Wars involving major powers get sometimes lit by fixations, or to use a less charitable word, fantasies, on threats that are imaginary. An extreme example with widespread worldwide consequences is the fixation of major European powers, including Germany, France and Britain that they are under imminent threat of a kinetic offensive by the Russian Federation. They need to see the comment on this made by US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard. This comment, made on a prominent social media platform, is that the DNI has evaluated that the Russian Federation lacks the capability to invade and occupy even the whole of Ukraine, much less the capability of doing so to countries in Europe such as France, Germany and Britain.
Indirectly, the DNI was defending President Trump, who has been accused by several in Europe that he is “too soft on Russia”. It is realistic of President Trump to seek a detente with the Russian Federation for the purpose of teaming up to jointly utilise the immense natural wealth of Russia for mutual benefit. They need to admit that President Trump was right and they, Prime Minister Starmer, Federal Chancellor Merz and President Macron, were wrong. The problem for this simple public affirmation of a fact is that taxpayers in countries with Russophobe Heads of Government will then ask them why they have been paying so much additional taxation if the grim scenario of an imminent Russian attack were overdrawn.
Whether it be Germany, France or Britain, the not inconsequential expenditure incurred by them on sustaining the Ukrainian conflict has resulted in slower economic growth and greater financial stringency and insecurity amongst the households of millions of citizens. Yet whatever the political risk involved, it would be better for Merz, Starmer and Macron to continue the present disastrous course of action taken by them. In the past, such fantasies have on occasion led Europe to war.
In his “Am Westen Nicht Neus” (All Quiet on the Western Front), Remarque ended his book by illustrating a German Field Marshal who had been headquartered in a chateau in the bits of French territory occupied by the German army. With just a quarter hour to go before the time when the Armistice was to take effect, the Field Marshal ordered a fruitless final charge of the soldiers under him on a French fortified post. In the final moments of World War I, German soldiers fought to the death against their counterparts in the French army. In a gruesome scene, a German soldier fought and overpowered a French soldier in a French trench. The Field Marshal in the army of the Kaiser was determined to fight until the final moments before the Armistice took effect.
More French and German lives were lost as a result, adding on to the tens of millions of young lives similarly lost. When the Armistice took effect, the Field Marshal shot himself to death, being unable to face a world where the German soldiers had been defeated. But not before he ordered the shooting of a few young soldiers who had refused to join in a futile final battle against the French in their trenches. This time around, it is not French, German or British soldiers but Ukrainian soldiers who are at risk of being killed.
Every day that passes in the carrying out of a campaign to reoccupy the lands lost to the control of Kiev consequent to the 2014 “Maidan Revolution”, the popularity of President Zelenskyy amongst his citizens further diminishes. Small wonder that promises made by him at Mar-a-Lago of favouring peace are those President Zelenskyy has no intention of keeping. For peace would result in it being too obvious to hide even within his other European backers, that the war being conducted at great human cost was futile from the start.
As indeed is any peace effort made towards ending the Ukraine war as long as Zelenskyy is the President of Ukraine. In the final hours before as the war ends, Zelenskyy and his family would need to flee to a country favourable to him, such as Britain, where he is reported to have bought extensive properties since he walked away from the April 2022 peace agreement with Russia, at the urging of US President Biden and British Prime Minister Johnson, who promised “whatever help was needed to get back the lands lost in 2014”.
Biden was true to his word, for US taxpayers funded more than half the money needed by Ukrainian forces to just continue fighting, forget getting the lost lands back. The spending of taxpayer dollars on the Ukraine war was among the primary reasons Vice-President Kamala Harris lost to her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump. Voters questioned why Biden and Harris (who too was wedded to the same policy of the then US President) lavished so much money on a fruitless war in Europe while so many of them saw themselves as in more in need of such money being spent on their wants.
It is another matter that the candidate they elected as President of the US did not spend even that money on them, but through ruses such as the Department of Government efficiency threw several of them out of work. He also cut back on the already meagre assistance the most needy were given, instead giving billionaires a “trillion dollar Tax cut”. The cut benefitted those who could afford to pay more rather than less taxes, but try telling that to a fellow-billionaire, President Trump. Small wonder that several millions of those who voted for him in 2024 on the promise of lower prices and more jobs but got higher prices and increased joblessness instead.
As for ending “forever wars” and bringing the troops home, neither in Gaza nor in Ukraine is he even close to securing a peace enforced by the Oval Office. Instead, he has started a new war, with Venezuela, directing key US naval assets there rather than closer to the real threat, China. As a consequence of the diversion of key military platforms, the Chinese air and naval forces have ramped up their threats to Tawan, launching the biggest encirclement of that island state ever seen during any of the past decades.
Foes of the US are enjoying the sunshine of the recent policies of President Trump. As for friends, many have been taken for granted or even given harsher treatment, including in the matter of tariffs. President Trump needs to revert to the unerring compass that sustained him through the Biden prosecution and a hard-fought campaign and in most of his selections of the Trump Cabinet. His finding his apparently mislaid compass needs to take place soon, if he is to salvage his second term from the wreckage that it is becoming, especially on social and military policies, as also on healthcare.
