Corker's attack on the president's nuclear authority

Trump Critic Sen. Corker to Hold Hearing on Executive Authority to Use Nuclear Weapons

Fine, but the issue is less one of Trump using nukes first against Korea than whether he decides to reduce NK to an ashtray at the risk of global thermonuclear war, in case NK launches one or two nukes at the US.

Or, OK, if they don't launch, at all, but merely very clearly obtain the capacity to hit us with hydrogen bombs.

Yes, that is first use.

But what if he decides to start a conventional war to prevent NK getting that capacity, or to take it away from them?

Update.

IKE's biographer says he ended the Korean War by threatening to use nukes, at a time when nobody else had them.

MSNBCs house general: NK has or soon will have nukes they can hit us with. Get used to it.

General Barry McCaffrey.

The MSNBC CMW is that this is inevitable and no military action to delay or prevent it beyond pure symbolism is acceptable.

Certainly nothing that risks war.

They continue to urge diplomatic actions and sanctions as an alternative to military action, though they themselves at the same time repeatedly say they will not work.

Their solicitude for the civilians in Seoul whose city would (we are told) get clobbered by artillery in the first minutes of a general peninsular war far exceeds their solicitude for Americans who will soon face being nuked if the US actually attempted to defend SK from NK.

NK is right.

The day they can nuke San Francisco is the day after the last day on which they will face any significant danger of a war to force regime change on them.

And every day from that day forward is a day on which the US is much less likely than today to come to the aid of SK if NK invades the South.

Paper tiger, eh?

Oh, and nobody is even whispering reminders that Eisenhower ended the first Korean War by use of a totally believable threat to use nukes.

David Brooks' dx and rx

It's not too late!

Not a bad summary of the case for stopping Trump and Cruz at the convention.

But his finish is a delusion.

Along comes Donald Trump offering to replace it and change the nature of the G.O.P. 

He tramples all over the anti-government ideology of modern Republicanism. 

He would replace the free-market orthodoxy with authoritarian nationalism.

He offers to use government on behalf of the American working class, but in negative and defensive ways: to build walls, to close trade, to ban outside groups, to smash enemies. 

According to him, America’s problems aren’t caused by deep structural shifts. 

They’re caused by morons and parasites.

The Great Leader will take them down.

If the G.O.P. is going to survive as a decent and viable national party, it can’t cling to the fading orthodoxy Cruz represents. 

But it can’t shift to ugly Trumpian nationalism, either. 

It has to find a third alternative: limited but energetic use of government to expand mobility and widen openness and opportunity. 

That is what Kasich, Rubio, Paul Ryan and others are stumbling toward.

Phooey.

Kasich, Rubio, and Ryan are not remotely three peas in the same pod, and none represents a way forward.

The way forward is the way back, emulation of Eisenhower and Nixon and Rockefeller.

They were, like Trump, friendly to the working class and the Big Government built by, at the time, over half a century of progressivism, in total contrast to its sworn enemies, followers of Goldwater whom they all three despised and whose conservatism they loathed.

A Republican Party willing to resume that identity can be a serious and viable competitor for the socially and economically further left Democratic Party.

But nobody who came to speak for any variety of Republicanism in the last few decades will say that, since all of them are conservatives, themselves, of one stripe or another.

Pshaw

Well, this is stupid.

En effet, la déstalinisation conduit certains gouvernements à espérer le changement.

C’est le cas en Pologne, mais surtout en Hongrie où une rébellion éclate pour ramener au pouvoir le communiste réformateur Imre Nagy (1896-1958) et écarter le stalinien Mátyás Rákosi (1892-1971).

Mais Khrouchtchev renverse brutalement cette insurrection, causant la mort de 25 000 personnes et provoquant l’exil d’environ 150 000 autres.

Imre Nagy est arrêté et est exécuté en 1958.

Mais parce que la coexistence pacifique implique une non-intervention dans les affaires de l’autre bloc, les États-Unis restent en retrait dans le conflit.

Ceux-ci tentent toutefois de négocier au niveau international avec l’Union soviétique tout en soutenant la propagande anticommuniste aux États-Unis.

Ils n’interviennent pas davantage pour défendre leurs alliés français et britanniques lors de la crise de Suez.

Fiddlesticks.

When push came to shove, Eisenhower flatly let down enthusiasts of rollback like those who would cheer for Goldwater in 1964.

The bluff had been called.

And Suez was more complicated than that.