Friday, April 07, 2017

How's Taleb feeling?

From Axios this morning:

On what Trump will consider:
Defense Secretary James Mattis will present President Trump with plans prepared by U.S. Central Command for a "saturation strike" on Syrian military targets tonight at Mar-a-Lago, per The Intercept.
  • What that means: The U.S. would launch dozens of Tomahawk missiles at Syrian military targets to overwhelm their Russian-bolstered defense systems and cripple Syrian air capability against rebel forces, military sources told the Intercept.
  • The big risk: The saturation strike would almost certainly result in Russian deaths, which is the "sticking point" for Mattis. The risk of Russian casualties — plus the location of Syrian air defenses in densely populated areas — were big reasons why the Obama administration never went forward with such a plan.
On what Hillary Clinton said yesterday:
 On striking Assad: "We should take out his air fields, and prevent his ability to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them."
The Trump version sounds bigger than the Clinton version, but I guess it's hard to tell.

So - big difference, hey?   And with Trump, you get the added "advantage" of attempts to destroy Obamacare with nothing to replace it; a crippling of anti pollution measures; tax and infrastructure plans designed to blow out the budget; increased defence spending for a force which Taleb thought might be used less; and talk of "going it alone" against North Korea when everyone knows that's impossible.  

Yeah, great political judgement there, Taleb...


2 comments:

not trampis said...

Clinton is much better thinking. You want to have as little as possible of Syrian jets in the air firing chemical weapons.
Simply make them unable to fly.

The Rebels have no planes.

Jason Soon said...

it's ridiculous how fast Trump has folded on this.