Who says history does not repeat itself? Who says it does?
Both are right, both are wrong, which is to say stuff happens that should not, that could be prevented but it happens and so it seems, just now, that history has farted Trump and the smell is that of 1919 in 2019.
An American president is dealing with Turkey and Hungary, remnants of two of the losing empires in WWI, as if they were great powers.
An American president, any American president, should never meet with a creature like Recep Erdogan anywhere much less at the White House or, for that matter, Victor Orban of Hungary, who showed up at the White House lately too.
And never mind Trump buddy Nigel Farage, who has proven so much better at leading Great Britain to the far side than Oswald Mosley (who persuaded Diana Mitford if not many more – she a great sycophantic friend of Adolph yes, that Adolph. Think of it this way, with Trump, as we know, it’s all in the family — the blood family and the blooded families of history).
No, an American president chastises them (Erdogan, Orban and their ilk), makes it difficult for them to function, blocks them internationally. Well, they are supposed to, aren’t they?
Instead, this president says of Erdogan, who has imposed a reign of terror in Turkey while seeking Ottoman resurgence in the Mideast by any means including massacre – this president says, “I like him”.
A president has to meet with Vladimir Putin – as a known adversary – because and only because Putin controls the largest nuclear arsenal in the world — ours is second in number by a few but has greater deliverability (Barack Obama budgeted tens of billions of dollars over the next two decades to maintain the arsenal, the one Obama-thing this one has not reversed).
Not that this matters a hell of a lot if we or they use the nukes, a dicier chance now since the abandonment of intermediate nuclear weapons control even as Ronald Reagan’s and Mikhail Gorbachev’s larger strategic nuclear arms limitations head toward expiration in a year or so with no effort whatsoever to keep them (we’ll leave it to the evangelicals to battle for the lord while the rest of us worry anew about Armageddon).
So, yes, American presidents have to talk to Vlad no matter how noxious he is – and he is.
But they don’t have to be his buddy, do him favors. Not hardly, not at all. No favors need be given a nation with merely the 14th largest economy in the world, approximate to 7% of ours still the largest in the world for a while yet.
No favors but pressures are due Turkey, Nato’s second-largest military power after the U.S., which infuses Erdogan’s impunity.
Then is Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who Erdogan wants to kill, safe from extradition or a diplomatic kidnapping in Pennsylvania after today? Safe from a president who says of Erdogan “I like him” — after the Turk has played this president for a fool again and again?
If Gullen will yet be safe in his Pocono hideaway it will be only because — unlike Turkey -we still have, for a while, independent courts.
Trump, who knows almost nothing, does not know that he has the world back in 1919, a bad time that led to much worse times.
Peeling the Onion 