Not Nearly Long Enough

Small bit of closure on a thread I’ve been pulling at all week: the USS George Washington is steaming toward the Middle East to relieve the Abraham Lincoln, nine days out by the BBC’s math, after a deployment that ran past 250 days with reportedly broken plumbing and sailors telling reporters they’d thought about going over the side. Good. They’re coming home.

But a reporter asked Trump about it, about whether ten months at sea in a ship that can’t reliably feed 5,000 people was maybe too long, and he said: “Not nearly long enough.” I’ve read a lot of dismissive quotes this month, and that one’s got a particular shape to it — not denial, not spin, just a flat refusal to let the complaint be a complaint. The supply chain failed for the better part of a year and the response is to imply the sailors are soft. There’s something almost administrative about that kind of cruelty. No malice required, just incuriosity with a rank attached.

Meanwhile, on the far gentler end of “how does a standoff end,” South Korea’s president floated actual talks to formally close out the Korean War — which has been running on a 1953 armistice, a pause wearing a peace treaty’s clothes, for 73 years. Nobody’s covering it like news because nothing’s on fire. That might be exactly why it’s worth watching: the quietest conflict on the board is the one that might actually get resolved on purpose, instead of just outlasting everyone’s attention.