North Korea is another failure of Obama's rule. No engagement and no balls to sort out the problem for eight years has allowed them to develop their nuclear weapons programme.

This and Syria will go down in history as Obama policy failures. Let's hope that the North Korea situation doesn't result in as many deaths as Syria.

"That was fun and to round off the day, I am off to steal a charity collection box and then desecrate a place of worship.” - Smokey, The Selhurst Arms, 26/02/02

Read "The Road" and then decide if you want to survive...

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.

NK had its first successful nuclear weapons test in 2006. [Link]

Obama didn't take office until January 2009. Still, let's not let facts get in the way of a good rant.

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.

Not that I want a North Korea thread to become another anti-Muslim discussion but I thought I'd reply to some points made about Turkey. I speak as a British born Turkish Cypriot but one who's visited Turkey many times on holiday.

Erdogan's party are unable to govern without a coalition with a right wing nationalist party. Sound familiar?

That said his party are ahead of the opposition. There are many deficits in the society but there are also many progressive people who are fighting against the retreat into reactionary politics that seeks to blame minorities and foreigners for all it's limitations.

Again, sound familiar? As in UKIP and some elements of the Tories.

I'd take a holiday there if you're in need of some enlightenment, the motorways are better maintained than in UK, free health care everywhere, the development of social security. There's plenty worse places you could be. And yes, I make a point of going to places other tourists don't. But if you want a full English with a pint of beer that's available too if you stick to the resorts.

It's not a perfect society. But where is, maybe Sweden or other Scandinavian countries? Certainly not the UK where a minority party bribes another minority party to stay in power despite losing a majority. Or the USA where the President was second in votes but due to electoral system won a majority of the electoral college.

And how many policy failures has Trump already attained to date? At least Obama kept his people alive and didn't resort to gung-ho tactics of the type that Trump is displaying. Trump has seriously ramped up levels of US animosity with North Korean leadership whereupon it is increasingly looking like there could be some serious catastrophe about to be played out. UN seems to be invisible within all of this at the moment.

Obama's foreign policy was weak and ineffective and we are now seeing the fruits of that.

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. [Orwell]