Klingons at the Republican Debate

 

            I’ve sometimes wondered what life must have been like for Mr. Spock after the Federation made peace with the Klingons in 2293 and began accepting them into Starfleet.  It must have been bad enough to have to put up with people ruled by their emotions like Dr. McCoy or by their hormones like Captain Kirk.  Adding the often senseless belligerence of the new Klingon officers to the mix must have started his copper-based blood to boil.

            Poor Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and John Kasich must have felt just that way on Wednesday night while contending with a pack of snarling, growling, saber-rattling, Republican candidates seeking the presidency.  They must have felt as if they were in an as yet undiscovered country.

            Speaking of the just concluded nuclear deal, Cruz, for example, bellowed: “If I am elected president, on the very first day in office, I will rip to shreds this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal.” 

            Mike Huckabee, who had once been the pastor of a Baptist Congregation in Pine Bluffs, Arkansas said that he wanted to “destroy” an agreement that “the president treats like the Magna Carta, but Iranians treat like it’s toilet paper” because “otherwise, we put every person in this world in a very dangerous place.”

            Carly Fiorina, the winner of the debate according to a new CNN/ORC International poll, through what looked like clenched teeth, promised to abrogate the agreement on her first day in office.  Right after the inaugural festivities, she snarled, she would make two phone calls. 

            Implying that for her, the key point of the agreement was to protect Israel, Fiorina promised that her first call would be to her “good friend Bibi Netanyahu” to reassure him that we will stand with the State of Israel.” 

            The second would be to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader and a person with whom not even Barack Obama has spoken, “to tell him that unless and until he opens every military and every nuclear facility to real anytime anywhere inspections by our people, not his, we, the United States will make it as difficult as possible to move money around the financial global system.”  She’s since said that she’d tell him, “Idon’t care what your deal was.  Here’sthe new deal.”

           Fiorina also said that having met Russian President Vladimir Putin, “I wouldn’t talk to him at all.  We’ve talked way too much to him.”  To get through to him, she would immediately “begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states, “ and “probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany,” apparently to show Putin that the U.S. has “the strongest military on the face of the planet.”

            Fascinating.  She’s obviously a lady who has the stones to poke at a bear. 

            Marco Rubio wanted to make sure that everyone knew that “There is a lunatic in North Korea with dozens of nuclear weapons and long-range rockets that can already hit the very place in which we stand tonight.  The Chinese are rapidly expanding their military. . . A gangster in Moscow is not just threatening Europe, he’s threatening to destroy and divide NATO.  You have radical jihadists in dozens of countries across multiple continents . . . And now we have got this horrible deal with Iran where a radical Shia cleric with an apocalyptic vision of the future is also guaranteed to one day possess nuclear weapons . . . These are extraordinarily dangerous times that we live in.

            That sure is frightening.

            Scott Walker wanted to cancel a scheduled State Dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping to send a message about Chinese computer hacking.  And Donald Trump wanted everyone to know that he is “the most militaristic person you will ever meet.”

            Bush, Kasich and Paul responded to all of this posturing in a manner worthy of The Next Generation’s Jean Luc Piccard, Captain of the Starship Enterprise.  Said Sen. Paul: “Should we continue to talk with Iran? Yes. Should we cut up the agreement immediately?  That’s absurd. . . .  The same goes with China.  I don’t think we need to be reckless, and I think we need to leave lines of communication open. . . .We do need to be engaged with Russia. It doesn’t mean we give them a free pass, or China a free pass, but, to be engaged, to continue to talk.  We did throughout the Cold War, and it would be a big mistake not to do it here.” 

            Governors Bush and Kasich agreed, with Kasich noting that “we are stronger when we work with the Western civilization, our friends in Europe, and just doing it on our own I don’t think is the right policy.”  Said Bush, “It’s not a strategy to tear up an agreement.”

            Unfortunately, Piccard doesn’t play any better in the Redlands as he does on the Klingon home world.  According to the CNN/ORC International poll, Trump is still in the lead, Fiorina has vaulted into second place and Rubio almost quadrupled his percentage of potential votes, moving from 3% two weeks ago to 11% last week. Neither Bush, Paul nor Kasich has improved his share of potential votes from two weeks ago.

            It’s hard to know whether this is normal for the Republican Party, with its fear-based worldview, or if this is a manifestation of the anger I wrote about a few weeks ago.  What does seem to be clear is that Republican voters want to see that their candidates are willing to put the rest of the world in its place.

            Regardless of which explanation is correct, the belligerence on display last week makes it unlikely that anyone would live long and prosper if any of these people make it to the White House.  No country seriously threatens us.  Iran, Russia and North Korea are small and weak in comparison to the U.S. military, and there’s no evidence that the leaders of any of those countries has a death wish.  Tweeking other countries make it likely that they’ll tweek us right back.

             It’s just that as technology shrinks the world, it becomes more likely that when we all go about maximizing our interests, we’re all going to bang into each other from time to time.  The question is whether we politely mumble “scuse mes” to each other and move on or whether we regard those bumps as insults and demand redress.

            Clearly, most of the Republicans prefer the latter course of action. We all know where that goes, and it’s most assuredly not a place no one has gone before.  That’s why Spock is likely to shake his head and wonder whether there’s any intelligent life in the outfit he works for.