking and pulverizing national security

     Imagine if this had been our President for the past four years. Oh, wait.

Who from your childhood does Donald Trump remind you of now?

 

For me, he’s the bad kid at the birthday party who acts out so outrageously that his parents have to be called to pick him up early and take him home. But before they get there, he purposely and with malice aforethought breaks everything he can. 

He throws the birthday cake on the floor and stomps it into the carpet. 

He smashes the birthday presents by jumping up and down on them. 

He spits in the punch bowl. 

He says he has to go make a wee-wee and then deliberately pees on the bathroom floor.

 

And then, when his parents arrive, he whines to them that everybody at the party is being mean to him.

 

This time, the party is Joe Biden’s, and oh how lucky we’d be if Trump limited his misbehavior to trashing a birthday cake and spitting in a punch bowl. It’s worse than that. Much worse. He is deliberately endangering our national security, weakening our defenses against Communist Russia, and inching us toward what could turn out to be a war, maybe even a nuclear war, with Iran.

 

• Donald Trump “withdrew” us from the Open Skies Treaty, which allows our intelligence aircraft to fly over Russia and see what they’re up to — from missile launches to massing troops on the border of a third nation.

 

• He deliberately made it difficult for Joe Biden to simply reverse our Open Skies treaty withdrawal. Trump has done so by planning to get rid of the specially-equipped reconnaissance planes used in the Open Skies flights. In effect, whether out of spite or because he’s in deep to the Russian espionage apparatus, the Russians couldn’t wish for a better agent saboteur than Donald Trump.

 

• Having abrogated another treaty, in this case with Iran — the one that pretty much kept Iran out of the nuclear arms race for ten years — Trump has now begun advocating a military strike against Iran. The New York Times reports:

WASHINGTON — President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday.

A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike. The advisers — including Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — warned that a strike against Iran’s facilities could easily escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

[snip]

Since Mr. Trump dismissed Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other top Pentagon aides last week, Defense Department and other national security officials have privately expressed worries that the president might initiate operations, whether overt or secret, against Iran or other adversaries at the end of his term.

The Iranians stuck to those limits even after Mr. Trump scrapped U.S. participation in the Iran accord in 2018 and reimposed sanctions. The Iranians began to slowly edge out of those limits last year, declaring that if Mr. Trump felt free to violate its terms, they would not continue to abide by them.

 The upshot to all of this would be to get us involved simultaneously in war against two nuclear adversaries, Russia and Iran. No, it wouldn’t be good for the United States. But it would mean that Trump has made sure Joe Biden can’t enjoy his birthday cake or play with his new toys.

And frankly, that's all I think the snotty little brat wants.