Trump’s Foreign Policy: The Popping Point of Maximum Pressure | National Review "The U.S. is gaining momentum in our standoffs with China, Iran, and North Korea. So expect dangerous provocations." When the provocations come, do great damage in return. As my father told me as a young boy, never start a fight, but never dither in ending one once started. "The most dangerous moments of a trade war, a political impasse, or an escalating military confrontation are predictable. They follow when one side, arrogant from previously being exempt from any consequences for its aggression, believes it’s starting to lose a conflict that it prompted and cannot afford to lose. At this critical point, it either lashes out to avoid defeat or accepts inevitable loss — but at least hopes to take its victorious adversary down with it. Think of Japan running wild in China and Asia during the late 1930s, scorning milquetoast criticism from a disarmed Europe and the U.S., and then growing hysterical when Britain and the U.S. finally began rearming and sanctioning Japanese exports and imports — all leading to the cataclysm at Pearl Harbor and Singapore. Or remember Saddam Hussein’s financially exhausted Iraq in 1990, worn out from the disastrous Iran–Iraq war, and its growing indebtedness to the West and Arab world — and then in lunatic and disastrous fashion invading Kuwait. The lessons are not that wounded animals defeat their stronger adversaries. Rather, when trapped and slowly bleeding to death in their caves, in extremis they sometimes prefer to leap out in a foolhardy and desperate effort to find some solution for their own self-created dilemmas. In the next few months, we should expect a major provocation from either an increasingly beleaguered Iran or a flummoxed North Korea — and some sort of desperate quid pro quo from China presented as a last chance, a rare and magnanimous offer to stop the tariffs so “we can all just get along.” Trump should stay the course and not let up until he achieves the original aim of his maximum pressure campaign. Nothing is more dangerous than to enter an existential standoff, feel momentum accruing, and then appease and grant concessions that destroy all prior sacrifice that heretofore had been finally paying off. Instead, he should expect our strapped adversaries at some point to do their worst, and then meet that challenge with our best — and ensure that our adversaries in their decline lack the power to take us down with them."
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