Problem Countries for the United States The current situation in the world is not very good. The situation I am talking about is the state of relations between some countries. It is hard to believe, but the Taliban launched an attack just before a peace meeting with the president. How does one make a peace treaty with an entity which denies woman’s rights to even a basic education? Not only that they consider us crusaders who must be crushed. This group is living in the 10th century not the 21st so they will fight forever. I can’t blame the president for trying to make peace and withdraw our troops wherever he can, but it seems if we leave Afghanistan the Taliban will ban together with other Islamic terror groups and the attacks will spread throughout the Arab world and then continue on to the rest of the world. It is a real sticky problem. North Korea is another place where it seems we will not succeed. We may have a dialog with its leader Kim, but is there any chance he will give up his nuclear weapons to become a more prosperous country? When a dictator is in power what is his most important agenda? It is staying in power above all else and this is the problem we face in that country. Kim doesn’t trust us or our system of democracy. He looks at places like Libya where Qadhafi gave up his major weapons and later was murdered. He may want to eventually see North Korea more prosperous, but not until he has at least more nukes on IBMs and submarines capable of launching nuclear rockets. A secondary consideration for him is he would love to take over South Korea and be the leader of a united Korea. Meanwhile he also faces the other power brokers in his party who might be able to get rid of him if he does something considered weak by them. It is very hard to convince someone like this to do anything he perceives as a danger to himself. Iran is just another problem similar to North Korea, but worse. The reason I say worse is because its president really does not have the final say in the way the country is run or in any negotiations it might make. It is the religious leader Khomeini. He will overrule anything the president does he doesn’t agree with and he looks at these things with a different view. The Iranians remember when the United States put the Shaw in charge of their country and it seems they will never forgive us for this. Their agenda seems to be similar to Isis in that they are trying to foster rebellion in the Arab world and have increased the capacity of their nuclear capabilities with new machines which are a lot more efficient. They put in new centrifuges which are ten times faster than the ones they replaced. Centrifuges are used to create nuclear fuel and nuclear bomb material. One might say Iran is the hardest nut of all to crack. China is scheduled to meet with the United States in October 2019. I am writing this article in September 2019 so I don’t know what is going to happen, but I do know we have a big trade and territorial problem with China. If we look at the trade problem, we find the deal we had with China enriched them while hurting us. We were trading with a country which has no respect for the intellectual property of others or their patents and copyrights. One of the things they would do is buy something from another country in small amounts and then copy it. We can no longer allow this to happen. They would trade with our open market while theirs was closed for many items. This is how they built their economy into the biggest in the world. We must have equitable trading but even if the President of China would want it, he faces the Communist Party which could remove him or worse. As for the territorial problems, China wants to be the powerhouse in the region and has done a lot to try and take over the waters in the area. They have gone as far as telling other countries they cannot travel through certain seas without permission from the Chinese government. You can imagine how this went over with the United States. To put it mildly we then sent several ships through the area and continue to do so any time we want. China is building all sorts of anti-ship weapons and improving their military and soon will be the country with the second biggest aircraft carrier force. It will still be only a fraction of the size of ours. When the Soviet Union fell, it was thought Russia and the United States might become allies. The Russians asked the United States if they could partner with them on the next manned moon mission, after all they were involved with the International Space Station as were we. We denied that. The Russians wanted to join NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and were denied membership. The last thing the United States wanted was their old enemy given a say in that organization. In a way we missed a chance when the Soviet Union fell to have better relations with Russia. It is said the Russians continued to listen in on the population and there were so many microphones in one of the churches it was known as Our Lady of Immaculate Reception. This just proved the Russians didn’t trust us either. Russia was in total disarray after the fall of communism. In 2005 when Putin met with an American delegation he said, “You can’t have everything your way anymore. We can have effective relations, but not just on your terms.” Putin had a problem and it was internal. Under his presidency crime and criminal organizations strengthened. It made it much harder for the U.S. to deal with the Russians. Russian geopolitical interests were the opposite of ours in many areas and we finally reached a point where we were beginning to have a Cold War again. Plans were made to consider the Ukraine and Georgia NATO members, which really angered Putin considering Russia was denied. It never happened however and just added fuel to the fire separating Russia and the United States. It is not easy trying to get countries to forget their differences if they had a checkered past and perhaps found themselves on opposite sides of wars and such. The ideal thing would be for all countries to get along and be able to negotiate their differences. In the real world some countries have a hard time doing this.
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