3 days, 3 international incidents

[Fast Walker 52]

1) the Pakistan call, pissing off India

2) the Taiwan call pissing off China

3) now the Philippines call, praising the murderous monster there http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/03/politics/trump-duterte-phone-call/index.html

I really feel bad for the career diplomats at the State department.

Let's just hope these can be smoothed over and won't cause worse problems. They still will cost us.

https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/805065476300800000

Countries where trump already screwed up diplomatically is 2 long to tweet. Why won't he get briefed by State like all prez-elects be4 him?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Interesting comment.

I really feel bad for the career diplomats at the State department.

I wonder if there will be mass resignations during a Trump administration.

A friend of mine used to work for the State department, served in a South American country and an Eastern European one, then decided it wasn't quite the life for her. I'll have to ask her how much difference she thought it made who was President. I think she served partly under Clinton and partly under W.

[Ilsa]

2. I hope they don't resign.

We need people at State that know what they're doing, not to make Trump look good, but to protect the US from his messes, possibly economic, possibly worse, like war.

[Fast Walker 52]

3. exactly... we had similar things with GWBush, but this is just way way way worse

and we need good people there to keep us from starting a war for no reason at all except Trump's dumbassery.

[NightWatcher]

4. And he doesn't take office for almost 50 days...

[Barack_America]

9. I think he could actually provoke a war in that amount of time.

I'm not kidding.

[Ilsa]

10. I'm trying to work my way through the potential logistics

of how it starts and develops. All I can come up with is a massive attack on DT's whereabouts by a foreign power pre-emptively.

While some of us are having a second Thanksgiving, a RW General takes us to war anyway.

[Horse with no Name]

5. but I was just reassured that just like America, the rest of the world

knows that trump is on a learning curve....yes someone just said that.

[Fast Walker 52]

6. is learning even possible for this 70 year old man child with ADHD?

[Skittles]

7. no

[bdamomma]

8. who just said it

this man is a full threat to americans and the rest of the world. can't Obama call martial law and arrest this man???

[Fast Walker 52]

11. I really feel like somehow this can't stand-- this man, this election, this insane future we are

looking at-- something has to give.

Hopefully his presidency will fall apart without too much damage...

[Fast Walker 52]

12. "Take This Trump Shit Seriously"

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/12/3/122017/224

I don't think it's productive to be glib about "long-established 'rules' of doing things" when it comes to China and Taiwan. Whatever you want to call "the Deep State," the development of the One-China Policy was a diplomatic dance that worked precisely because all sides agreed to abide by something that didn't make perfect sense. I think it has been vastly more successful than the way we treated communist takeovers in Korea and Vietnam. And, yes, it's a way of controlling our own lunatics just as much as it is a way of controlling theirs.

If Trump is being advised by lunatics now, that's a problem. And if he's just so ignorant and pig-headed that he doesn't know or care what he just did by having his staff arrange a call with Taiwan, that's not a bold way of violating pointless norms. It's extraordinarily dangerous and portends all kinds of problems for our country, the world, and the prospects for peace between nations.

I cannot understand how Trump was allowed to offer a state visit to Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines. It's beyond belief. That absolutely cannot happen. Figuring out how to handle Duterte and our longstanding relationship with the Philippines is a real conundrum, and a ton of work would have to be done before we could even think of rewarding Duterte with a state visit. Honestly, I don't think it would ever be justifiable.

And Trump cannot go plodding into Pakistan-India relations without getting a briefing from the State Department. They are nuclear-armed powers on constant alert against sneak attacks from each other, and it's unimaginably irresponsible to speak with either government without carefully considering the implications of every word you're going to say.

You can talk all you want about how Trump has some kind of mandate to challenge the status quo and that our elites are just using stale norms to "control the executive." We've had normal presidents deal with that straightjacket, on Cuba, Israel, China, anti-Soviet policy. That's not what we're dealing with here. At all.

If you want to challenge norms and blow up longstanding ways of doing things, it's all the more important that you understand exactly why we have done things the way he have and what the implications are of changing them.

Right now, we're relying on something quite appalling.

[bdamomma]

13. Very good post

tRump doesn't know diplomacy, he is quite mentally ill. And we know our Congress will do nothing to help us. They will take their private planes and hightail out of the country.

These are billionaires they don't give a crap about us.