There is a wonderful 1993 movie called Rising Sun, starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, involving the
investigation of a murder in a newly-opened Japanese corporate office building in
New York. In it there is an early scene in which the young detective (Wesley
Snipes), guided by the old Japan hand (Sean Connery) suddenly realizes that he
is completely out of his depth, and that in the Japanese corporate culture
around him there are layers and layers of complexity well beyond his simple
American concepts. I think the
mainstream American press and the blogosphere and the TV talking heads are
about at about that point right now. Ideologically blinded, they still think of
Trump as dumb and naïve despite the now overwhelming evidence that he is in
fact a pretty bright guy, a lot brighter apparently than the political
establishment and media that were so sure he would never win the primaries, and
certainly never win the presidency. And in fact, anyone who really thought clearly
about it might suspect that anyone who could become a billionaire with a
private 757 jet in the rough, dog-eat-dog high-risk New York commercial real
estate market is probably a pretty clever cookie!
Trump’s call with the President of Taiwan set off a
predictable cascade of editorials and stories about how this was yet another naïve
move by a foreign policy amateur. Now of course it has been coming out that
this was instead a carefully planned strategic move, orchestrated in part by
ex-Senator Bob Dole over several weeks. To understand the background and probable
significance of this move, read George Friedman’s article Trump, Taiwan and an Uproar. Friedman, CEO of STRATFOR, the
world’s largest private intelligence agency, is a very astute geopolitical
student. (I highly recommend reading STRATFOR’s free weekly geopolitical
summary articles, and Friedman's books).
Since the mainstream press (and the administration) has been
wrong-footed for some years now with ISIS and the Middle East, China, Putin’s
Russia, Brexit, and now the primaries and the election, one wonders how much
more it will take before they realize they need to re-calibrate their thinking.
Or maybe they are so in thrall with their ideology, or so smug in their
supposed superiority that they are simply incapable of learning and changing!
Posts
