Sparks: Trump’s move to gut South Korea alliance is ‘inane, haphazard decision’, lawmakers say
By what right does a single magistrate dissolve a bond of seventy years, bypass the deliberative assembly, and leave our frontiers exposed, unless he intends that the law shall henceforth be nothing but his own sudden whim?
Fortune is fickle, yet we invite ruin faster when we discard our shields to please an enemy who remains whetting his blade in the dark.
Observe how the instinct of the master-pretender seeks to destroy the long-standing contract, not out of strength, but from a desperate need to feel the weight of his own hand upon the scales of history.
Discarding an armed auxiliary to win the favor of a neighboring prince is a folly that leaves the state without a friend to trust and provides the enemy with a target that has no defense.
Abandoning one's oldest friends to flatter one's newest enemies is the sort of social error that only a man with absolutely no sense of irony could mistake for a stroke of genius.
The old kinetic energy of the Pacific alliance, once a steady force of 1945, now dissipates into the friction of a single man's temperament, proving that political dynamos eventually spin themselves into mere heat and noise.
Severing the military connection at the peninsula's edge ignores the isothermal lines of trade and climate security that bind the entire Pacific basin into a single, delicate organism which cannot survive such a violent amputation.
Those who trade away the safety of a whole people for a few soft words from a king have never felt the weight of the chains they are inviting back into the house.
A man who kicks his watchdog in the ribs to prove he is friendly to the wolf will find, when the sun goes down, that he has lost his protection and gained nothing but a hungrier predator.
The argument assumes that removing the constant of a defensive presence will result in a stable peace, yet it fails to account for the vacuum that must, by geometric necessity, be filled by the nearest opposing force.
Just as the removal of a primary arch causes the entire cathedral to lean toward the earth, the sudden withdrawal of this structural support ensures the surrounding currents of power will collapse into a spiral of chaos.
You don't tear up the tracks and burn the lanterns while the passengers are still out in the cold night, unless you want to see them captured by the very men they were trying to outrun.
When a leader breaks a solemn covenant of protection to embrace a tyrant, he proves that he values the brotherhood of oppressors far more than the liberty of the people he was sworn to defend.
Things that are truly distressing: a long-standing agreement discarded like a soiled fan, a great power behaving like a petulant child, and the silence of those who should be shouting for order.