Trump's Threat · Liberty Politics Discussion

Trump's Threat

When Trump wrote, "A whole civilization will die tonight," many said that he crossed a line, a moral boundary unacceptable from a leader -- even if he didn’t mean it.

How should Trump communicate to an enemy that massacres civilians, takes advantage of kindness, and respects nothing from its opponents but force? If the objective is to achieve peace through threat, why was Trump's threat not acceptable?

War requires deceit. Victory requires unpredictability. You don’t always tell the enemy what you're going to do, and particularly not one with a moral code that does not respect its own word.

Deceit is usually bad. But deceiving the enemy, in war, is necessary. To threaten the enemy, Trump had to be unpredictable -- in front of the world. If that strategy saves lives, what's wrong with that?

To say there is something wrong with that is to say that it is better for many to die than for Trump to have used the words he chose. And to fail to recognize this fact is to be blind to the nature of this enemy and the reality of war.

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