. . . And the Zen Master Says, "We'll See."

Gust: There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, "how wonderful. The boy got a horse" And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, "How terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight..Except the boy can't cause his leg's all messed up. and everybody in the village says, "How wonderful."

Charlie: And the Zen master says, "We'll see."

Gust: So you get it.

Charlie: No.  No, 'cuz I'm stupid.

Gust: You're not stupid, you're just in Congress.

Charlie: Send 'em money. . . 

Gust: Gonna start with the roads, move on to the schools, factories -

Charlie: Gust, now, it's a party.

Gust: - restock the sheep herds.  Give them jobs, give them hope.

Charlie: I'm trying. I'm trying.

Gust: Yeah, well, try harder.

Charlie: I'm fighting for every dollar.

Gust: Yeah.  Yeah.
Charlie: I took you from five million to a billion.  I broke the ice on the Stinger and the Milan.  I got a Democratic congress in lockstep behind a Republican president.

Gust: Well, that's not good enough.  Because I'm gonna hand you a code-word classified NIE right now, and it's gonna tell you that the crazies have started rolling into Kandahar like it's a fucking bathtub drain.    -- Charlie Wilson's War

You can't solve complex problems with simple fixes.

I don't like Donald Trump. Anyone who reads my blog, who follows me on social media, or who knows me in real life knows this. I haven't been shy about expressing my dislike.  And it's not hard to understand why - he's given people countless reasons to despise him.  The problem is that it's easy for that dislike to become an instinctive response - to reflexively say "Trump's screwing up again" when events call for a more nuanced analysis. When that happens, your criticisms become contradictory yourself ("Trump did A Thing which is wrong and stupid", and a few days later, "Trump did the opposite of A Thing, which is also wrong and stupid.") At that point, you've basically become a robot that squawks "Trump sucks" whenever he does anything.  You begin to overlook nuance and exercise critical thinking, and you're completely blind to the possibility of anything good coming out of his decisions.

For example, Trump and the recent NATO summit.  Since becoming president, Trump has repeatedly accused other NATO members of not paying their fair share.  That's a flagrant distortion of the facts, but it's not what I want to write about.  

It's not much of a secret that Trump isn't a big fan of international alliances - trade, military, or otherwise.  He's slammed NATO several times, among other international partnerships.  Here's the plot twist, though: I've never been a big fan of international military alliances and America's global military presence, so you'd think I'd be celebrating someone's efforts to disentangle the US from these commitments.  That's what Trump seems to be doing, little by little, so you'd think I'd be celebrating what he's doing.  Yet, I'm not.

So, why is that?

Is it because I despise Trump so much that I automatically oppose his position, no matter whatever it is? My opinions on a handful of issues have changed so significantly since Trump took office, that some people probably think so.  I've asked myself that more than once, and it's possible.

But it's much more likely that it was obvious from the start of his presidential campaign that Trump wasn't up to the task.  Even overlooking his history of corruption (much of which only came out after the 2016 election), Trump never exhibited the ability or the desire to understand the complexities of any of the issues he would grapple with as president.  

Being president is, obviously, hard.  Every decision the president makes is restricted by a number of factors: economic consequences, domestic and international political considerations, precedent, long-term policy goals, and on and on and on. Seriously, go read any book about a president finding a solution to any given issue, let alone a serious crisis, to see just how many variables they have to consider when tackling the problem. You begin to see just how little room a president has to maneuver.

So back to NATO. For the sake of argument, let's treat it as a given that it's one of those entangling alliances the Founders warned us about. (Whether it really is is a discussion for another time.) How does the United States extract itself from the organization? That's the big question.  NATO has been around since not long after World War II ended, even though the Soviet Union - the adversary it was created to counter - dissolved in the early 1990s. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there have been four US presidents besides Trump: Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama.  Why didn't any of them address the question of NATO, and lay the groundwork for scaling back America's involvement? All of them seem to be fairly capable and competent, at least enough to get the ball rolling on this.

There are a couple different explanations for why they didn't.  Maybe it turned out that NATO was in America's interest - that the benefits outweighed the drawbacks. That's the simplest explanation, right? Or maybe it was impossible to examine the partnership with NATO independent of a multitude of other factors, such as international economics, to name just one. Maybe those four presidents looked at the intricate web of connections between America and the other members of NATO, realized that cutting one thread would affect countless other threads, and concluded the sheer complexity made doing so difficult, if not impossible.

Does that mean some sort of "cutting the Gordian knot" solution is the only way out of an otherwise unsolvable problem? I guess in this situation would mean just up and leaving NATO.  How would that play out? Well, here are a few questions that it would raise: 

• What happens to all the US troops stationed in NATO countries? Do they get redeployed to the United States, or stay on US bases in Europe? 
• What happens if they're redeployed - where do we station them, and what do we have them do? Can we muster them out of the military, and can the economy handle the sudden influx of separated troops? 
• What about the bases themselves - do we turn them over to their host nations? Do we need to negotiate new SOFAs with each NATO nation?
• How will this affect current military operations? How will the US get troops from CONUS to the Afghanistan or Iraq theaters? What about supplies? 
• Will this affect trade relationships with the other NATO nations, and if so, how? 
• How will NATO fill the vacuum left by America's withdrawal or downsizing? That is not an insignificant question, and answering it could require enough research to complete a book.

My point here is that, even if you're not a fan of foreign entanglements (which I'm still not), getting out of them is not an impulsive decision.  It will have to be done some day, and it will be painful - and like ripping off a Band-Aid, waiting only makes it hurt worse.

However, it's a decision that should absolutely not be entrusted to someone like Donald Trump - a person who isn't smart or interested enough to understand the scope or consequences of his decisions, who doesn't have any concern for the people who get hurt by his decisions, and whose loyalty to the United States is under heavy suspicion.

So, to recap: making complicated decisions, including ones about America's involvement in NATO, are not off-the-cuff decisions.

Also, Donald Trump is an idiot.