Trump’s demagoguery is making the world a more dangerous place

Donald Trump will no doubt claim that he is an excellent representative of the ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’ idea of diplomacy, now that his foreign diplomats have argued that North Korea is wrong to claim that America is at war with North Korea.

Strong men like Trump can always switch from threatening to appeasing approaches – well, so they think anyway!

The problem is that he represents in reality a different approach to international diplomacy which is that ‘the madman always wins’.

This is a dangerous idea because it threatens the uneasy balances of power which have emerged since the Second World War and Korean War.

The only way of rectifying such a balance (once tipped by a madman) is to be just as mad as the madman. That’s when the nasty game becomes accident prone.

A rocket fired over Japan might, for example, accidently destroy Tokyo , then a power fantasist like Trump would feel he had no choice but to retaliate.

Or North Korea might indulge its latest threat and shoot down an American jet in international air-space.

Madmen also cause a moral decline in world relationships. When the Christian right in America backed Trump despite his promise to commit genocide if threats continue, the moral voice of America was declaring its moral bankruptcy.

Don’t expect Vladimir Putin to feel comfortable about that; instead his uneasy balance of power with America will also feel under threat, and as he (another power fantasist) has recently warned us of Russia’s concern, we are all left treading on explosive eggshells.

The world (including the UK) is becoming a nastier, more dangerous place.

ANDREW VASS Corbiehill Place, Edinburgh In a long-awaited speech Donald Trump rightly criticised the United Nations, that corrupt, opaque, diplomatically immune and largely unaccountable organisation which regards the billions it gets from western tax-payers as an entitlement.

Decisions are dictated by non-democratic voting blocs, such as the Saudi-based 56-member Islamic Conference or the 120 member Nonaligned Movement, chaired in recent years by such luminaries as Cuba, Egypt, Iran and Venezuela.

In the ‘Cash-for-kim’ farrago, the UN Development Program transferred hard currency and dual-use goods including nuclear technology to North Korea, while Iran received nuclear technology from its World Intellectual Property Organisation.

Finally, there’s no more glaring example of UN hypocrisy and subversion than its Human Rights Council, dominated by such human-rights abusers as Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Qatar, Venezuela, Gabon, Bangladesh, Burundi, Cote d’ivoire, etc, etc. REV DR JOHN CAMERON Howard Place, St Andrews