It’s also very much in line with voting patterns of the last decade, whatever or whoever was being voted for.

The voters basically don’t like what they see, blame the current incumbents, vote for whoever promises to change it, then vote them out when they don’t deliver. Next.

It’s always about change. And quickly.

So with Brexit, far and away the most significant slogan was, ‘Take Back Control.’ Who from – well the Brexiteers successfully laid that at the door of the EU. But in the negotiations that followed not much changed, so in comes the buccaneering Boris Johnson who says he will sweep aside the ‘deep state’ or whatever and – with another superb three-word slogan – ‘get Brexit done’.

So, hurry up and change – let’s ‘Get Brexit Done’. But when we get it done, what changes? Our passports change colour, but the economy stagnates along with living standards, and while Europeans stop coming in and often go home, immigration soars from elsewhere. Meanwhile people in ‘the establishment’ are still behaving badly.

OK then say the voters, let’s give this Tory bunch a good kicking, and vote for another bunch, who can’t be bothered with a three-word slogan and go straight for one word – ‘Change’.

So in Labour comes, and what changes? Sorry, that question’s rhetorical of course. Not much, and then enter stage right are all sorts of the usual ‘establishment’ cock-ups and nonsenses.

Which brings us to the latest elections. Who better to promise ‘change’ than people who’ve never been in power – they haven’t had the chance to fail, haven’t yet broken their absurdly extravagant promises, so screw it say the voters, let’s give them a go. So, here we are, with the insurgent Greens and Reform surging, especially Reform.

But, whatever the politics, the thread is always ‘change’ - drawing a line from Brexit, through Boris, to Starmer, and now to Farage/Polanski.

What change? How many Reform or Green voters really know beyond the vaguest outline what either stand for – or frankly care? Whatever. The current lot, in this case Starmer and Labour, got the kicking they deserved.

In the film, ‘The Wild Ones’ there’s an iconic scene where the disillusioned Marlon Brando character, Johnny, is asked “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”, he answers “Whaddaya got?” Here it’s, “Hey voter, what change are you voting for?”, they answer “Whaddaya got?”

And there’s the problem. In the broadest terms what the voter wants is sort of clear – secure job, decent home, education for their kids, reliable healthcare, blah, blah, blah, and they don’t think they’re getting it. But that doesn’t really get us very far does it? How do we get to that promised land?

What’s clear I think is that none of the insurgent parties know. Their promises don’t add up, literally or metaphorically, but the current mood of the electorate is a bit, so what? The promise of change is enough for now. The current lot are rubbish, so let’s swipe right to something new and see what we get.

All this is aided by the deep, almost bottomless, lack of charisma of Keir Starmer. People say the private Starmer is a wonderful guy. Here’s a tip – whenever anyone tells you that someone is charming etc in private, then they are really acknowledging they have a problem in public. And for a politician it’s the public bit that matters.

Not so Polanski or Farage. I have to say their charisma entirely escapes me, but I have to acknowledge that for many it’s real enough. So charisma, no record to defend, and the promise of magical change to overcome the discredited ‘establishment’. That’ll do for now.

The trouble is it won’t solve anything. The country is indeed in in trouble, with deep systemic problems, but there are no easy answers, and certainly none that don’t involve sacrifice on the part of most of the electorate, including therefore those who might vote for them.

And neither the Greens nor Reform are seeking sacrifices from any group that aren’t already favourite whipping boys, whether its billionaires or illegal immigrants. In former Prime Minister Theresa May’s words there is no ‘magic money tree’ out there, no deep well of rich businessmen from which to easily siphon off a few billions, no trillions of inefficient public spending.

So there’s no tap Polanski or Farage can turn on – they are bound to disappoint those simply banking on change for change’s sake.

Back in 1940 Churchill was able to level with the British people at our time of existential crisis by stating, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Now the crisis facing Britain then was obvious enough, and you can ask things in wartime – as we are seeing in Ukraine – you can’t ask in peacetime. But the point remains – the country is in trouble, and there is no easy way out of it that isn’t going to involve all of us having to pay some portion of the price.

In his inaugural address in 1961, US President Jack Kennedy famously said, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.”

Who of our current crop of politicians could say that and not attract ridicule and derision?

But regardless, something of that spirit is what’s needed. Someone with the charisma to say something like that, but just as importantly, with a vision and a plan to go with it, that makes us willing to go along with them - that the gain will be worth the pain.

For the tragedy is that the upside to the electorate’s desire for change was, I believe, a willingness to accept some hard choices at the beginning of the Labour administration. But Labour blew it. As we’ve seen Starmer not only lacks charisma, but he also lacks vision and a plan.

In 1945, with an exhausted, impoverished Britain on its knees in a turbulent world, there was another uncharismatic Labour Prime Minister, Clement Atlee. However, he was a man with a plan, as well as a strong team around him in a party with a vision, and remarkable things happened.

Of course history doesn’t repeat itself, but still provides lessons to guide us. What has brought Labour down was this combination of lack of charisma, vision, strategy and a clear plan. At the point where inspiration was needed they offered waffle and u-turns.

Of course, the discouraging reality is that change is really hard in a massively indebted, sophisticated, complex economy, and one that’s become over-bureaucratised and rule-bound. Turning this particular supertanker from its lumbering course will be heartbreakingly hard as well as slow, and anyone who offers an easy answer can be dismissed as a conman.

Hence it’s even more important that along with inspiring and harnessing a willingness to accept tough change there comes a realism and clarity to go alongside charisma – but charisma harnessed to a strategy to do more than get elected.

There’s an old English proverb saying, ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’ (or woman). The hour has certainly cometh.

I could go on, but it's all too depressing...

Perhaps true, but it also diverted us from something equally as important, in fact more so I think, which is that Trump is no Roosevelt (either Theodore or FDR). Nor in fact is he like any of the presidents who followed FDR, including Truman the US President when Churchill first coined the ‘Special Relationship’ term in his Fulton speech in 1946.[i]

Everything Trump says needs to be seen in that context – he is an increasingly authoritarian narcissist who it could now be fair to describe as a megalomaniac (consider how those around him treat him, then look up some definitions and tell me I’m wrong[ii]).

So in considering the Special Relationship, let’s recognise that when it comes to personalities, it’s less about Starmer (for all his inadequacies) than it is about Trump.

For Trump doesn’t do special relationships, there’s really only one kind of relationship – you do what he wants. If you do, you’re great, if you don’t he gets nasty, usually publicly. Moreover, if you do what he wants today, you’re not building credit in the bank for tomorrow. As many find, being nice yesterday is not going to get favours today.

At its most kind, people call Trump’s approach ‘transactional’, which crudely translates into others paying him for anything and everything, usually in hard currency.

However that also implies a two-way approach, whatever the means of transaction, but this is not how Trump sees things – it’s what’s in it for him and the idea of a deal where both win is not what he’s looking for. His approach would be more accurately called zero-sum, where winner takes all. In his business life he boasted about getting great deals where the other side got thoroughly rolled over.

To put it mildly this is not an approach which encourages partnerships, even unequal ones where the dominant side gets more but still recognises the junior partner needs to see value as well. On the international front such partnerships include things that are valuable but intangible – not something that counts with someone who sees the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Which brings us to the US/UK Special Relationship.

It is, or perhaps was, a partnership. Not an equal partnership, but a partnership.

To last a partnership has to achieve a number of things. Each partner has to want it; each partner has to bring something to the party; each partner has therefore to get something worthwhile from it that sustains it. Finally, to last, there has to be some kind of connection – to basically feel comfortable with the relationship. Call it what you will, maybe a friendship, or shared values and outlooks – but something that takes you beyond the transactional.

On every single one of those the Special Relationship is declining.

We should also be aware of some constancies. We always valued it more than the US.

It also had its limits. In the 1956 Suez Crisis, President Eisenhower’s pulling of the economic rug from under Britain played a huge part in our humiliation. Harold Wilson’s refusal to get involved in the Vietnam War was a massive disappointment to the US. Eventual US support in the 1982 Falklands War was touch and go. Margaret Thatcher was furious at the 1983 US invasion of Grenada, a Commonwealth country, without consultation. Reagan phoned to apologise and things got smoothed over. Partners can disagree without divorce following.

Nor was the Special Relationship ever all-encompassing. It was always overwhelmingly security-focussed. For most of post-WW2 era, Britain had a lot to offer. Steadily declining in terms of size and capability maybe, but still enough to get respect. Sadly, that respect has now also declined. The quality of British forces is still well-regarded, and at the worker bee level the links are usually still good. However, the US with good reason believe our size and capabilities have fallen below critical mass – the most ‘special’ part and reason for the Special Relationship is in intensive care.

What remains is the intelligence relationship, where along with the other ‘5-eyes’ partners (the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) we still have much to give as well as get.

Then beyond that there’s the habit of partnership and a shared outlook.

So when we do the balance sheet, it’s no surprise we have issues.

Especially when you take in the Trump factor. As highlighted above he doesn’t do partnerships, it’s not how he sees the world. What’s in it for him – and currently looking at us, he’s thinking, not so much.

Beyond that is the way he sees the US wielding power generally. He doesn’t see the need to consult or compromise. If this seems extreme, then recall the interview he recently did with the New York Times. Asked if he saw any checks on his power on the world stage, he replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.” The questioner then asked, “Not international law?” and he replied, “I don’t need international law.”[iii]

In his world, he’s the biggest guy on the block and can do he wants, so his definition of partnership is the rest of us get with the programme and do what we’re told. Followers not partners.

Hence his anger with Starmer, whether you agree with that decision or not, for initially denying the US use of RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia. We were just meant to take our instructions and crack on.

We also need to factor in more widely the way the US has behaved in launching this war. Having witnessed, and been in my own small way involved in, the various wars since the 1991 Gulf War, then what’s striking is the US’s casual dismissal of its allies with minimal or no consultation.

In the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War the US painstakingly built-up a coalition and consulted allies, as it did in 2003, as it did in Afghanistan, and in Libya. It also worked through international institutions, argued for its legitimacy and made the case to the American people.

This time? Not so much. It was my way or the highway – and a good kicking if you don’t join the cheerleading.

So when it comes to the decline of the Special Relationship, how much is Starmer and how much is Trump? What’s special about a relationship based on obedience?

Which also brings us back to one of the cores of that relationship, which is commonality of interest based on shared outlooks and value.

I fear this is also where we are diverging, an uncomfortable and saddening thought.

In my last Substack I highlighted I was conflicted, and remain so, because I could not wish for the survival of a terrible regime that was also a threat to international stability and other countries, including mine. That said, I could not avoid recognising the war was a breach of both international and US law. If you believe Iran was enough of a threat to need attacking – and I can see why people do – you also have to own that this can’t really be squared with fundamental international law that the US was preeminent in creating

Nor could I accept what, to be blunt, were the lies and specious reasoning seeking to justify it. The tortuous, tangled justifications being put out – most absurdly Marco Rubio’s on what constituted an imminent threat – rather demonstrate this.

That sense of a rupture in what are meant to be shared values and respect for fundamental international laws and norms, has been sharpened for me by comments from the crudely bombastic US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth.

Here are a few remarks from his first press conference where, ranting like some Mafioso out of The Godfather, he condemned, “so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force. America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history…. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.”

This is someone who lip-smackingly boasts in press conferences about acting ‘without mercy’ and that ‘they are toast’, and authorises the release of videos of military strikes backed by rock music, like some video game. This is also the man who in his confirmation hearings gave a series of evasive answers refusing to commit to following the Geneva Conventions, saying, “…What an America first national security policy is not going to do is hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield.”

OK then – I guess I should get some pearls then. Do we really want a relationship, special or otherwise, with someone like this?

I spent decades working alongside the US military, and both like and respect them. Regardless of my concerns about this war, my instinctive sympathies lie with those out there on operations, and that sense of fellow feeling absolutely remains – but the morality and nature of their leadership scares the hell out of me.

Hegseth’s remarks are all of a piece with the attitude of the wider administration and their approach to how they will operate on the global stage, best exemplified by Stephen Miller, Trump’s most fascistic, who said on CNN, “We live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” He added, “We are a superpower…we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”

So, ‘no stupid rules of engagement’, screw the ‘so-called international institutions’ – most of which the US created – just the ‘iron laws’ of the world as interpreted by a superpower.

Maybe he could have handled it more adroitly, presented it better or even compromised a little, but in this light does Starmer’s concern for international law look quite so pathetic?

After all, who does international law benefit more? Not the ‘iron law’ superpower bullies in the global playground. They can do what they like. It’s more the smaller and middle powers.

Like us.

I’d guess regular readers of my Substack’s may guess where this is going – a reminder yet again (sorry, but it is relevant) of our old friend Thucydides, the Ancient Greek historian. His quote ringing down the ages effectively highlights the alternatives to our era’s Geneva Conventions, ‘stupid rules of engagement’ and humanitarian standards of ‘so-called international institutions’, when he wrote “…right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

The benefits of the threat of the Iranian regime being reduced or eliminated are obvious, but the collateral damage is also obvious. Oil prices rising (incidentally helping Putin), inflation rising, global trade disrupted, regional stability damaged. All will impact Britain along with all those other nations who have to live with whatever Trump chooses to do, ignoring those pesky international laws and institutions.

All of course noted by other big powers who will argue they are also only responding to imminent threats and the like, following those ‘iron laws’. That’s after all what Putin says about Ukraine. Like it or not this is another step towards an anarchic new world order.

So, what do we do?

Firstly, stop obsessing over the Special Relationship. We’re both bigger and smaller than that. Smaller in the sense that the gap between us and the US is now too big to bridge as being anything like equal or influential. Bigger in the sense we are still a considerable country with influence and weight, and it’s demeaning to keep banging on about something the other part of the relationship doesn’t especially value.

Recognising this will help us recalibrate our relationship with the US and, right now, Donald Trump. So, Donald Trump slags us off – so what? Sure, we can’t ignore the superpower and have to deal with it, but why should we respect or tie ourselves in knots over the latest effusion of the manchild, giving him the attention his bottomless ego craves? Tomorrow we might be wonderful, the day after back in his delusional doghouse. Roll with it, follow what’s in our interest, and shrug our shoulders – be British, as the WW2 poster advised, and keep calm and carry on.

Then onto more fundamental issues.

In his seminal Davos speech on the rupture in the international environment, Canada’s Mark Carney, highlighted the need for middle powers to work out a way to combine in the face of Great Powers carving out spheres of influence. He noted if we were not at the table then we were on the menu.

How do we avoid being on the menu? By being strong enough to claim a place at the table in a rough new world order. Right now we’re mostly not. An obvious place to start is defence. Without making too much of our Type 45 destroyer HMS Dragon not already being in the Mediterranean, it is beyond disgraceful that the Royal Navy does not have any such asset ready for sea duty. Put simply we have too few destroyers and frigates, and that’s a product of decades of decline.

The same applies to our ground forces. Noting all the potential demands on them, let alone the ones we already have, they are pathetically small and poorly equipped. And the list goes on and on. Individually our service personnel are of high quality, but quantity has a quality all of its own.

If we want to be taken seriously we need urgent action and emergency spending now, not next year. The Tories may be right to demand the government accelerate defence spending, but they have nothing to boast about, being absolutely complicit in where we are now.

My first war as a BBC Defence Correspondent was the 1991 Gulf War, where Britain made a very real contribution – we were players. Yet I still remember that following it, literally on their return from fighting that war, squadrons of Tornado bombers were immediately disbanded in line with the previous Tory defence review. Since then we have had Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Iraq War, not to mention the storm warning of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine in 2014, and still the decline continued.

Reversing that decline can work in two ways, to help restore the Special Relationship insofar as is possible, but also give us the capability to disentangle ourselves and develop relations with other allies, other middle powers, which also needs to be a priority. We accepted US leadership in part because it was cheaper as well as being instinctive allies. The US, whatever its irritations, to a large degree was also OK with that, because it enabled them to call the shots, knowing we would have to follow their lead.

If we want to change that we need to pay, and it’s going to hurt. Are we willing to pay the bill? Our choice.

To return to how I started. The world has changed. Starmer is no Churchill; Trump is no Roosevelt; the world of 1946 and Churchill naming the ‘Special Relationship’ is not the world of 2026; Churchill’s assumption of a ‘fraternal association’ between the ‘English-speaking people’ is no longer to be assumed. The Special Relationship is no longer so special, and we should not assume Britain and America’s future direction of travel, Trump or no Trump, will be the same.

[i] https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/the-sinews-of-peace/

[ii] https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/megalomaniac A megalomaniac is a pathological egotist, that is, someone with a psychological disorder with symptoms like delusions of grandeur and an obsession with power. We also use the word megalomaniac more informally for people who behave as if they’re convinced of their absolute power and greatness.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/megalomaniac having an unnaturally strong wish for power and control, or showing that you think you are much more important and powerful than you really are

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalomania Megalomania is an obsession with power, wealth, fame, and a passion for grand schemes.

[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/politics/trump-interview-transcript.html

Petraeus’s answer to his own question led to him, as the top commander in Iraq, later driving the so-called “Surge” strategy to stabilize the country, seeking to create a more secure environment, allowing a gradual, conditions-based withdrawal. The surge’s at least partial success was a major improvement on went before.

When he became ISAF commander of the NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, he asked the same question on arrival. I was deployed to Kabul at that time, and once again the focus on ‘how this ends’ produced more coherence, for a while at least.

For me, as a witness to much of the decision-making on the war in Afghanistan that seemingly simple question actually highlighted once more some very real dissonance on how it would end, what we were trying to achieve and, as a result, the resources and tactics then needed to achieve that. The incoherence on what success looked like played a big part in why we failed.

That was then, but the need to answer that question before going to war is eternally valid.

And in fact for planners it is a part of a standard approach, simply expressed as: Ends, Ways and Means.

Critically, note that you should decide the desired end state first. Having decided what you want (Ends) you work out how (Ways) you will achieve it with what (Means). As you develop your plan these three are of course interactive. You may want a certain end, but do you have the capability, for instance weaponry and numbers to get there. If not then you need to adapt your end state to something feasible.

Sometimes the planners may conclude the desired end state of your leaders is not achievable with the ways and means available. No surprise that this will not go down well when you brief that. Predicting future outcomes with certainty, especially for something as complex as conflict is inherently tough. Life being what it is, the forces and planners will often be told to crack on with what you’ve got and stop whinging. I’ve been there, I’ve seen it, and too often also seen the unhappy consequences.

Which brings us to Trump and Iran. What’s the strategy, what are the ends and do they line up with the ways and means?

Bluntly, the ends are unclear and somewhat incoherent. Trump’s 8 minute speech announcing the attack was (for him) mostly free of the off course rambles that usually characterise his speeches. However, it still left a lot open on what the US was aiming to achieve.

At the start he said, “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime..” By the end he was telling Iranians, “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny…” So from defending Americans to regime change – a big circle to square.

He variously said the aim of the operation was to ensure Iran wouldn’t have nuclear weapons (despite having said he’d already obliterated their programme in their attacks last year); to obliterate their ballistic missiles; to obliterate their navy; to ensure Iran’s proxies (eg Hamas) couldn’t operate any longer; he told the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, armed forces, and police, to lay down their weapons in exchange for immunity or face certain death.

Most notably he told the Iranian people, “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take…So let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny.”

So how does this variety of ends match the ways and means?

The means are airpower and the ways are using it to target nuclear, missile, air defences, command and control and various leaderships. Given the massive level of resources being used then the chances of taking out the military targets have to be good.

However airpower alone can hardly force the Iranian Revolution Guard, military and police to lay down their weapons, and unless the US intends to occupy Iran – which it doesn’t – then it cannot promise either immunity or death. Who takes the weapons and who offers immunity or death?

Even more, the US is not offering the ways or means for the Iranian people to rise up and seize control of Iran. Airpower cannot do this. The Iranian regime did not need nukes or ballistic missiles to suppress the demonstrations; Kalashnikovs were quite sufficient. The regime has deep roots and many layers of control, with a monopoly on the means of violence, so even decapitation of the senior leadership won’t topple them. This is especially so when there is no organised resistance movement within Iran to take advantage of any temporary chaos caused by killing the current leaders.

It was therefore quite distasteful for Trump to somehow say to Iranians the US is doing its bit, so over to you – as if it would be their fault if they don’t topple the regime. He’s getting his blame game in early. Whack the regime from the air, then walk away blaming the Iranian people for not taking advantage of his big, beautiful air campaign

Speaking to the Washington Post later, Trump said, “All I want is freedom for the people.” Aside from (rather typically) contradicting the aim he declared to protect Americans, the reality is he has not provided the ways or the means to reach that end.

What’s happening will certainly weaken the regime, but saying he’s somehow opened a door for the Iranian people to walk through is not the case – I would wish it was. Put simply, there seems to be no plan for the day after the airstrikes and dubious assumptions, at least by Trump, about what they can achieve with airstrikes alone.

It was Eisenhower who said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”. It’s pretty clear that there has been no planning for after the airstrikes.

So, how does this end?

As the experience of recent conflict tells us, often painfully, then outcomes are often both more widespread, unexpected, and far-reaching than predicted, stretching beyond the immediate conflict.

Many are understandably highlighting the chastening consequences of our involvement in Iran and Afghanistan, where we got involved on the ground to huge cost. But we can also look to the reverse, where maybe not engaging on the ground also had consequences – Libya.

There NATO airstrikes, could be justified both legally and morally, and did get UN backing. But one consequence was the death of Gadaffi – another brutal leader. There the West did not get engaged on the ground, and I know from my job at the time that a key reason for staying out was the lesson we chose to draw from intervening in Afghanistan. All the same Libya collapsed into anarchy and is a prime cause of the mass immigration that is today driving so much of Europe’s political strife. Did or could anyone have predicted that? Could a presence on the ground have helped prevent it, enabling a more stable government – leaving them to it certainly didn’t.

One outcome is a further fraying of any meaningful international rule of law. The US is in breach of international law. The Iranian regime is so appalling it’s a temptation to gloss over this – they kind of deserve what they’re getting – but we also have to face this reality. If we’re prepared to accept the breach we must own the consequences of another step into an increasingly anarchic global order.

The same with the killing of Khamenei. There are various laws and conventions that prohibit the assassination of so-called ‘internationally protected persons’, including heads of state. It’s also been part of US law. There’s a little ambiguity here, and as we know Trump doesn’t do ambiguity. He does what we wants and lets his lawyers work on a fig leaf.

It could be argued that we’ve been here before, as with Iraq, but I would also point to the lengths the US did go to in trying to get authorisation for its attack, and its effort to consult and assemble a coalition.

Trump neither tried nor cared.

Other nations will have noted and any restraint they felt will be that much less. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, and they also have clever lawyers.

The same applies to US law. Trump announced the launch of what he described as “major combat operations” without consulting Congress, a clear breach of US law. To be sure he tried to legally justify his action by saying he was responding to “imminent threats”, but this was the most transparent possible fig leaf – none but the most ignorant or cynical can believe this nonsense.

Given a supine Congress, I imagine Trump will get away with this, but the outcome is that it’s another, and significant step, towards the breakdown of the separation of powers within the US and the President having increasingly untrammelled power, as Trump once said, “to do what the hell I like.”

So this is one way it ends – with an emboldened, very powerful, authoritarian leader who feels free to operate without restraint both nationally and internationally.

More immediately, what will be the outcome in the region?

If the Iranian regime does collapse then the internal chaos that’s likely will have many ramifications. Not least a flow of immigrants, many inevitably heading towards Europe while also stressing neighbouring countries. The results of conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere have all spread outwards like the ripples from throwing a stone into water – why should Iran be different?

Economic costs are inevitable, already happening, it’s just how much, for how long. The Gulf States, hitherto supposed paragons of stability, will take a hit, and this will have global ramifications. Oil prices seem inevitably likely to rise, maritime trade through the Gulf of Hormuz is hugely vulnerable with major knock-on consequences for us all.

If it’s over fast, then economically I guess this will be more of a line squall than a storm, but no-one knows how this will end or when it will end, with no indication of any plan for the day after – certainly Trump’s claims about improving ‘affordability’ for US citizens will be taking a knock.

More indirectly I can see China being quite content as it watches the US global reputation go further down the pan while also learning from a potential future enemy on how it conducts operations and burning through billions of dollars of kit that will take years to replace. Meantime Ukraine goes on the international backburner while Putin plays for time and continues his war crimes.

But could it end well?

First of all, like most others, I simply don’t see a way for some peaceful transition by airpower alone.

Beyond that, I will confess to feeling conflicted in some ways. It’s not just that the Iranian regime is so evil, but that they also exported their evil. In crude terms the international way of the world and implicit nature of international rules was that you could do what you want to your own people, however bad, as long as you didn’t try to do it other countries. Iran’s regime is different.

It has not only terribly oppressed its own people but, as a core objective, explicitly and deliberately exported its Islamic Revolution. Its so-called Axis of Resistance, through proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi were violent destabilising forces in the region. They have been directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of many British and allied soldiers as well as undermining the potential success of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They were and are a threat, although – as I said above - not an imminent one. So how can I even regret the death Khamenei and his henchmen, and a regime that no longer exported terror and violence would be a good thing.

Does that make it right or, just as important, sensible?

Well, to some extent success can create its own justification, albeit morally dubious. Is it OK then for the biggest bully on the block to decide what’s right or wrong? We are back to that world of Great Powers, where in the words of the ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

I fear where this is going. Trump has pushed a very large boulder down the hill with no real idea where it’s going and lots of things in its path that can be damaged. As we all know by now he has the attention span of a gnat and could very easily walk away at a moment’s notice declaring victory, leaving others to clear up the mess.

So coming back to Petraeus’ question, ‘Tell me how this ends?’ The US ‘ends’ do not match its ‘ways and means’, leaving a massive question mark for the day after the airstrikes stop. We have seen how the best laid plans fall apart with unforeseen consequences. Here there seems to be no plan.

Recently he did an interview with the New York Times (NYT) that was especially revealing, especially with regard to why he wants Greenland:

President Trump: Because I want to do it properly.

NYT: And properly means own it?

President Trump: Really it is, to me, it’s ownership. Ownership is very important.

NYT: Why is ownership important here?

President Trump: Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.

After another question, the NYT followed up: Psychologically important to you or to the United States?

President Trump: Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.

And there we have it. The greedy, acquisitive, grasping real estate dealer wants to own it because, well, that’s how he is. He even admits other presidents might not see it that way.

All of the reasons he gives are just window dressing, rationalisations to buttress the fundamental reality – he just wants it because its big and he wants to make American bigger, like it’s some kind of real estate portfolio. In many ways he’s a simple soul, just not a very nice one.

This is not to say the rationalisations don’t matter. As any psychologist or good strategic communicator will tell you people operate and make decisions on instinct and emotion, but need to believe they are rational actors – an insight first written about by the great Greek thinkers such as Aristotle and Demosthenes and confirmed by modern thinkers such as Kahneman.

So we have seen in Trump’s latest Truth Social post that he offers a variety of fairly dumb and somewhat outlandish ‘reasons’ why he needs Greenland for security reasons – but the underlying reality is what he told the NYT.

What that means is while it’s important to undermine those rationalisations it will not change his mind. The rationale for a NATO-led multinational Arctic security is overwhelming to anyone who is really concerned about security, but at heart that isn’t what it’s really about for him. He will just gin up a new rationalisation or repeat the old one.

So how can they change his mind? Not easy, but the key is to stop treating him as if he actually cares about strategy. It’s about psychology not strategy. He’s a narcissistic bully who believes he’s perfect. The rest is detail.

As a bully, and while he’s no great intellect, he does have an intuitive sense of the weakness of others. His reincarnation after his 2020 defeat has magnified his grandiose sense of self, further reinforced by his survival from an assassination attempt and the way he has driven a coach and horses through Congress and any norms of government.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the renewed attempt to annex Greenland follows the kidnapping of Maduro – he’s on a roll, feeling like King of the World, a massive sugar rush pulsing around his body with his sycophants licking his ass.

So when he looks at Europe he’s not seeing allies, friends or partners but a bunch of weaklings he can roll over. Goodness knows he’s stuck it to us enough in any number of Truth Social posts. Haven’t we got the message yet?

It’s notable he hasn’t had nearly as much success with Russia or China. They’ve given him the finger or just ignored him. Like any bully he targets the weak, steers clear of the strong and doesn’t have friends, only followers.

So here we are. Aware of our own failings in defence, we have placated him, sucked up to him, achieved some tactical success and made some time. But ultimately we have been feeding an addiction to a man with serious personality flaws and bottomless narcissism.

When my generation did our history we were taught about Danegeld – which is quite ironic in this context. Danegeld was basically protection money paid by Anglo-Saxon kings to buy off Viking (ie Danish) raiders because we were too weak to fight them off militarily. The king most associated with Danegeld was Ethelred the Unready (the clue is in the title) and every so often the Danes did some rape, pillage and murder to keep us on our toes and get a bit more gold. The money demanded kept rising and ultimately a Dane (Canute) ended up as king.

Well, in a manner of speaking we’ve been paying Danegeld haven’t we? It hasn’t bought us respect, any more than the Anglo-Saxons got from the Danes – Trump regards us as weaklings, Europe the Unready, and now he wants some serious tribute.

But here’s the thing. We are not so weak we can’t face up to the bully.

We can produce a credible Arctic security mission – indeed one far better than a unilateral US effort. We also do have basic unity – no one outside Trump and his sycophants - even within the US - believe this is a good idea. Equally to the point allowing Trump to get away with it will hollow out NATO and have dangerous consequences for Western security.

If ever there was a time to stand up to the bully this is it.

How? Put some European troops into Greenland, not just a recce force. Britain has Arctic trained Royal Marines in Norway now – move a company over to Nuuk, joined by other nations now under threat of Trumps stupid tariffs Canada or Finland can move a couple of icebreakers into the area. The Danes can station one of their ice capable patrol boats in the area.

We don’t need to advertise this as against Trump, just say we are responding to his concerns about Greenland’s security – but the message will have been sent. Our Chief of Defence Staff should get on the phone to the US Joint Chief and quietly tell him they will defend Greenland’s territorial integrity – and highlight something the US military know well, which is that any military incursion will be against US law. The US military themselves will have their metaphorical head in their hands at Trump’s stupidity.

Meantime the threatened nations need to unite to say they will not give in, while the EU should plan potential retaliation. After all, the EU only recently signed a tariff deal, which Trump is now casually threatening to void. They don’t need to get too specific, but make it clear this will not go unanswered.

Is this escalation? Well yes, but the stakes are very high. Surely it’s time to recognise this may be a strategic issue for us, but it’s the personality of Trump we are dealing with. This is not strategy but psychology.

If we’re not going to stand up to the bully over something so clearcut, so serious, when will we? How much more Trumpgeld are we going to pay?

The premise is simple – to try to undermine the primary US argument for taking Greenland, that it needs it for its critical national security, and demonstrate that there is a better way to secure the US’s interests.

In his typically mafioso manner – a tone he seems to increasingly delight in – Trump has declared, “I would like to make a deal, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” NATO’s task, along with Denmark, is to demonstrate it is the easy way.

There may be more to it than national security – it’s in part a rationalisation reflecting Trumps grandiosity and some of his cohort’s more dystopian worldview – but that is the cited reason, and offering a better way forward at least opens the way to try to avoid disaster.

So first off, there is a genuine security issue around the Arctic, and the first mistake Trump & Co are making is to somehow separate Greenland from the rest of the Arctic. It’s the global warming, that Trump says is a scam, that’s reducing the ice and opening up the Arctic seaway as a security issue in a new way from how it was during the Cold War.

Once you put Greenland in a wider context – and view it on a more sensible map – then the fallacy of an American First & Only becomes clearer. If you move away from the traditional Mercator projection with the Arctic stretched along the top and go to an Azimuthal Equal-Area projection of the Arctic region the region looks very different.

Not only is Greenland smaller (albeit still very big) but it’s far closer to Canada than the US, while various other NATO allies, Norway, Sweden and Finland grouped around the Pole look obvious partners in combining to guard against Russia’s expansionism with China.

And indeed until very recently that was the US view as well, for as recently as 2024 the US published its Arctic Strategy with partnership at its core. Its preamble states the strategy should ‘deepen engagement with Allies and partners’ and predicates success upon ‘security cooperation with our regional Allies and partners’ based on three elements, “enhancing our domain awareness and Arctic capabilities; engaging with Allies, partners, and key stakeholders; and exercising tailored presence.”

The rest of the document is soaked in that assumption. And well it might be, because the reality of the US superpower’s current might in the region is distinctly underwhelming putting a distinctly unflattering light on claims about only the US being up to defending Greenland.

As is now well-known existing agreements give the US all the security permissions it needs but in Greenland itself the many US bases and many thousands of personnel that were there in the Cold War has shrunk to one base with less than 200 personnel. The US decided Greenland didn’t matter much until very recently.

More broadly US specific Arctic capabilities are currently inadequate. Greenland maybe a big landmass but it’s seapower that is the critical capability here. Moreover, the melting of the ice cap may be opening up the sea ways, but it’s still hazardous sailing where ice-capable ships are critical.

As highlighted in a previous Substack, the US has only two icebreakers and plans for US-designed and built vessels have failed, so in order to get new vessels into service by 2028 they’ll have to be built in Finland to Finnish/Canadian designs. Finland has eight of its own already.

The Canadians, with 21 have the world’s second largest icebreaker fleet, even Denmark have four ice-capable warships and have ordered replacements, while Norway and Sweden have some capability.

Meantime, superpower or not, the US if it wishes to go it alone, has a two year gap before it can start fielding any such capability against the Russians who have 40+ and the Chinese, who have five.

Bluntly, if its serious about Arctic security, then the US needs NATO’s Arctic members, especially to fill a current gap in its capabilities. Here then is the basis for an offer to Trump to go along with the redline to back off from demanding the annexation of Greenland.

Fully in line with the existing US Arctic Strategy, the NATO Arctic members can propose a partnership, with real non-US assets at the heart. NATO’s existing command structure can work with the US to produce it in quick time. Call it Operation Arctic Trump or some such, put an American Admiral in charge, give Trump a bloody peace prize, golden husky desk ornament, or a pet polar bear – anything to get him to proclaim it’s a great deal that he’s done – pressuring those pesky Europeans into doing his bidding.

That’s the carrot. What about the stick? Well the reality is that if the US annexes Greenland then NATO is in crisis, possibly terminally. In which case the US can’t expect any co-operation in the Arctic – in other words taking Greenland worsens not solves the actual problem.

Maybe Trump won’t care, but others will, including increasingly worried Republicans lawmakers, who – however cowed by Trump – are appalled at the threat to NATO. They need to be briefed, to know NATO can provide a real alternative to meet the real problem. Trump’s Greenland plan is madness, and they know it.

And of course that’s the problem – the madness of King Donald. Wanting to take Greenland is a function of his personality. His recent interview with the New York Times highlighted this in his comments on Greenland, as when asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

This is of course nonsense – NATO nations have shared risk not ownership since 1949. In fact partnership not physical ownership is the essence of so many endeavours in peace and war – but not for Trump, an unreflective manchild driven by his pathologies. Psychologically HE feels HE must own something to succeed, whether it’s a Trump Tower, Venezuelan oil or Greenland. When it comes to Greenland, ownership would not just be unnecessary but be disastrous in its consequences.

So let’s at least strip away his excuse, and offer the US, not just Trump, a good way out from a genuine problem, which we can solve as partners. We also need to produce some doubt and delay; to challenge his assumption we’re weak and he can bully his way to success. When it comes to Greenland we can’t afford that and we don’t need to. He’s on a sugar rush and we need to slow him down. Why tell him what we’ll do – avoid a public row, but privately maybe it’s time to tell him to FAFO, albeit rather more politely.

Firstly, what happened with the extraction of Maduro was illegal. Sure, lawyers – who are after all paid to dance on the head of a pin – can come up with their arguments, but we know don’t we?

Second fact – Trump doesn’t give a stuff whether it’s legal or not anyway.

It’s almost funny to watch Trump’s flunkeys twist and turn about the legalities while Trump then cheerfully undercuts them as he rambles his way through such nonsense, saying he wanted to do it, he could do it, so he did do it.

It’s not that the legalities are irrelevant, but even more relevant is that the US is now run by a man who doesn’t think they are relevant. He can’t even be bothered to pay lip service to them and pretend that he is constrained by any rules.

So set aside what’s essentially now an academic argument about the legalities and focus on the reality of our new world disorder, long-feared, but now here.

Trump is no intellectual, thinker or historian, but the narcissistic pathologies and instincts that drive him can still be placed in context, in the stream of foreign affairs and state on state rivalries, as well as the actions of dictators and authoritarians.

Back in February 2025, in an early Substack, I highlighted the growing prevalence of great power competition in our affairs. https://open.substack.com/pub/marklaity/p/from-thucydides-to-trump?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web I especially quoted the Greek historian Thucydides’ famous quote about the reality of that great power competition, which has echoed down succeeding centuries, “…right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Put less elegantly, big boys do what they want, and little guys can suck it up.

That somewhat changed, at least to a degree, with the creation in 1945 of the UN and its charter, “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members’ and that ‘All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

That did impose some constraints, even in the breach nations felt the need to justify their actions in this new context. Even at the height of the Cold War the rivals avoided direct confrontation. Norms and nuclear deterrence combined to prevent brute power being the sole determinant of international relations.

Also, what would be labelled the Rules-Based International Order (RBIO), included a far wider range of international agreements, for instance on trade and the law of the sea. Most importantly, the RBIO was largely driven by the US and reached its peak in Europe at least, with the ending of the Cold War.

Without the US even pretending to care about anything other than brute power there can be no effective rules, even in Europe.

Trump’s actions, and what he says about them also challenge norms that go back even further, to the so-called Westphalian system dating back to the 17^th century. Then after the devastation of 30 Years War the exhausted, weakened states, recognising things couldn’t go on as they were, agreed a series of pragmatic treaties agreeing not to interfere in each other’s domestic affairs, creating something of a more stable balance of power.

It’s important to realise that this itself came to underpin the UN Charter, which states, “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

Again, this was hardly perfectly applied, but it had its effect and acted as a constraint on worse. It was the breakdown of the Westphalian system that led to the world wars and the creation of the UN.

At the peak of the rules-based order in 1997 the US and Russia both signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act, “with the aim of creating in Europe a common space of security and stability, without dividing lines or spheres of influence limiting the sovereignty of any state.”

Note: Without ‘spheres of influence’.

The Russians decided otherwise over a decade ago, as shown by their behaviour. Now the US has gone down the same path. The recent US National Security Strategy (NSS) blew this up comprehensively with its claim the Western Hemisphere is their Sphere of Influence, and we have now seen this in practice. Not just kidnapping Maduro but saying they ‘run’ the country and intend to exploit its oil industry for US profit. The bluntness of this and a raft of other statements, can still shock, such as the State Department posting an image of Trump with the declaration: ‘This is OUR hemisphere.’ None of this democratic, collaborative, values-based nonsense there.

But equally to the point, Trump by declaring his Sphere of Influence is giving the thumbs up to others to have their own Sphere of Influence in this new world disorder. It’s not so much that China and Russia weren’t already working on this, but even they paid lip service to the rules-based norms, and actually created narratives to justify their actions and win support, with some success.

Now Putin and Xi, and other rising powers, not only can use Trump as a justification for their own actions, but actually seek to collaborate with Trump in a grand policy of dividing up the world – you keep out of my sphere, and I’ll keep out of yours.

Which brings us back to Europe and its allies.

In this new world disorder, where might makes right, if you don’t have your own Sphere of Influence then you’re going to end up in someone else’s.

In military power terms, our NATO Sphere of Influence is clearly buckling before our eyes. Trump’s demand to take Greenland if carried through would fatally damage the Alliance. The horrible reality is I don’t think Trump cares if it does.

In economic power, then the EU is a somewhat fractious sphere of inconsistent and often capricious influence.

In political and soft power we have a global network that shares a lot but doesn’t add up to a sphere of influence. Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Canada of course is in NATO.

Put that altogether – we have a potentially very powerful Sphere of Influence, extending beyond geography, but making that a reality requires facing up to today’s dismaying reality.

For all of the above have assumed the US was our leader, on our side and in broad terms acting in our interests. So we were fine being in an overarching US Sphere of Influence, one not simply based on brute power and implicit coercion but shared interests, values and partnership.

That’s over. Stephen Miller, Trump’s most fascistic (not to mention most fascistic-looking) enabler, said on CNN, “We live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Remember that Thucydides quote?

So we now have to construct our own sphere that could live without the US. It would also have to recognise, and pay the price, of living without the US and operating in a more dog eat dog international environment. The US would be a transactional member when its mutually convenient.

This is not to say we deliberately distance ourselves from the US but in any dealings with them we should recognise this is an alliance of convenience not shared values and outlooks. Also, one where any US commitments, whether trade or defence, can no longer be relied upon.

And in this new no-rules based order we choose our fights. Maduro’s kidnap is water under the bridge. Not only is Maduro a hard person to side with anyway, what do we gain from it? Trump will ignore any criticism and just seek retribution at anyone daring to contradict his kingly actions.

As for the precedent it sets, it’s a bit late for that too. Russia and China will certainly be delighted, and it makes life easier for them in the public space, but I think their existing actions show they can always manufacture an excuse for whatever they do if it matters enough.

So, in this new world disorder we need to speak and act for our direct interests not the Rules Based Internation Order (RIBO). Greenland is such a case.

God alone knows what pathologies are driving Trump in his latest madness, but Greenland should be a redline.

Why? Firstly, because it matters fundamentally to things that are in our direct interest. A forced annexation of Greenland would massively damage and weaken NATO, perhaps terminally. Denmark is in NATO and the EU, they are close allies and friends and they share our values. Greenland is part of Denmark, and even if one day Greenlanders vote for independence that day is not here and their rights are fully respected by the Danes.

Secondly, the US not only lack any legitimate right to Greenland it also lacks any rationale that makes sense beyond Trump’s need to scratch an egomaniacal itch. The claim the US needs Greenland for its security is absurd, but seeing as this is the heart of their claim it’s worth a little analysis.

Under existing agreements it can have bases and expanded presence for the asking and as both are NATO members this comes with firm security guarantees. It doesn’t need ownership.

Its claim Denmark is not doing enough is pretty rich from a country that reduced its Cold War presence in Greenland from around 10,000 to the current 200. It says its worried about Arctic security but currently has just two icebreakers, one barely operational, and has only just ordered a fleet of what will be 11.

Further, so withered is the mighty US’s shipbuilding capabilities that their own proposals for home designed and manufactured ice-capable ships failed, and in order to get new vessels into service by 2028 they’ll have to be built in Finland to Finnish/Canadian designs. Finland has eight of its own already.

Also involved in the deal is Canada, which already has 21 ice-capable and icebreakers – the 2^nd largest fleet in the world after Russia with 40+. Even the supposedly pathetic Danes have four ice-capable multirole warships. Meanwhile, the Chinese are just getting into the icebreaking business have five ice-capable or heavy icebreaking vessels.

What does all this add up to? Firstly, the US is very far from an Arctic military power and indeed allowed what capabilities it once had to wither – whatever its potential, it’s in no position to criticise Denmark or NATO on this. Secondly other NATO nations, notably Finland and Canada, do have considerable capabilities, in excess of current US capabilities.

The obvious conclusion is that if the US is really worried about Arctic security then everything it needs to address this already exists and indeed NATO offers a superb forum and planning capability to produce an effective multinational approach. In fact, much better than going it alone.

So the Greenland redline is not only necessary, but also offers the Alliance a firm proposal for a way ahead to go alongside a firm no on annexation.

This also highlights the issues at the centre of how we respond to this new world disorder, with neo-fascists like Miller channelling Thucydides about the ‘iron laws of the world’ being about ‘strength.’

In a world where Trump’s world view resonates with that of Putin we need to show strength of a kind they respect. We are now in a world where a revanchist Russia seeks to establish an expanded Sphere of Influence in Europe and the US’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) states its willingness to actively meddle in European democracies in pursuit of furthering Trumpian ideologies.

The starting point is defence. Non-US NATO’s open flank is the post-Cold War decline in European and Canadian defence spending and capability. That’s now being corrected, but not big enough nor fast enough. It not only gives the US a moral advantage but maintains the power of dependence as currently we can’t afford to offend them.

The US correctly highlights that a rich continent should be able to manage its own defence and support Ukraine. The faster we do it then the sooner we will be better able to face up to Trump and reduce our dependence on a capricious ally we can no longer trust. We don’t need to seek confrontation, but the constant pussy-footing to avoid offending the manchild, while it may help in the short-term, more generally confirms his disrespect for us.

Respect needs to be earned.

Taking Britain as an example, then our current commitments are frankly pathetic. The crisis is here and now, so major spending and other action is needed now, not with unfunded commitments when ‘circumstances allow’. It’s going to hurt; painful choices will have to be made; interest groups will yell and march – but that’s where we are. The RBIO is dying, the US can’t be trusted, and our adversaries are smelling blood.

The non-US NATO, EU and global partners can do this. It’s not as if we are poor, nor that the US doesn’t benefit. As I wrote this, we learnt that the UK supported the US in its seizure of a tanker with bases on UK soil and, logistics and surveillance. We need to challenge the damaging and inaccurate narrative that the US has not benefitted hugely from its allies in both war and peace.

Winston Churchill famously said, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”

That’s something that’s far truer than Miller’s neo-fascist beliefs, “The real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

Such characterisation rarely ends well. A far cleverer man than Miller, Otto von Bismarck, once said something similar. As the Prussian Chancellor in 1862, in a speech famously titled by its closing words, he argued for how to further Prussia’s rise and German unification, “The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power…. Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided…but by iron and blood.” Germany’s rise of course, through blood and iron, ended with two world wars.

I am not saying we are on the verge of world war, but the US’s own record surely demonstrates the limits of strength and power. It wasn’t enough in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Western Hemisphere it ‘owns’, the many internal coups its strength and power facilitated did not produce a stable, prosperous continent but one that decanted millions upon millions of immigrants into the US. Will taking Maduro but leaving his system otherwise unchanged encourage Venezuelans to go home?

Conversely and looking worldwide, the US has had unrivalled ‘soft’ power, achieving much of its aims and prosperity through the influence that came from example, values and quiet pressure. It was also to a large degree trusted. Who can trust them now beyond the day, wondering what some 0300 Truth Social post could upend.

However flawed, the Westphalian system, the UN Charter, NATO and the UN were all responses to try to escape a world where, as Thucydides, said, ‘…the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’

That’s not a good place to be, but we are where are – now we must, living up to our values and standards, create our own Sphere of Influence. We have the means, do we have the foresight, unity and the will?

It broadly means being caught in a situation where whatever you do you’re in a mess – ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The novel was set in the dangerous world of a bomber squadron in World War Two. The anti-hero lead character, Yossarian, wanted to avoid flying further combat missions. He was told by the combat doctor, Daneeka, that without physical injury the only way to avoid combat was to be declared insane…but there was a catch.

“You mean there’s a catch?”

“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”

This came to mind when the definitely crazy Donald Trump issued his deranged and sickening comments following the death of filmmaker, Rob Reiner, director of, among other classics, ‘When Harry Met Sally’, ‘Stand By Me’ and ‘A Few Good Men.’

Before the tragedy further deepened with the arrest of Reiner’s son for the murder of both Rob Reiner and his mother Michelle, Trump wrote on social media, “Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before.”

I don’t think I need to dwell on the sheer loathsome nature of this post at so many levels, but what also occurred to me was that in one way Trump was right – he did, in a strictly non-medical informal sense of the word, drive Reiner crazy. Just like he drives me, and most likely you, crazy. And so he should.

So if you think what Trump’s doing is somehow normal then you’re crazy, and if the insanity of his actions is not driving you crazy, then you’re not. Catch-22.

Taking this further then I’d say there are two distinct strains of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The first is that of Reiner, myself and many of you. Let’s call ours TDS-A.

We look at what he’s doing, and his increasing descent into delusional, malignant narcissism and think, Whisky Tango Foxtrot? How can this be happening, how can it go on? Reiner – a very eloquent critic of Trump – said of him several years back, “Donald Trump is the single most unqualified human being to ever assume the presidency of the United States. He is mentally unfit.”

And Trump’s descent into his own very personal derangement seems ever more obvious. The Reiner post disturbed even many of his own loyalists, but it’s hardly the only bizarre action this week.

In the White House there is a corridor where previous presidential portraits are hung. It’s meant to be a dignified, reflective record of America’s presidential history. No more. The manchild’s acolytes have now added plaques underneath them slagging off the record of his Democratic predecessors with typically childish language, lies and prejudices. Such toddler antics illustrate the lack of seriousness which so much of Trump’s team demonstrate. The world’s going to shit while they giggle about ‘owning the libs’ and play stupid pranks.

Meanwhile other groups of his acolytes seize any opportunity to suck up to their king and indulge his bottomless narcissism, most recently renaming the Kennedy Center – the capital’s cultural centre – the Trump Kennedy Center. Trump’s interest in culture of course doesn’t extend much beyond his support for World Wrestling, but hey it annoys the ‘liberal elites’ who do, so let’s do it.

It was the response to the latter that brought to mind the other strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Maria Shriver, niece of JFK, after the centre was named put out an anguished post saying, “Can we not see what is happening here? C’mon, my fellow Americans! Wake up! This is not dignified. This is not funny.”

She quickly got her answer in the comments that followed as the MAGA crowd piled on. If you want to despair for the future of humanity then the cesspit that is now X is the place to go. Quickly the comments largely became aggressively supportive of whatever Trump did and nastily critical of Shriver. It’s a pattern I’ve seen whenever someone posts something that might challenge the MAGA world view. Do they spend all day roaming X looking for someone to insult and get angry about?

This is the other strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome, let’s call it TDS-B, and far more dangerous. This is the MAGA cult. I use the word ‘cult’ advisedly because they usually exhibit many of the symptoms of cult followers. At the core is the belief Trump can do no wrong.

That means a variety of forms of cognitive dissonance. So they avoid disapproving of something by dismissing it as ‘just Trump being Trump’; or treating it as something of little consequence. Evangelical Christians seek to cover their hypocrisy in supporting a non-churchgoing amoral adulterer by saying God uses imperfect instruments to implement his supposed will.

Most common is distraction and diversion by ‘whataboutism’ and attacking his opponents and their motives to avoid engaging with what he’s actually done. Meanwhile they stay within their bubble where uncomfortable facts, thoughts and arguments rarely penetrate.

That’s why the Epstein case has been an issue. For us mere TDS-A sufferers the Epstein issue, unsavoury though it is, is less of a deal. However, for TDS-B victims the Epstein Files conspiracy is deeply rooted in their core narrative and has been massively fertilised inside their bubble. It’s integral to the TDS-B strain. It makes it harder for the usual cognitive dissonance booster vaccines to work.

And Trump’s remarks about Reiner also strike a dissonant chord. Publicly, Americans – when they’re not posting anonymously on X – tend to be a courteous bunch and this didn’t sit well. It’s no coincidence some parts of MAGA have been showing signs of strain and dissent, for instance Marjorie Taylor Greene on both Epstein and Reiner. As an extreme loyalist she’s expressed surprise at the way Trump turned on her over it, but anyone without TDS-B could have told her that loyalty is a one-way street when it comes to Trump. He’s only interested in fealty.

There are also signs of disquiet among MAGA over where Trump’s pathologies are taking him. Having gained power by promising to ‘drain the swamp’, his palling up with billionaires and self-aggrandisement is an ever more obvious contradiction as he plans a massive gold-laden White House ballroom while calling the ‘affordability’ problems of his supporters a ‘con’.

And of course the more his narcissism is indulged the worse it gets. Surrounded as he is by acolytes and yes men/women, who is there to challenge his bottomless self-regard as he spirals ever downwards. It is a form of derangement that’s ever more obvious, especially given his mania for naming things after himself and plastering his face all over the place, often absurdly, such as saying he looks similar to Elvis Presley.

We all laughed at Turkmenistan when its former dictator renamed the months, with January named after himself. Is this so very different? What next?[i]

Well, we kind of know. The US Mint is planning $1 coins to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the United States, and the proposal is to have the face of Trump on them, although the legality of this is pretty dubious. Trump himself has variously said that only Washington and Lincoln may be above him as a president. You don’t have to be deranged to consider this kind of egotism as pretty alarming in anyone with his kind of power.

But will they break with him? Doubtful. Because TDS-B also has many of the features of an addiction. MAGA is not just some strongly-held political belief but effectively a cult. Such followers of Trump identify totally with him, and he and MAGA have become integral to what they are. An attack on him is an attack on them, their sense of what and who they are. Also, having committed so deep and hard, how can they admit they’ve been wrong all along? That’s an enormous hole to dig yourself out of, most likely in the face of an angry response from your social group.

The gang around him are also locked in. Some will be cult followers, but even the ones that aren’t, the fanatics like Stephen Miller, or the cynical power hungry, like JD Vance, are also in too deep. Their future is tied to him. To be sure they will be jockeying to inherit his mantle, and likely roll their eyes at his antics, but they will also know that right now if he falls, they fall – none of them inspire anything like the support and all of them are guilty by association. This is why they are all working so hard to rewire the US system ready for the post-Trump era.

So, what does this mean for us?

- At the outset, we should recognise symbols matter. His post on Reiner may seem trivial at one level, but it exemplifies so much about him that we can all understand. The same applies to considering what motivates a man so keen to rename things after himself. And what it says about someone who spends time preparing elaborate, childish insults to his predecessors. We can argue about the rights and wrongs of tariffs, Ukraine/Russia and so on, but these apparently lesser things truly reveal the nature of the man. This is an increasingly imperial presidency and the personality that did all this is quite literally deciding the fate of nations. The way he demeaned Reiner is not so very different from the way he speaks of Europe’s leaders.

- He’s getting worse. It’s hard to imagine all this from his first term of office – indeed, for all his nonsenses from that first term, I can’t think of comparable examples. To this we could add his increasingly public, jaw-dropping rudeness and insults to journalists, usually women.

- No-one around him is going to stop him - some indeed are emulating him. They are either in his cult, so prey to TDS-B, or in too deep to do anything other than go along with him. We have to assume this is the pattern for the next three years at least.

- His pathologies – his derangement – make it foolish to trust or rely on his word. Driven by his narcissism, his penchant for holding grudges, his reliance on instinct and emotion, then everything is about him, and he will swivel on a dime (or soon, maybe a Trump dollar).

To me it confirms a sense that we need to adapt how we respond to him. I have long thought that any tactical benefits we gain from sucking up to him don’t necessarily help us strategically in the longer term because it feeds his narcissistic addiction and imperialist grandiosity that he alone can fix things and is always right.

Telling him he’s always right won’t help when sooner or later we have to tell him he’s wrong and our paths have diverged to the point where sucking up can’t plaster over the faultlines. Because that divergence is coming. Neither is sweet persuasion going to work – his narcissistic derangement means it will never be enough, especially after we keep giving him credit even for things that he hasn’t done, such as ending eight wars.

For Trump the personal is political and Trump’s personal actions show what he is – do we really think he looks at anyone or anything else through anything other than that personal lens? And of course, money.

No wonder we have TDS-A! The horrible irony is that Trump is driven by the need to be in our face all the time, yet how can we resist in our differing ways unless we acknowledge what’s happening?

One of the disturbing things about our current state is the normalisation by so many of the abnormal and so failing to rise to the scale of the challenge we face. This is not normal, it’s very, very serious and if it doesn’t drive you a bit crazy you’re not paying attention. He wants our attention, and in our way, to work out how to respond, we have to give it.

There’s a jokey saying, ‘Just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not after you.’ In Trumpworld it’s more, ‘Just because you’re deranged it doesn’t mean the world isn’t insane.’

Catch-22.

[i] As I wrote this ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was on TV. In it the hero, George Bailey (James Stewart) is shown what life would be like if he had not existed. One change is that the idyllic town of Bedford Falls comes under the grip of the avaricious, money-grubbing Henry F Potter – who renames the town, which he corrupts, Pottersville.

Now, I appreciate I’m perhaps a bit odd, certainly I’m in a minority, in getting worked up about such things, or maybe even being that interested. After all, it’s in the nature of representative democracy, that the electorate outsource decision-making on such things to those they elect, so they can get on with the rest of their lives.

But that can only go so far – outsourcing shouldn’t amount to abdication. And it certainly doesn’t extend to the news and current affairs media. A major part of their purpose – at least in my view – is to alert the public to what matters, to highlight what needs their attention and do it in a way that engages that attention.

These thoughts came to mind as I watched and read the response to that new security strategy – or rather lack of response.

The NSS came out overnight on Thursday, so let’s look at how BBC TV News responded. On the Friday late evening news, the lead story, covered at length, was the World Cup draw for England and Scotland. On Saturday, the lead story, again at length, was where they’d play their matches. Then on Sunday, the lead story was Lando Norris winning the Formula 1 World Championship.

Really? Is the city where a football team is going to play a match the most important story of the day? For God’s sake is it really even the most important sports story of the day? A Brit winning the F1 championship is great, but is it really that important? Interesting maybe for those who like their sport, but the most important news? On newspapers sport was on the back pages for a reason

Meanwhile, of the NSS, nothing.

After nearly five decades in the media, I am wearily familiar with the cynical, glib arguments about what journalists do is just ‘infotainment’, but the thing is I’m not a cynic.

So what it put me in mind of was the famous quote from Juvenal, the 1^st century Roman poet, about the public being distracted by ‘bread and circuses.’ The full quote is worth considering, “Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

His remark took aim both at the People and the authorities. The authorities were condemned for maintaining control by bribing the people with free wheat and providing spectacles (think ‘Gladiator’) which distracted attention and encouraged passivity rather than engagement. The People were condemned for being willing to abdicate civic responsibility in favour of such bribes and distractions.

Today, to those to be condemned I would now add much of the news media opting for infotainment – why challenge and inform when you can indulge? Why explain difficult stuff when you can analyse whether England’s circus performers can cope with playing in the heat at next year’s World Cup.

Later, the NSS somewhat limped into a wider public discourse but primarily as a discussion topic in current affairs rather than news. Where it’s entered the wider discourse it’s as an addendum to Trump’s latest brainfart in an interview damning Europe as decaying and its leaders as weak. In a way it’s all of a piece with news media’s lack of seriousness – finally responding once the world’s leading circus performer (who also rose to fame on the back of a TV show) wraps it up in easily digestible soundbites.

Meanwhile, much of the analysis among commentators (including mine on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7402730832362229760/ ) has highlighted the NSS’s significance for us, saying things like, ‘If Europe still needed a wake-up call then the US has just provided it.’ But how is anyone going to wake-up if there’s no alarm sounding?

All this is part of the problem. Leaving aside the alarming nature of the overall document, the NSS’s apologists seek to justify the extraordinary assertions it makes about Europe by highlighting Europe’s failure to pull its weight, primarily on defence.

In this particular aspect they have a case – it’s our open flank. However the wake-up call it gives is not that of a critical friend but a very openly signalled warning that they are they are ceasing to be our friend. And given the pre-eminence of the US in so many areas that’s very alarming indeed and far more significant.

So, let’s look at the NSS in a touch more detail, remembering this is a formal document not some off the cuff Trump soundbites.

It will come as no surprise to learn that, in somewhat nauseating tones, it depicts Trump as the all-purpose, very stable genius from which all good things flow. If, like The Police song, ‘Every Little Thing (S)he Does is Magic’, then it’s hardly surprising if a sense of alternate reality permeates the entire document.

It certainly strives hard never to let a meaningless cliché go to waste in the search for a faux profundity, itself masking vacuity. So it gravely states, ‘President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being “pragmatist,” realistic without being “realist,” principled without being “idealistic,” muscular without being “hawkish,” and restrained without being “dovish.”’ Hmm, what on earth does that word salad actually mean? Perhaps the suggestion of an early version of ChatGPT?

I think the cliched language, the unsupported, inaccurate assertions and general vapidity of the NSS is not irrelevant in that reflects the intellectual poverty of the thinking behind it. That doesn’t change though how worried it should make us.

Most notably on Europe of course, where – and I choose my words carefully – Trump’s administration is saying it will actively support regime change within democracies in order to bring in governments aligned to the US worldview.

Thus, the NSS propounds a narrative of an undemocratic Europe to, “include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and Sovereignty...censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition…”

“…The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition. A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes.”

America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism...Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory.”

It tops if off with its bullet point list stating among others:

“Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize:....

- Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European

Nations.”

It’s a bizarre series of statements, both offensive and inaccurate. Europe’s governments are by any measure among the world’s most democratic nations. The assertion that ‘governments’ subversion of democratic processes’ are preventing peace in Ukraine is simply hallucinatory nonsense. As the saying goes, rubbish in, rubbish out.

But the outflowing rubbish is not just opening a yawning gap between Europe and the US but openly signalling active support to far right parties like Germany’s AFD, and France’s National Rally – an extraordinary move to interfere in the domestic policies of democracies that are supposedly allies.

The language used about ‘civilisational erasure’ and general support for Christian nationalism is strikingly aligned to the narrative of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who really is subverting democratic processes, but is also a great pal of Trump.

What’s also notable is that while Europe gets it in the neck there is not one word of criticism for Russia, neither for its aggression in Ukraine nor its lack of democracy. Indeed the NSS’s narrative on culture and civilisation is close to some of Putin’s own views.

This is a stark contrast with Trump’s 2017 NSS which stated, “...Russia want[s] to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests…Russia aims to weaken U.S. influence in the world and divide us from our allies and partners.”

Russia will also have been hugging itself at another casually announced priority in the NSS asserting, ‘Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.’

NATO having an open door policy for new members, has been a unanimously agreed policy for decades – indeed the Alliance’s largest ever single enlargement of multiple nations was driven by a Republican president. Driven by fear of Russian aggression – which as we can see has been clearly justified by events – enlargements have been far from automatic. Stopping them would have been high on any Russian wish list, and now they’ve been given it without any Alliance debate.

Other than this, it’s also noteworthy that in what is after all a National Security Strategy, NATO – for more than seven decades the West’s primary defensive alliance – gets no recognition of its continuing importance or role, other than a requirement to spend more in a section on ‘burden-sharing’.

Looking beyond the focus on Europe, another important feature stands out in the section on the so-called ‘Western Hemisphere’, which basically means Latin America, with the reassertion of the US ‘Monroe Doctrine’.

The Monroe Doctrine dates from the 1820s when President Monroe asserted that the European powers should stay out of Latin America, which was now the US’s backyard, and any meddling would be regarded as a threat to US national security. It was initially somewhat welcomed by Latin American nations still shrugging off European control. However by the early 20^th century it, under President Theodore Roosevelt, took on distinctly colonial overtones, as an increasingly powerful US gave itself the right to intervene in Latin America in cases of ‘wrongdoing’.

More recently the doctrine had been reinterpreted as being more about partnerships than dominance, but that’s certainly not Trump’s view, and the NSS makes that explicit with what it calls the ‘Trump Corollary’, “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”

It goes on to say, “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

Are we seeing this being put into effect now in Venezuala?

Regardless, why should we care in Europe? Because by asserting its primacy and right to intervene as it sees fit in the Western Hemisphere the US is embracing the concept of ‘spheres of influence’, where the world is divided up among the big powers.

Big boys’ rules.

And this is an absolute departure from the direction of travel that seemed to follow the end of the Cold War. In Europe at least that period saw countries that had suffered under the Soviet yoke were able for the first time in half a century to choose their own course.

It was the US that very much led the way in that and even the Russians were at least temporarily on board. In 1997, in happier times, they signed the NATO/Russia Founding Act, stating:

“NATO and Russia will seek the widest possible cooperation… without dividing lines or spheres of influence limiting the sovereignty of any state.” This meant, NATO/Russia further agreed:

“…respect for sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security, the inviolability of borders and peoples’ right of self-determination.”

That was then. Since then Putin has pivoted back to an openly imperialist world view, now asserting, ‘The Russian world means Ancient Rus, the Tsardom of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and modern Russia that is reclaiming, consolidating, and augmenting its sovereignty as a global power.’

That’s an awfully big chunk of Europe, including NATO members. Russia believes it is justified in controlling its own ‘sphere of influence’, what it calls the ‘near abroad’, with Putin stating, “…we will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia.”

Again, little wonder Russia has welcomed the NSS. Not only is it free of criticism of Russia, it is the US espousing the same world view as Russia. If the US can claim it ‘must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity’ how can it object to the same reasoning by Russia over Ukraine and other parts of its ‘near abroad?’

Notice in both the US’s and Russia’s claimed ‘sphere of influence’ what the smaller nations think of it is irrelevant. The US statements in the NSS about the primacy of national sovereignty is suddenly very conditional, not to say hypocritical. Big boys rules[i].

One ironic footnote to the NSS’s assertion of US power-based dominance is that it then bizarrely says, ‘We want to maintain the United States’ unrivalled “soft power” through which we exercise positive influence throughout the world…’ This from a government that has just cut billions in development aid, dismantled USAID and its international broadcasting outlets such as Radio Free Europe. Trump’s team are systematically eviscerating US soft power, not maintaining it.

It was Theodore Roosevelt who said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick” but Trump prefers loudly bullying, especially your supposed allies. Soft power basically works through persuading others that acting together is in their mutual interest and to accept certain values and policies on the basis of ‘enlightened self-interest’. Trump’s loudly proclaimed ‘America First’ approach is so obviously unenlightened self-interest that it begs the question as to why other nations would want to support the US.

So, what does this mean for Europe and, more to the point, what should we do about it?

Firstly, we should not hope this is some passing phase, some storm we can weather. Trump’s one year into a four year term, and what we’re now seeing formalised reflects instincts and prejudices that have been evident for years. This reflects what he is.

Secondly, it also reflects the prejudices and views of his team. Most notably, in February in Munich his Vice President, JD Vance, delivered a speech with the same criticism of Europe. If anything Vance is even more trenchant in his views, and he of course is a front runner to follow Trump in 2028. Given the games the Republicans are playing with fixing the US electoral system to their advantage then hoping the Democrats might win is not a good bet.

Effectively we now need to set aside the assumptions of the last eight decades.

Europe must work on the basis that the US and Europe are now on diverging paths and can no longer assume we are friends and instinctive allies that share the same values, world view and therefore likely strategies.

This doesn’t mean Europe and the US have become adversaries, but it does mean sometimes and probably increasingly we will be clashing. Thus, over Ukraine, Trump favours concessions to Russia that are fundamentally against Europe’s security interests. In the same vein, Trump actively meddling in European democracies to boost political parties he favours is the action of a hostile actor.

Specifically, on defence, whatever we say publicly, we need to work on the assumption that the US can no longer be relied upon to live up to its Article Five obligations that an attack on one will be regarded as an attack on all. We can also assume adversaries like Russia will draw the same conclusion, which makes it all the more like they will test NATO’s resolve.

So we are in unexplored terrain and in a critical situation – one where NATO and the EU’s leaders need to rise to the scale of the challenge. We are going to have to find ways to disagree, and act in our own interest, politely but firmly, even if it risks the wrath of Trump.

Here we have to again acknowledge that the NSS has a point about Europe doing more to manage its own defence, and having more than enough resources to face Russia down if it did. I have previously rejected the grossly exaggerated assertion that somehow Europe’s contribution to NATO has been so pathetic, and also the notion that the US has not itself benefitted hugely from its contribution. It has, and in all sorts of ways.

Nevertheless, it has been shouldering a disproportionate share of the burden, and that’s going to have to end. More to the point it needs to end quickly.

To be fair, Europe’s nations have been moving in this direction, but in most cases the rises in budgets, defence reforms and weapons production have been within an ‘almost business as usual’ process. But what we actually need is emergency action as even then it will take years to crank up our emaciated armed force and defence industrial base.

Meantime we are perpetually one Trump tantrum away from some disaster. And Putin is pressing hard in Ukraine, seeing a window of opportunity. We need to fully take on board that Ukraine is our frontline – Ukraine is buying us time to crank up our defences, and if they fold then an emboldened Putin will quickly seek to pressure NATO in all sorts of ways.

We need to recognise that Putin’s ability to sustain his war against Ukraine is because he has turned Russia into a war economy. We are largely still operating with both peacetime economies and mindsets. Putin’s wartime economy can’t last, how long is guesswork, but while it does there is gap and that makes us vulnerable.

What we also see is a gap within Europe, in that some nations are adapting both resources and mindset, and others are not. Sweden is for me the exemplar in addressing the mindset issue, issuing a nationwide leaflet on what to do in case of crisis and war, with senior political and military leaders saying things like, “The situation is not pitch black but is very serious. All residents should now get ready for war in Sweden. On an individual level, you have to mentally prepare yourself.”

Other nations like the Baltics and Poland are also very forward-leaning. Of course they’re close to Russia, but Denmark is not, and it has re-introduced conscription, with forms of military service being planned by France and Germany. NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte put it starkly, “To prevent war, we need to prepare for it. It’s time to shift to a wartime mindset, and this means we need to strengthen our defences even more.”

In most countries though that debate has barely, if at all, started. It must, because that wartime mindset is going to be painful and require sacrifice.

That includes Britain, where the government is trying to talk a good game, but falling woefully short. Sure we’ve given a lot of kit to Ukraine and upped defence spending, but nothing we’ve done has required anything close to sacrifice on our part, nor has our government even begun to generate a narrative to prepare the nation for what needs to be done. For all Starmer’s foreign travels, defence and security are a ‘by the way’ in government messaging.

For instance, our armed forces remain in a parlous state, underequipped, undersized, with serious capability gaps in critical areas, and a shadow of what they were. The current uplift to their budget will barely touch the sides of what’s needed.

The obvious question then is where’s the money going to come from? The answer is, it’s going to come from us, and other places that also matter – and it will hurt. That’s the price of three decades of ‘bread and circuses’ since the end of the Cold War. We chose to believe that somehow we had seen the last of war, that even deterrence didn’t have to be very deterring, and we were wrong.

I am horrified and, having worked with so many Americans, personally upset by what’s happened to my America, but we are now in a double-bind. To the East we have a malign Russia invading Ukraine and conducting hybrid warfare against us, while to the West our former friend is turning their back on us. The sun is setting to the West, and on the wider Western World.

So, now it’s up to us to prove Trump wrong, to prove we are not decaying and weak, that our democracies retain their unity of purpose, values and durability.

At the crisis point of World War Two Churchill rallied Britain with his speeches, in one of which he said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

We are lucky we are not at such a point of crisis. The ‘blood’ is coming from the Ukrainians and, as a result, so are most of the ‘tears’. What’s needed from us is ‘toil and sweat’ because we still have the time and the resources to provide Europe with the security it needs, and without having to rely on others.

The key point though is that we need to realise the need and buckle down to the task – no more ‘bread and circuses’.

[i] This return of Great Power brutalism and its historical roots are covered in more detail in a previous Substack that may be of interest: https://open.substack.com/pub/marklaity/p/from-thucydides-to-trump?r=ewpcb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

The contrast could not have been starker. In front of me were a group of dedicated and patriotic men and women who’ve already sacrificed so much, losing friends, family and homes to defend their country and in support of values we share. On the other side is Trump – a loathsome creature with literally no redeeming qualities (if that seems extreme please identify them).

He is not fit to lick their boots.

So, when the so-called ‘peace’ plan surfaced my first reaction was visceral anger. When the full text emerged I remained angry, but that’s now been augmented by bafflement at what it proposes.

It’s little wonder it’s now (at time of writing) been reduced to 19 points. Basically it’s a mess – a dog’s dinner. However it’s amended it’s worth looking at because it highlights some continuing trends.

Leaving aside pro-Russian bias and the nauseating desire for the UST to actually make money out of the capitulation plan, it’s full of presumptions and assuming agreement and active support from a wide variety of actors that couldn’t possibly be assumed or expected.

Let’s look at a few:

Extracts from points 3 & 7 said ‘NATO will not expand further’ and ‘NATO will adopt a provision stating that Ukraine will not be admitted at any time in the future.’

NATO – not consulted at any point on this – has 32 members, and such a provision has to be accepted by them all, so any one of them can veto it. It’s also no small expectation on the part of Trump to assume NATO will or should never enlarge. It’s only a couple of years since Sweden and Finland joined, while there are still other nations with aspirations to join, unsurprising given Russia’s imperialist bent. Are the Baltics, to mention just three, going to fall meekly into line?

Point 11 and 14 state, ‘Ukraine may apply for EU membership and will receive short-term preferential access to the European market pending review’ and ‘Frozen assets will be used as follows:…Europe will add US$100 billion to increase the investment available for Ukraine’s reconstruction. European frozen assets will be unfrozen.’

The EU – like NATO also not consulted and blind-sided – has 27 members, so were they expected to fall obediently in line?

Then Point 13 casually said, ‘Russia will be invited to return to the G8.’ So, the other six members of the G8 – sigh, also not consulted – will doff their cap to King Trump and do as he wished? You get the picture.

Most of the talk around this apology of a plan has been about Ukraine’s acceptance, but it also depends on NATO, the EU and G6 falling into line and doing stuff that are not in their interest. Trump may now be the de facto king of the former USA, but he’s not yet king of the world, even if he thinks he is.

Going back to the top of the list we had:

‘2. A full and comprehensive non-aggression agreement will be concluded between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe. All ambiguities of the past 30 years will be considered resolved.’

What does this even mean? What ambiguities? Even the language and grammar is frankly odd, leading to some suggestions the whole plan has been translated direct from Russian. Either way the whole of Europe – until now completely uninvolved – is apparently meant to go along with developing some unspecified agreement which solves everything, everywhere, and in quick time.

What total, arrogant, ignorant nonsense.

Let’s turn now to Trump showing his usual feral desire to turn a buck.

The clearest element on Point 9 on the very vague U.S. security guarantees is that, ‘The United States will receive compensation for providing the guarantee.’ Point 14 said ‘US$100 billion of frozen Russian assets will be invested in U.S.-led efforts for Ukraine’s reconstruction and investment. The United States will receive 50% of the profits from this initiative.’

So there we have it, not peace at any price, but peace at a profit. Truly a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Perhaps Zelensky’s big mistake was not to offer to build a Trump Tower in Kharkiv? Or perhaps rename Pokrovsk Trumptown?

To the actual bits of the ‘plan’ that directly relate to Ukraine and Russia, then the tilt to the Russian wish list is all too clear, especially on territory, where the Ukraine would have to give up parts of the Donbass, including key defensive lines, that Russia has failed to conquer despite sacrificing hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

The security ‘guarantees’ had so little detail on enforcement that they really don’t guarantee anything, making nugatory statements like ‘Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed.’ Other statements border on the bizarre, such as, ‘Russia is expected not to invade neighboring countries.’ What the hell does that mean? ‘Expected’? Given its record, the reverse could be expected.

Another extract stated, ‘If Ukraine, without cause, launches a missile at Moscow or Saint Petersburg, the security guarantee will be considered void.’ What would amount to a ‘cause’ and could Ukraine launch a missile at any other Russian city and keep its guarantee?

Again, not just a biased plan but a confusing mess of one that was plain unworkable. At one point the ‘plan’ – at Point 28 – it’s even renamed a ‘memorandum’, which is a very different thing and in no way a basis for anything but further negotiation. Any real planner or negotiator would have their head in their hands at this.

This is indicative of much of the UST efforts throughout. Trump’s chosen dealmaker, Steve ‘Witless’ Witkoff, has again been seeking to cement his standing as the most inept negotiator in American history. The Russians must really love him.

And fundamentally it misses the critical element of any negotiation between warring parties – which is that the warring parties must actually want peace, and this is not where we are.

Ukraine really does want peace, and will suck up some tough stuff, but not peace at any price.

Russia, or rather Putin, doesn’t want peace, and is happy to carry on the war, because it remains committed to maximalist aims that amount to Ukraine surrender.

So Ukraine wants peace, but not at any price, and right now Russia prefers war in order to seek total victory.

This reality is reflected in what Russia has actually said about the original 28 point plan. Welcoming it in broad terms but in no way saying they would accept it or sign up to it. In fact they said it was a ‘basis’ for a settlement. So, even a plan widely and correctly seen as ticking many boxes in the Russian wish list is still not good enough. If Ukraine had accepted then the Russians would still have pushed for more.

This can be seen in a couple of the points. For instance while the ‘plan’ limited Ukraine’s army (but not Russia’s), at 600,000 that’s still a big, viable army, and far, far bigger than the 85,000 Russia has demanded. The Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory, and further additions, are labelled ‘de facto’ not ‘de jure’ – in other words not being accepted as legally part of Russia as Putin demands. There’s more, but the point is made. The tilt to Russia is big, but not absolute.

So, what then are the chances for the modified reduced plan the Europeans, Ukrainians and Marco Rubio have been pulling together?

Surely pretty small although I’d be happy to be proved wrong.

What yet another European diplomatic rescue mission has really done is seek to save Ukraine from Trump, just as they did after the Trump/Putin Alaska summit. The reality is that Zelensky, NATO, the EU and member nations are negotiating with Trump not Russia. And just like that earlier rescue mission – if it succeeds again – Zelensky can agree a ‘peace deal’ with Trump, which will then be effectively rejected by Russia.

That would mean we will be pretty much back to where we started before the 28-point plan. Neither warring party is ready for peace, with the Ukrainians trying to ensure the survival of their country, and the aggressor still aiming for total victory.

So, the war will most likely go on, which raises the question of how do we get peace? It comes down to persuading/forcing both sides that a deal is better than fighting on.

The reality again is that far more pressure has been applied to Ukraine than Russia. Ukraine is ready to suck up some very tough stuff, while Putin has consistently indicated he’s happy to carry on fighting and there’s no reason to doubt that. Yet Trump has equally consistently given his buddy Putin an easy ride.

Putin’s willingness to fight on is based on a variety of factors. Seeing as he doesn’t give a damn about the deaths of Russian soldiers, who he regards as meat for his frontline grinder, then humanity isn’t going to come into. At heart he believes he can outlast us all, and that is in large part based on not just contempt for European steadfastness, but his ability to wrap Trump round his little finger.

I think Trump genuinely does want peace, but ironically his softness towards Russia is a massive, perhaps critical, element in keeping the war going.

If Putin knew for sure that America was really backing Ukraine with weapons etc, was cracking down on Russia’s economy, it’s shadow oil fleet and so on, then the price of continuing would rise. His assumptions and the reality about winning an attritional war and outlasting us would be massively challenged. If you really wanted an end to the war then turning the screws on the party keenest to fight on should be obvious, but somehow it isn’t. Instead Trump keeps telling Zelensky, ‘You don’t have the cards.’ Well it would help if stopped taking cards from Ukraine and stopped giving cards to Putin.

Not that this lets Europe off the hook. Ultimately we have more skin in the game than Trump. Ukraine is our frontline and if it loses then we have a direct threat to our security.

It’s fair to say NATO and the EU have upped their game, but unnecessarily and unforgivably late in the game, and with scope to do more. Russia considers itself at war with us, and with a mindset to match, but we still find it hard to see ourselves at war with them, and to devote the resources and strategy that should follow. Russia’s perception we lack determination overstates the case but has an uncomfortable element of truth.

Part of this is that in today’s hybrid conflicts the nature of war in the grey zone is diffuse and too easily deniable. But it’s real enough all the same.

Maybe that’s changing. We expect the Baltics and other Northern European states to bang the drum, but the south has been far more cautious. However here is Italy’s Defence Minister, Guido Crosetto in a paper he published condemning “inertia” by European and NATO states in the face of brazen Russian aggression, “The hybrid war is continual and attacks critical infrastructure, decision-making centers, essential services and the fabric of each country, with daily and growing risks of catastrophic damage. We are under attack and the hybrid bombs continue to fall: The time to act is now.”

He goes onto say if Europe was invaded by a land army we “would not simply barricade ourselves at home hoping they would go away.”

Well, indeed. And when it comes to Ukraine, we need to try to get ahead of the game and seek to take the initiative rather than have to keep launching rescue missions to save Ukraine from Trump.

As I write this I am aware much of it could be quickly outdated by events. But the fundamentals remain the same, regardless of whether the 28 points have now become 19, or any other number.

Ukraine wants peace and will compromise. Russia wants victory doesn’t see the need to compromise. The only way to change that balance is to maximise support to Ukraine so they can sustain the fight and to raise the cost of continuing the war on Russia and undermine their belief they will inevitably win a war of attrition. And critically Putin must realise when we say we’re in it for the long haul, we are.

The main accuser – leading the charge against the BBC is the Daily Telegraph trumpeting a leaked internal memo from a former independent adviser strongly criticising, amongst other things, the opening sequence of a documentary on Donald Trump’s chance to win a second presidential term. Using the memo a Telegraph apparatchik asks, rhetorically of course, in a YouTube video, “If members of its own independent editorial committee have no faith in the BBC you have to ask, should we?”

The leaked memo criticises other aspects of BBC news coverage, but as we can see from the news coverage the overwhelming emphasis is on the Trump documentary – and on the basis of that fundamental questions are being asked about the future of, and indeed justification for, the BBC.

So, please bear with me, let’s do some forensic analysis on this clip and its significance.

The edit was in a montage at the start of the documentary spliced together two accurate clips in his speech to the crowd on January 6 before they marched on and stormed the Capital in a bid to overturn the election result.

In one clip he told them to march on Congress, saying, ‘We’re going to walk down to the Capitol... and I’ll be there with you.’ There was a cutaway to the crowd, and a second clip spliced on where he said, ‘And we fight. We fight like hell.’

Both quotes were accurate, taken directly from his speech to the crowd, but separated by 54 minutes, and when he said the first clip he added, ‘We’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.’

And that’s it. This was a montage setting up the main hour-long documentary called Trump: A Second Chance? Obviously such an appalling piece of bias was so obvious, so flagrant, so disgraceful that it immediately stoked broad-based outrage across the whole political spectrum and much handwringing

Oh wait.

The documentary was broadcast a week before the US presidential election in November last year – a year ago. Reaction at the time?

Zero.

This is not irrelevant. If, as is claimed by the independent adviser, this was so distorting and misleading that it ‘materially mislead viewers’ why did no-one outside this adviser raise a hue and cry. Where were the complaints from the audience and other media outlets?

Let me suggest that perhaps the fact Trump DID tell people to march on the Capitol, and he DID tell them to ‘fight like hell’, was something well understood by the audience regardless of the gap between the remarks.

Now, let’s be clear, the splicing was wrong. Broadcasters like myself have all been there – the problem of taking a lot of material and turning it into a couple of snappy clips is fraught with peril. It’s easy to cut one corner too many, to lose patience as you run out of time and say that’ll do.

Trump’s speech that day was over two hours and 22,000+ words, so not easy, especially from a man who is verbally incontinent and speaks with little structural coherence, or often even discernible sense. Still it was slipshod and shouldn’t have happened. It would have been easy to highlight the fact there was a gap between the two remarks.

But – there’s more.

The Telegraph and fellow critics, as well as the adviser have made a huge amount of, indeed largely built their case on, the 54 minute gap between his call to march on the Capitol and the call to ‘fight like hell.’

But that’s not the only reference to walking to the Capital. Here’s the unedited transcript from the ending of Trump’s speech to the crowd. (My highlighting)

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavours have not yet begun. My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country. And I say this despite all that’s happened. The best is yet to come.

So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol, and we’re going to try and give…the Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote…but we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help. We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.

So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.

I want to thank you all. God bless you and God Bless America. Thank you all for being here. This is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.

So, in reality Trump not only told the crowd to ‘fight like hell’ but SECONDS later, not 54 minutes later, also told them to ‘walk down Pennsylvania Avenue’ to the Capitol, not once but twice.

Sure Panorama should not have spliced the original clips together, but the Telegraph have built their massive edifice of accusation, something that supposedly ‘materially mislead viewers’, on a 54 minute gap between Trump telling them to walk and telling them to fight. This gap supposedly totally altered the context and therefore the meaning of Trump’s remark

But as the extract above shows – there wasn’t a gap. If the sloppy eejit who spliced the original widely-spaced clips together had instead edited the concluding remarks together, which were only seconds apart, and said exactly the same thing, then the core of the Telegraph’s accusation collapses.

And all this ignores some other fairly glaring issues about Trump’s incitement to his supporters, which throw some light on the implication that Trump’s speech was somehow not part of the problem on that day.

Like the day before the march when he tweeted, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.”

The responses from his supporters included tweets like: ‘Is the 6^th D-Day is that why Trump wants everyone there?’ ‘Trump just told us all to come armed. Fucking A, this is happening.’ It ‘will be wild’ means we need volunteers for the firing squad.’

That’s the context for his incendiary speech, when he told them to fight or lose the country, when he told them to go to the Capitol. And when they did, his inaction for hours made it worse. Then, when it was all over Trump was, after all massively criticised, even by Republicans, as well as being impeached. What came out in that inquiry shows he was far from critical of the rioters as it was happening, and his pardoning of them all since is the final proof that he had a role in making what happened on January 6 happen.

Oh and by the way, no-one is criticising the main body of the actual Panorama documentary itself, which is unavailable now, but by all accounts was fair.

So all this mountain of shit being piled on the BBC is based on a few seconds in a long forgotten if decent programme and some careless, poor editing which didn’t actually lead to something that ‘materially misled viewers.’ I mean, does anyone sentient actually believe Trump did nothing wrong on January 6, that he was just an innocent lamb wanting a nice peaceful march?

There’s a current phrase, especially in the US, about something being a ‘nothingburger’ – a fuss about nothing. Given the sloppy edit this isn’t quite a nothingburger, but not far off, so in good British culinary terms I’d describe it as an overcooked, cheap sausage, filled with gristle and breadcrumbs and precious little meat.

So how have we got here?

Well, firstly, the BBC is far from perfect, and I’ll come back to that. More to the point though, the enemies of the BBC are circling and looking for any excuse, and think they have an opportunity. Let’s look at some of the accusers.

The Daily Telegraph hates the BBC with a passion. This is not just another news scoop for them but part of their campaign to kill it. The Daily Mail is in the same category. They’re entitled to their views, but neither is in any sort of position to pronounce on impartiality and fairness when their story choices and opinion pages are so thoroughly compromised in support of a right-wing agenda – including attacking the BBC.

Laughably Boris Johnson has entered the fray to attack the BBC. Early in his career he was sacked by The Times for making up quotes, and later also sacked by the then Tory Party leader, Michael Howard, for lying about an affair. As Daily Telegraph journalist based in Brussels he was a byword for grossly exaggerated stories attacking the EU. His political career was ultimately derailed by a growing successions of scandal involving his consistent problems with being honest and straightforward. It’s hard to think of someone more lacking in credibility to talk about integrity and impartiality.

Except of course for Donald Trump, whose encounters with truth are largely accidental as he weaves the web of delusion Trumperbole that is Trumpworld, where he’s right about everything, always winning, solves wars with a wave of his hand, and anyone who doesn’t agree with him is a radical left lunatic or something similar.

I’m not saying being slagged off by Trump is a badge of honour or should be actively sought, but it just inevitably goes with the territory for any media that does its job properly. Unless you are the Prime Minister there are some people whose good opinion is really not worth having. The same applies to his various spokespeople/propagandists who are presiding over an administration that is steadily pushing out any but the most slavish and craven supporters of Trump.

What are the wider implications of the current crisis? Why does it matter?

Having started on forensically analysing a video clip we now need to widen the aperture, realising the BBC’s opponents are using a pretty minor issue for wider purposes which not only would undermine the BBC but affect a wider media landscape at a time of turmoil and change.

The BBC itself is facing a fundamental review and renewal of its charter at the end of 2027, and current debates will help create a climate and context for how that turns out. Those who want to in effect kill the BBC are trying to create a public and political narrative to bring that about.

This makes it all the more important for the BBC to engage in that debate, to seek to shape that narrative, and bluntly it’s not been very good at it.

Sadly, this is not new – as a communication organisation it’s remarkably bad at communicating about itself. The fact that this issue itself rumbled on and built up for several days without the BBC getting engaged speaks for itself. As a former NATO spokesman I regard BBC crisis communications as frankly rubbish.

It needs to improve, and fast, because the media landscape raises genuine issues about things like the license fee. In the era of social media, streaming, Netflix & Co, the funding model is a legitimate issue for discussion.

The future of news, not just BBC news, is also on the line. The business model for mainstream news organisations is broken. Serious local news is dying fast. People have got used to getting their news for free, while also moving over to TikTok and the like for influencer-driven news, often living within the algorithmic models that just tell you what you want to hear.

Alongside this we are seeing a consolidation and concentration of ownership, notably in the US, which is seeing billionaires taking more and more control of major media and communication groups. Many of them have aligned themselves to Trump. In this country ITV is in talks with Sky. Where this all leads is up in the air, but anyone who believes that we should trust billionaires to deliver fair and impartial news is delusional.

So, for me the survival of a publicly-funded broadcaster to deliver a broad range of fair and impartial news is fundamental.

I have been a journalist and then spokesperson for coming up to five decades. When I look out at the media landscape it scares me.

Frankly, I am far from an uncritical admirer of the BBC for which I worked for two decades. I do think there’s some substance to criticisms about coverage of Gaza and so on. But when I look at the alternatives I don’t see them. For the Daily Telegraph I would quote the bible, saying, “Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

For the BBC, I would say, you’ve had enough warnings, for God’s sake sort out your crisis communications as part of a proper narrative for the future. For the rest of us? The alternative to the BBC is far worse, so to quote Trump in mildly altered form, ‘We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country media you can trust anymore.’

In general terms this is a good thing, a mark of respect, a reminder of common humanity, expressed so well in the words of John Donne’s poem ‘For whom the bell tolls’, which starts by noting,

“No man is an island,

Entire of itself.”

…and concludes with,

“Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.”

So, death can unite, but it can also divide – and it’s how we, those that are left behind, respond that decides that.

And there is zero doubt how Charley Kirk’s supporters have decided to use it. Churchill is quoted as saying in 1945, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’, itself drawn from Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, "Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis."

So Trump and his cohort see their Machiavellian opportunity, simultaneously abusing the traditional restraint about not speaking ill of the dead to wall Kirk off from criticism while exploiting his murder to attack any and all opposition to them.

Perhaps curiously, I still felt some reticence about speaking publicly, a lingering remnant of John Donne’s wisdom for the ages. But then I heard Charley Kirk’s widow, Erika, speaking.

Sure she’s grief-stricken, but her message couldn’t have been more political, or more exploitative in using her husband’s death – or more ominous.

It was not her ‘battlecry’ that her husband’s ‘mission’ would continue – agree or not, that’s fair enough – but who it was aimed at when she said, “The evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination.... They killed Charlie because….”

Wait a minute here – let’s back up a bit. The man who murdered Kirk is in custody. There is no ‘they’ or evildoers with an ‘s’ who are responsible.

Unless of course you are going to spread the net wider – to use his death as part of a wider campaign against some amorphous ‘radical left’, wrapping into that anyone who disagrees with what he stood for.

Which is exactly what Trump and Co are doing, and now Kirk’s wife has thoroughly aligned herself with that approach. She has weaponised his death. It could be said she’s entitled to, but if that is so it also means that any reserve linked to what’s said about him can be equally fairly set aside.

That doesn’t make his murder any less wrong. It can’t and mustn’t be rationalised as in any way justifiable, but it does put what he stood for in the frame.

That starts with putting some context to the image being presented of him as some champion of free speech, debating and making his case with all and sundry. There’s an element of truth to this as he avoided the rancorous language of many Trumpites, and was prepared to go onto campuses and engage with opponents.

But as far as being a real debating opportunity, forget it.

His so-called ‘Prove me Wrong’ tours might as well have been called ‘Showing I’m Right’, as the whole set-up was inevitably going to leave him looking like top dog. On stage the whole time, while opponents had only a brief time to build an argument. His rhetorical techniques were also as old as time. Answering opponents with one or two word questions; speaking quickly with no pauses, mixed with long-winded assertions, often dubious, piled on top of each other.

The ultimate proof of course is did anyone ever ‘prove him wrong’? Of course not – debate is real discourse, and he was never up for being proved wrong. It was a pretty good schtick, but a schtick all the same. Trust me, when it comes to speaking in public I do this stuff for a living. After half a century as a communicator I could appreciate the technique, but can’t be fooled by it.

As for the politeness, well yes, up to a point, but when it came to the content politeness went out the window. The term that springs to mind is being politely hateful.

In her statement following his murder, Erika Kirk, referred to God’s ‘merciful love’ but that was something frequently missing from Kirk’s views. When it came to LGBT+ he referred to them as an ‘abomination to God’. He said passing the seminal 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbade discrimination on the basis of race, was a ‘huge mistake’.

In October 2022, Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked with a hammer and nearly died. Kirk said the attack was ‘awful’ but called on some ‘amazing patriot’ to bail him out. Really?

The list could go on. I don’t know how he was in private but in his public persona he was not a kind man. Perhaps best exemplified by his justification for the most extreme possible interpretation of the 2^nd Amendment on the right to bear arms.

He said of gun deaths on April 5, 2023, "I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights."

So, if some fanatic shoots you dead then that’s kind of tough, being trumped by the importance of the 2^nd Amendment.

Unsurprisingly Democrats and other opponents of Kirk and his views have pointed out, unkindly if accurately, the irony of his fate – becoming part of the collateral damage he regarded as a reasonable price to pay for his expansive interpretation of the 2^nd Amendment.

However, I think we can safely assume that Erika Kirk wasn’t including supporters of extreme gun ownership amongst the ‘they’ or the ‘evildoers’ she blames for her husband’s death. No, her statement will have added fuel to the far more ominous statements coming from Trump and his supporters as they seek to exploit the opportunity that has come their way.

Right from the get-go Trump was laying the blame on the ‘radical left’, saying, "This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now…radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives."

This is of course absolutely hypocritical from the man whose violent rhetoric vastly outweighs the excesses of the left, for instance calling leading Democrats ‘the enemy within’ and ‘evil, sick, crazy.’ It will come as no surprise that when he talked about examples of political violence he cherrypicked attacks only on Republicans, conveniently ignoring those on Democrats.

Most recently, on Fox, he was asked, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” His reply? “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less…. The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. … The worst thing that happened to this country.”

Even before there was any suspect in custody he said his administration ‘will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”

As Machiavelli said, "Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis."

And he’s being relatively mild compared to many of his acolytes. The most alarmingly extremist member, of his team, the Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, who recently called the Democrats a ‘domestic extremist organisation’, offered this, “There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless.”

And of course you can always rely on Elon Musk to add fuel to the fire, posting on X even before Kirk's death was confirmed, "The Left is the party of murder."

Meanwhile one of the apparently more rational members of his staff, Susan Wiles, has pointed the way it will be used in the service of a wider strategy, “We are working, we were actually already working, spurred as much by the Ukrainian woman who was killed on the train as by Charlie’s tragic passing, [on] a more comprehensive plan on violence in America, the importance of free speech and civil speech, the ways that you can address these, they can only be called hate groups, that may breed this kind of behaviour.

So in the coming days, the president will be telling the American people about what we plan to do. It will not be easy. There’s layer upon layer upon layer, and some of this hate-filled rhetoric is multigenerational, but you’ve got to start somewhere.”

Note, how she wove in the reference to the murder of a Ukrainian woman stabbed on the subway by a mentally-ill homeless black man. That case has been made a cause celebre by Trump and the right. Kirk’s murder is now being made part of Trump’s wider narrative of a supposed violence omni-crisis to help justify federal intervention in Democratic-run cities, and the aggressive deportation campaign through the masked men of ICE.

I have no doubt Trump, Vance et al were genuinely shocked and upset, but their determination to use it for wider purposes is both clear, cynical and dishonest.

For instance, their much trumpeted commitment to free speech doesn’t extend to those challenging in social media their attempted deification of Charlie Kirk. Frankly, I think it both unwise and wrong to celebrate his death – he was hardly Hitler or Osama bin Laden – but in the swamp of general unpleasantness that marks so much of today’s unsocial media, it’s hardly strange, nor restricted to right-leaning figures.

Yet we are already seeing Americans losing their jobs for saying they have, in one instance, ‘zero sympathy’ over his murder. The US Deputy Secretary of State has warned foreigners about their comments, “I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action.” Meanwhile right-wing activists are tracking those who make what they consider bad comments and then pressurising their employers to sack them.

The way they are conflating the murderous actions of one man into a totally unjustified generalist assault on anyone who criticises the administration is chilling, especially given all the other actions to extend absolutist executive authority that are already in train.

As Machiavelli said, "Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis." They’re determined not to.

Thus the leaders of many of the world’s leading nations line up to blow smoke up his ass; to act like nodding donkeys as he says stupid stuff; to not roll their eyes in front of the cameras; and to stifle yawns as he goes off script and rambles on about all sorts of pet peeves. Most of all, setting aside embarrassment and dignity - all taking one for the team in the cause of trying to win his favour in a good cause.

The actual argument and facts they deploy are almost incidental, made especially so because the Trumpian worldview is so often a form of alternative reality. “Faster than a speeding bullet, able to end wars with a single phone call, unlike all those suckers and losers who came before him - it’s Supertrump.”

You think that’s going a bit far? Have a look at this post from the official White House account: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1943493150644777199. It’s gone far beyond parody.

Trump simply laps it up and, astonishing as it seems, really does take it at face value. If you still have any doubt, check out the dictator-style cabinet meeting where his lackeys competed over who could deliver the most vomit-inducing praise. Have a sick bag on standby: https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1960473445780873557

However obvious it is to us, all the evidence is that it works because it aligns to Trump’s gargantuan self-regard – remember this is the man who posted in all seriousness on his social media suggestions that he looked like Elvis Presley complete with split picture (yes he did, and no he doesn’t). https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/111869870716367808

That ability to rewrite history in line with his outlook was in evidence in his interpretation of the impromptu summit in the White House with Zelensky and European leaders. He saw it as a wonderful testament to his leadership, boasting of its unprecedented nature.

Unprecedented it certainly was, however, not testament to his leadership, but alarm at the disaster he might cause. This saw Europe’s leaders scramble on a Sunday to organise in a few hours an emergency pile-on to head off Trump doing something really dangerous when he met Ukraine’s Zelensky.

And when they briefed Zelensky they spent chunks of that time not discussing the war, but advising him on how not to offend the transparently thin-skinned Trump. For his part, Zelensky had been thinking carefully about what to wear. Really? Is the fate of nations meant to be determined by a bloody suit?

Then there was the composition of the European delegation. The European big beasts such as France, Germany and Britain were obvious, but why was Finland’s Alexander Stubb there? Yes, he’s highly capable, and really understands Russia, but his critical credential this particular time is he’s a golfing buddy of Trump. Then there’s Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. Again, highly capable, strong on Ukraine, and handily right-wing for Trump, but also, Trump fancies her a bit. NATO’s Rutte, the known ‘Trump-whisperer’ who recently called Trump ‘Daddy.’ All good people, but designed to appeal to Trump’s ego. Good on Europe for cranking up a bespoke team in a couple of hours, but a bit sad it’s come to this.

He is meant to be on ‘our’ side after all.

But he’s not really is he?

And Putin has worked out how to play him brilliantly, hence my remark about Pavlov’s dogs and Putin’s poodles. This obviously includes the shameless flattery. For example when Trump’s Ukraine negotiator Steve Witkoff first met Putin in March this year then Putin presented him with portrait he had personally commissioned as a gift for Trump. The portrait is a suitably kitsch rendition of Trump after the assassination attempt on him, and went down very well, rather than being seen for what it is. As we have seen with business leaders, Trump is pathetically susceptible to being influenced by very obvious gifts.

Then at the Alaska summit Putin took time out from persuading Trump to sell-out Ukraine to tell him that his 2020 election defeat was rigged due to ‘mail-in voting’ (what is more often called ‘postal votes’). Of course this was red meat to Trump, telling him what he already believed. In any sane world the President of the United States would have told Putin it was nothing to do with him, he needed no guidance on democracy from an authoritarian, and let’s stick to the topic we came to Alaska to discuss.

No such luck. In fact the advice from his pal Vladimar was so sticky that a couple of days later, like Pavlov’s dog, Trump was posting he would “lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots.” What’s more he then embarked on a lengthy rambling diatribe against mail-in ballots in his news conference with Zelensky. Putin’s poodle yapping away.

Putin’s ability to influence him extends beyond the obvious flattery, and that is based on an alignment of personal worldview. Both are essentially authoritarian. Trump sees himself as a king – approvingly reposting images posted by his press office of him wearing a crown, captioned ‘long live the king.’ Meanwhile Putin sees himself as a czar, with Peter the Great and Catherine the Great as his models.

No surprise then that both also believe in a world of Great Powers dividing the globe into spheres of influence. Trump’s limitless self-belief makes it easy for Putin to play into this, suggesting he and Trump can sort it all out between them – the big guys laying down the law to the little guys.

Putin’s advantage though is that he has a clear, consistent plan, focus, narrative and grasp of detail – none of which does Trump. Trump doesn’t do detail, has very limited attention span, is ignorant about the nature of conflict and no interest in relieving that ignorance. The man who wears a ballcap saying ‘Trump was right about everything’ is hardly going to admit to that.

He also wants a quick, flashy, very public fix to complex crises, so he can then move on to his next triumph. It’s been well-put that he is interested in the weddings not the marriages. In some ways it might almost be worse and he’s more like the guy right-swiping on a dating app.

This to some degree accounts for the way he so often parrots Russian speaking points. Having no real coherent principles, policy or strategy of his own, other than a vague desire for peace, he is a sucker for Putin’s blandishments. That same lack of intellectual coherence, and attention deficit also accounts for the flip-flopping over Russian policy – lacking a consistent strategy of his own he becomes even more capricious according to his emotions.

All of this has been made worse by his chosen partner in crime in negotiating with Putin, the witless Steve Witkoff. Witkoff, a New York real estate buddy of Trump is now the US negotiator on both Ukraine and Gaza, itself an absurd situation.

Worse though is the manifest unsuitability of Witkoff for the role. He not only has no relevant experience or knowledge of the issues but has absolutely no aptitude for it. He is absolutely a dream negotiator – for Putin, who must rub is hands with glee whenever he walks into the room.

Following his first meeting with Putin he returned sounding like a spokesman for Russia Today, enthusing about how well he was treated, telling Tucker Carlson, “I liked him, I thought he was straight up with me…I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.” There’s one born every minute.

It’s even worse than him being merely a Putin poodle, because at times he’s been actively damaging. Following his meeting with Putin ahead of the Alaska summit he suggested Putin had provisionally agreed to a whole series of territorial concessions, which was 180 degrees wrong and quickly ‘corrected’ by the Russians. He has since suggested Russia were up for agreeing security guarantees to Ukraine – the reality is they were not and are not.

Russia’s maximalist position has not changed one iota, but his misreporting about non-existent potential Russian ‘concessions’ further encouraged Trump to have the Alaska summit at a point when he had previously hardened his position on Russia. Witkoff’s handling within the meetings and in Russia has also been woeful, relying on a Russian-supplied interpreter, using an insecure phone, and following Trump’s habit of not writing things down and taking notes. To adapt the old saying, verbal agreements with Putin are not worth the paper they are not written on.

Perhaps most emblematic of his naïve credulousness came when he last met Putin, who gave him an Order of Lenin to be passed onto the family of an American mercenary killed fighting for Russia against Ukraine. Not only did he accept being treated as some kind of postman, but the idiot then actually personally delivered it to the family. How Putin must have laughed at pulling off that stunt. As the saying goes, you couldn’t make it up

The end result of all this tragic absurdity has been Putin continuing to get a free pass from Trump who reversed his demand for an early ceasefire, which had been backed by the threat of fresh sanctions from the US. Even worse, Trump was seemingly moving to put the blame for continuing the conflict on the victim – Ukraine. Alaska was a triumph for Putin.

This was the backdrop for the European scramble to support Zelensky – to head off looming disaster. In that they succeeded. But if they stopped the worst, Putin is still free of any extra pressure from the US for an immediate ceasefire, and is maintaining his offensive on the ground in the east, and in the air over the whole of Ukraine.

So, what has been achieved? There are more questions than answers on this, but the basic answer is not much, if anything.

The European leaders left trumpeting the triumph of wringing an undefined, somewhat vague sort of promise from Trump on US security guarantees as part of supporting any peace deal. I’d agree it was good as far as it went, but it didn’t go that far, and has already been muddied up by different statements from Trump, who, as noted above, hates putting anything on paper in case it commits him.

How Europeans can put flesh on the bones of potential support to a peace deal is also hard to do when there are so many potential options on varying different outcomes. Contingency planning in these circumstances is a nightmare. Not so much Plan A, as Plan B, C, D….

Even more fundamentally, security guarantees are irrelevant unless there’s a peace deal to guarantee.

There’s no sign of that and indeed Trump’s actions have made that less not more likely. So it’s all hypothetical at this point.

As indeed is Trump’s bluster about a Putin/Zelensky summit. The Russians quickly poured cold water on that, not through an outright rejection but through caveating it into the long grass.

It’s a statement of the obvious (although apparently not to the supposed author of The Art of the Deal) that warring parties only agree to a deal if they believe the gain is greater than the pain. At present Putin believes the pain is bearable, and the potential gain is achievable without a deal.

Ukraine and Russia are in a war of attrition. Such a war should not be confused with a stalemate – the grinding process of attrition may not be obvious, but it’s there, with its own ebbs and flows and timelines favouring one side or the other at different points and in different ways.

At present it favours Russia, although far from decisively. It’s able to mobilise enough soldiers to make up for its extraordinary casualty rates. Barely trained, many are little more than lambs to the slaughter, but for whatever reason, Putin’s sheepdogs are able herd enough into the killing fields.

As such they are increasingly pressurising the thinly manned Ukrainian frontlines. They are aided by improved Russian tactics and technical innovations – it’s not just Ukraine that is learning and adapting to new ways of warfare.

This in turn is enhanced by the fact Russia is now a total war economy, able to outproduce Ukraine in some significant weaponry – hence for instance swarms of drones overwhelming Kyiv’s air defences, or glide bombs pounding the frontlines in the Donbass.

For all that, their territorial progress on the Eastern Front is glacial and Ukraine seems able to keep that way, inflicting massive casualties and hitting strategic targets such as Russia’s oil industry. More, if the tide is flowing sluggishly their way right now, can it last? Their economy is increasingly struggling – to some degree they’re on borrowed time – and can they really maintain their military mincing machine?

Right now they have something of a window of opportunity – or even more importantly, think they have – so can Ukraine hang on long enough to close that window?

Some things Ukraine should be sorting out for itself. Its conscription age should be lowered, and its mobilisation system is still a mess. It is in an existential battle but has yet to mobilise all its human resources, even if it has achieved some truly remarkable feats.

But even more vital is the support it needs from us. Europe has been slow to crank up its own defence industrial base. It’s happening, and in some scale, but we are playing catch-up. We also need to truly match actions to our words through accelerating our investments. In this context we are still trying to fill a United States-sized gap in the near term.

Which brings us back to Trump. He can change the pain/gain balance to effectively tell Putin that his tactic of outlasting Ukraine and its allies will not work, and the pressure on the Russian system will increase.

That’s the only way Putin MIGHT come to the table to genuinely seek some sort of deal rather than just play for time – if he fears losing, or faces systemic crisis within Russia. Even that’s a big but, as Putin is also living in his version of an alternative reality, and for him personally it’s existential. It’s not existential for Russia, as it could end the war tomorrow and still be a perfectly viable country, but Putin would not survive.

All this means the most likely outcome for now is for the war to grind on. Ukraine, literally fighting for national survival, can’t stop, and Russia won’t.

Which is not to the taste of President Attention Deficit Disorder. When victory requires sustained effort and sticking with it then he’s not your man. He wants his quick wins, with him as master of ceremonies presiding over the peace deal, any peace deal – whatever, just sign the damn thing here. He just wants to end the war and doesn’t especially care who comes out on top, or stuff like right or fairness, as long as he gets the credit and marches onward to a Nobel Peace Prize.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but the best way to get a peace deal is to stop obsessing about one and just demonstrate to Putin that we are prepared to outlast him.

Are we?

This ruler was unlike all the previous rulers, and if anyone disagreed with him he would have a temper tantrum, and everyone was afraid he would then throw his toys out of the cot.

So, his courtiers knew that to stay in favour they should always agree with him, and over the years anyone with character and wisdom had been got rid of or decided not to play. Outside the empire, other countries were so afraid of a tantrum they also flattered him, so as not to have him throw out his toys.

One day, when he had used some of his toys, he said how perfectly they had worked and demanded everyone agree with him…

…Enough.

I am of course referring to Trump’s comments on the recent US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites and you get the idea I’m sure. The common phrase, ‘the king has no clothes’ and its variations, comes from the Hans Christian Anderson morality tale ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ from the final instalment of his ‘Fairy Tales Told for Children.’

In that particular tale http://hca.gilead.org.il/emperor.html a very vain emperor obsessed with his clothes is fooled by some conmen into believing they can weave him a wonderful set of robes – clothes that are invisible to anyone unfit for office or really stupid.

To cut a short story even shorter, his courtiers say nothing, and he ends up naked in a public procession, with no-one saying anything, until, “But he has nothing on at all,” said a little child at last. In the tale, word spreads, “But he has nothing on at all,” cried at last the whole people.

So here we all are – all living for real in a child’s fairy tale.

And this matters. So, rather than another broad brush assault on Trump, let me break down this specific instance and see Andersen-style the morals it draws.

Leave aside agreeing or not with the fact of the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, the information we could quickly and reasonably rely on is that they hit their targets. Immediate post-strike imagery and analysis showed a large amount of surface destruction. That’s it.

However, Trump, immediately went further, saying the sites, "have been completely and totally obliterated." This is typical Trump of course, everything is the best, worse, biggest etc, etc as he maintains his continuous effort to obliterate the outer limits of hyperbole.

But let’s be clear – he could not know this. Target hit is not necessarily target destroyed, especially when it’s buried deep within a mountain, as in the case of Fordo. The same day we saw the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, being far more cautious, "Final battle damage will take some time, but initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction."

So far, so typical.

But fairly quickly reality came calling, with the leak to CNN and the New York Times reporting that early assessments indicated it may have set back the Iranian nuclear programme only months. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/us/politics/iran-nuclear-sites.html

Cue outrage from Trump, echoed by his acolytes and sycophants. In Andersen’s tale the child’s cry is picked up by the crowd – in real life Trump labelled those who called out his claim as ‘scum’. He followed this up with typically aggressive and bullying engagements with the media, seeking to browbeat them into submission.

In a way his response was even worse than that of Andersen’s emperor, for whom the crowd’s reaction, “made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right; but he thought to himself, “Now I must bear up to the end.”

No such thought for Trump, who doubled/trebled/quadrupled down deeper than Fordo mountain in his assertion that Iran’s nuclear programme had been ‘obliterated’.

Roaring in behind was his leading sycophant, Hegseth, looking ever more like a wannabe mafioso, ranting at the media, and absurdly accusing them of demeaning the aircrew on the strike.

It’s worth noting his argument that the leaked report could be dismissed because it was an early assessment classed as ‘low confidence’ in part as the evidence was buried deep in a mountain. How can he dismiss that report because the evidence is buried inside the mountain and then go on to have high confidence it's been obliterated when, ahem, the evidence is buried under the mountain?

The answer of course is that logic is irrelevant. He says it is, because Trump says it is. His master’s voice – in mafia terms, the Don has spoken.

What’s the reality? Mostly likely, the US still doesn’t know, and with good reason. In the intelligence world there are quite elaborate categories for assessing intel as they often call it. It varies from country to country, but commonly it has low, medium, and high confidence categories with clear criteria for each, going far beyond looking at post-strike imagery.

So straight after a complex attack like the US strike then an intel assessment would almost inevitably be low confidence, not to imply failure, but because the assessment process is just starting. When Trump said it had been obliterated he simply couldn’t know, and he was foolish to say so.

Equally the leaked report is not and was highly unlikely to be definitive – hence it categorising itself as ‘low confidence’, which in non-intel parlance means, too early to be sure.

Does this matter beyond the security community? Absolutely.

Firstly, its success or otherwise has huge political implications. Setting back Iran’s nuclear ambitions by months or years makes a huge difference to handling Iran and the potential for either some kind of deal or maybe further strikes. What we can say is that there are unanswered questions about the whereabouts of Iran’s enriched Uranium and other unhit facilities.

Secondly, there’s the credibility issue. Anyone sentient already knows you can’t rely on anything Trump says, but the toxic effect is infecting the whole US system of governance.

So, since Trump said the Iranian nukes had been ‘obliterated’ everyone is falling into line. Even before then, any discussion of the imminence of the threat – how close Iran was to nuclear weapons – had been compromised. Tulsi Gabbard, the distinctly odd, Putin-loving, conspiracy-loving, know-nothing who is, God help us, Director of National Intelligence had said the intelligence service didn’t believe Iran was close to a nuke. Not only couldn’t she be trusted to really represent the views of the intelligence community, but once Trump decided to lean towards bombing Iran he bluntly said she was ‘wrong’. Obediently she then reversed her view, but still ended up sidelined.

More recently therefore, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director has, big surprise, come out and said ‘new intelligence’ suggested the programme had been set back for years. But how can we believe him, any more than Hegseth? Of course we cannot.

So, if the dedicated professionals who are doing the assessment conclude Iran’s nuclear programme is still a goer, will we be told or, more likely, how will it be ‘managed’?

To be clear, it is possible Iran’s programme has been really badly hit. Frankly, I really would rather Trump was right on this one. Only Iran wants Iran to have nukes. But the bottom line is we can’t trust the Administration to be honest on this – if they would hide the bombing not fully succeeding, then why would we take them at their word if they say it did? You can see this playing out now as the professionals twist and turn to try to play it straight and maintain their credibility without openly contradicting Trump’s hyperbole.

And credibility is so fundamental on a wider level beyond this issue. Ironically, given his abuse of facts and reality, Trump has got where he’s got in part because of massive distrust of the system, and the establishment’s loss of credibility.

As former British minister Michael Gove famously said during Britain’s Brexit campaign, ‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts…’ To be fair to him his comment was a little more caveated than it was taken, but the point remains. Growing vaccine resistance, the over-reliance on so-called influencers, the general disillusionment with incumbent governments.

This is the polarisation that is toxifying our politics where so many only trust those who reinforce what they already think. Part of that collateral damage is the loss of nuance – in a world mostly composed of greys we impose black and white. Iran’s programme is either obliterated or just delayed a few months.

We have a critical trust deficit, and here is just another example, including of Trump trying to close down, as a matter of policy, anyone daring to challenge his version of events.

Back in 2018, Lesley Stahl, the 13-time Emmy award-winning “60 Minutes” correspondent, related a conversation she had with Trump after his November 2016 election victory, when she asked him why he kept attacking the media. Stahl recalled, “He said you know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

That’s why he calls the media who reported the Pentagon leak ‘scum’. That’s why Hegseth, the former Fox News ranter, is so angrily bullying in his latest rants. That’s why professional media are unfairly accused of demeaning the aircrew on the Iran strike for daring to report doubts about the effect of the bombing.

Through my previous career I have been involved in the area of targeting and assessments, and I can tell you professional aircrew don’t give a stuff about being supposedly demeaned – they do care very much about knowing the outcome of their efforts, good or bad.

No, Trump’s rage at the media was not about the aircrew being demeaned but him feeling demeaned when his foolishly premature remarks met reality. It’s all of a piece with his campaign to undermine the media as a threat to his efforts to dictate reality – a policy pursued with enthusiasm by his acolytes.

In an update of Anderson’s fairy tale, anyone saying the emperor has no clothes would likely have someone like the White House’s communications director Stephen Cheung say of them, as he recently has of one journalist, “He’s a lying sack of shit…he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.” Classy stuff and somewhat typical White House media handling.

But the effect of feeling obliged to admire the emperor’s non-clothes has spread widely.

In the same week of the Iran strikes we had the NATO summit, totally orientated around keeping Emperor Trump from throwing a tantrum and perhaps sinking the Alliance. Rather like Andersen’s emperor and his obsession with clothes rather than running the empire, none of Trump’s antagonism to NATO is anything to do with some considered policy but a function of his narcissistic personality and instinctive prejudices.

Be that as it may, NATO’s bosses did what they thought they had to do. So, the Summit was drastically shortened to match Trump’s attention span. The communique was also shortened and there was no reference to Russia’s continuing aggression against Ukraine. Meanwhile, all the heads of state delivered lashings of flattery, allowing Trump to adopt his triumphant Mussolini pose in the group photo. Trump left saying nice things about Alliance leaders, so job done – for today at least.

And then there’s Mark Rutte. He’s NATO’s Secretary General, so I guess he took a big one for the team, with his supposedly private note to Trump praising him to the skies, that Trump then so predictably released. But the reference to Trump as ‘daddy’, coming in a joint media appearance, was at another level. I am ex-NATO and remain NATO to my fingertips, but come on.

Most of all they ‘fixed’ the communique to deliver Trump his demanded 5% GDP rise – sort of. 3.5% is for real defence spending, which is tough enough. The other 1.5% is ill-defined to put it at its most kind. It is – let’s face it – a bit ‘emperor’s new clothes.’

In the fairy tale, after the child’s cry is taken up by the crowd, Andersen concludes his tale, saying, ‘And the chamberlains walked with still greater dignity, as if they carried the train which did not exist.’

And so it goes on. It’s a bit alarming that a child’s fairy tale should be so apposite to our current state. And what about us? When it comes to our defence promises, and not just NATO, maybe we’re not naked but perhaps we are down to our underwear?

For instance, when Trump met El Salvador’s authoritarian leader, Bukele Ortez, at the White House it was not just the content that jarred – which God knows was bad enough – but the jocular tone of it all. As they joshed each other about deporting alleged gang members to a hellhole masquerading as a prison you could see they were having fun.

It brought to mind the guiding feature of this administration. A casual, careless, cruelty and indifference, which is toxifying so many of those it touches.

In his State of the Union ramble in March, Trump once more declared his ambition to annex Greenland, and ended by saying, “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” What was once a casual remark is now policy even if still delivered in a throwaway style that hid its importance.

And when he said it, the detail that struck me most is that some of the audience – America’s elected representatives – laughed.

Think on that. The President of the United States threatens, in breach of all international law, to annex ‘one way or the other’ part of another nation, which also happens to be a democratic NATO partner. And the response of his side of the house is to laugh. Not shock, not embarrassment, not disagreement, but to titter at their boy’s performance.

Another small detail. In the same speech he went on to grotesquely distort how USAID money was wasted in Lesotho, adding as a throwaway it was a country, “Which nobody has ever heard of.”

Again, they laughed.

Oh, how funny, such wit, the world’s biggest bully from the world’s most powerful nation casually demeans and insults one of the world’s poorest countries to add some spice to his stand-up routine, and all his followers can do his laugh.

For me, the significance of that detail is what it says about how Trump has dragged so many Americans down to his level. Once upon a time such crassness, such nastiness, such sheer bloody rudeness was beneath any nation that pretended to decency.

Now it’s just a joke. Associate with a bad crowd long enough and it rubs off, and when you look at Trump’s crowd they’re a bad lot, all taking their cue from him, competing with each other to obey their master’s every brain fart and praise his supposed brilliance.

And it has had real world effects. Somebody in his cult had actually heard of Lesotho – enough to slap 50% tariffs on them, which were also the highest of any country on the chart he presented with his tariffs’ announcement. As with everyone else, they are now on a 90 day pause in sentencing, but of course the guillotine is still hanging over them at the dear leader’s whim.

In his ridiculous chart Trump’s team claimed, as with everyone else’s, they were purely reciprocal tariffs because of Lesotho’s supposed 99% tariffs on US imports. Gosh, those tricky Lesotho types (known as the Basotho) joining with all those others who have, in Trump’s words, been “ripping us off” and “stolen our jobs, (as) foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once-beautiful American Dream."

So, what did they do to deserve the highest tariffs on the list? Firstly, we need to recall how Trump’s supposedly reciprocal tariffs were arrived at.

Amidst much (justified) scepticism about their origins, the White House finally issued an incomprehensible briefing document supported by an impenetrable formula filled with Greek symbols that was not only inaccurate in its own terms but actually disguised something very simple both in its formula and its idiocy.

Firstly, the tariffs are not reciprocal or anything like it. Basically, the White House took the trade deficit for the US in goods with a particular country, divided it by the total goods imported from that country and then divided that by two. So, in the case of Lesotho it exported $237m of goods to the US and imported $2.8m. This produces a trade deficit of $234.2m, divide that by $237m, and that equals assuming Lesotho had imposed tariffs of 98.8% on US imports. This was then halved to produce the US tariff on Lesotho of 50%.

As others have pointed out, a trade imbalance does not mean another country is trading unfairly or imposing tariffs, it just means one country wants, and therefore buys, more of the other country’s goods than it is selling to them.

Yet Trump is assuming that unless the US is exporting as much to each and every other country as it is importing from them then it must be unfair.

This is nonsense. The idea that the only fair trade is one where imports and exports match each other is beyond absurd.

Lesotho – the country no-one has heard of – is a good example of this nonsense. Its GDP per capita (a country's Gross Domestic Product divided by its population) indicates average annual income per person of about $1,100, whereas those poor, ‘ripped off’ Americans struggle by on the world’s 6^th highest GDP per capita of a mere $89,680. Given this disparity, what precisely does Trump think those ‘cheating’ Basotho’s should be buying from the ‘ransacked’ US – Tesla’s?

And there’s a further, and ironic, kicker. What accounts for Lesotho’s $237m of exports to the US? Mostly clothing, and that clothing industry was hugely boosted by the African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA) a US created and funded initiative designed to help the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, part of which included duty-free entry into the US.

So, Lesotho is now faced being potentially whacked by massive tariffs because of exports from a garment industry that was largely created by the US itself. Go figure.

Whether AGOA, congressionally mandated since 2000 but needing renewal this year, continues is obviously open to doubt. Add to that the impact of the destruction of USAID support to a country with one of the continent’s highest HIV/AIDs rates. Lesotho has a hard road ahead.

But hey, who gives a stuff – it’s just another ‘shithole country’ no-one’s ever heard of, so let’s smile and titter at the ‘master strategist’s’ wit and move on eh?

In case anyone’s unsure of where the ‘shithole countries’ reference comes from, it was a remark Trump made in a private meeting in 2018 about stopping immigrants entering the US from various African and Latin American countries. Inevitably it leaked and his denial of saying it persuaded no-one.

At least he felt the need to deny it then. Nowadays he doesn’t feel the need to deny his contempt and disdain for us all. So, at a Republican dinner on April 9 he was recorded saying about his tariffs, “These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are dying to make a deal.”

Trump then put on a pleading tone, adding, “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir.”

And of course, the audience laughed, enjoying his mockery of the rest of the world.

That’s us, that’s you. We’re the ones being mocked by Trump and laughed at by his ever-so respectable audience of well-heeled Republicans.

And again, look beyond the tariffs, and look at what all this reveals.

Because it’s about more than getting a better deal for America, but a reflection of his personality – his bottomless narcissism and desire for dominance and subservience in a zero-sum world where only he can win. And that personality has now brought out the worst in his supporters and enablers – the Ugly American in full bloom.

So as that expensively dressed audience who laughed at us, climbed into their giant SUVs, ‘trucks’, or chauffeur-driven limos to head back to their fancy homes, they will doubtless have said how glad they were to have a president who was stopping them being (in Trump’s words) ‘looted, pillaged, raped and plundered’ by the vanilla-growers of Madagascar, or clothing makers of Lesotho.

So, it’s more than money, more than tariffs, and we need to recognise this. Trump doesn’t just want a deal, but for it to be recognition of his power – he wants us to kiss his ass.

So, never forget – he’s enjoying this. Chaos? Whatever – as if he cares. There he is, with the whole world focussed on his every utterance – living the ultimate, unbeatable narcissist’s wet dream. He calls for the head of the Federal Bank to be sacked, the market’s slide – he says a day or so later he won’t sack him, and the market’s rise. For Trump narcissistic heaven is just a social media post away.

The best-known quote from F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ catches an element of this well, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Like the malignant narcissist he is, Trump has a vast carelessness, while he and his billionaire bros can retreat back into their money, backslapping each other in their bubble.

And, to return to Trump’s meeting at the White House with El Salvador’s Bukele Ortez, beyond that carelessness about the deportations to El Salvador there’s also the indifference and a cruelty that goes with it.

As they basked in and enjoyed their shared infliction of cruelty, Trump was asked about sending American citizens convicted of crime to the same place and he basically said, ‘why not’, joking with Ortez about having to build another five prisons. Was he serious? With Trump you never know, some jokes become policy, others just disappear as part of that day’s entertainment.

But more to the point, the very idea of deporting US citizens, is serious, not a jokey aside flashing across what passes for Trump’s thinking process. It’s serious how unserious he and his cohort are.

We also all know that the whole process of deportations to El Salvador is a con, based on a blatant abuse of the Alien Enemies Act, claiming Venezuelan gang members are not just criminals but some kind of invading army. Really? Who do they think they are kidding? Probably no-one, but with pseudo-straight faces they say it anyway, enjoying the joke.

What is serious too, is what happens to these deportees. Some at least will be the unpleasant Venezuelan gang members they are claimed to be, but regardless are we really meant to enjoy the scene as, bent-double they are frog-marched off planes, then with heads shaved crammed into mass cells?

Because that’s what Trump is inviting us to do – to participate, laugh and enjoy this uncivilised theatre of cruelty. And many do.

So, we see Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security, Secretary posing in ballcap, tight t-shirt and fancy watch against a backdrop of caged inmates, exulting in their humiliation, and threatening more of the same to others. And it’s catching – other Republican ‘lawmakers’ have visited to get their selfie with misery as the backdrop, just like some tourist standing in front of a Venetian landmark or somesuch.

All of us have unworthy thoughts, but isn’t a mark of a civilised person and country to rise above it, to in Lincoln’s words encourage the better angels of our nature – not indulge the worst demons?

And such casual cruelty extends beyond proper treatment of supposed gangsters. As is well known, the casually incompetent dragnet of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) illegally picked up Abrego Garcia and deported him to El Salvador. Having admitted it was a mistake (and sacked the lawyer who had the temerity to admit it) they then added further lies and tried to pretend it was impossible to get him back, saying it was up to El Salvador. In front of Trump, El Salvador’s President then said with a smirk he couldn’t do that. Smiles all round. Oh, what a joke. Wrong guy banged up in a El Salvadorean hellhole, ha bloody ha.

Why am I banging on about this – because, beyond the actions the nature of this administration is the catalyst.

Back in 2018, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote a brilliant article headlined, ‘The Cruelty Is the Point’, subtitled, ‘President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.’[i] It’s not just what Trump does but the nature of what drives him.

It’s also what both attracts and then toxifies all those who associate with him. In 2019, the former FBI Director, James Comey, wrote an editorial in the New York Times[ii] addressing why basically good people ended up colluding in bad actions. As someone who was in that circle he suggested, “Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring…. But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing.”

He goes on to highlight how Trump “makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us.” Eventually you end up making so many compromises that, as he concludes, “And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.”

And in his second iteration Trump 2.0 has brought in people whose soul was mostly already eaten.

A variety of toadies, hucksters, incompetents, the morally dubious, conspiracy theorists and opportunists, all content to echo and ape the dear leader, indulging his every whim – to use his phrase all ‘kissing his ass’.

Behind it all, there is a darker, more sinister group, content to promote him to the MAGA crowd as an American monarch, then, while he plays golf, work to dismantle American democracy through a serious of lengthy Executive Orders signed by Trump but highly unlikely to have been read by him.

The hallmark of his administration for us is capricious, careless, casual and cruel and dragging America down to his level so the unacceptable becomes not just acceptable and normal, but also mocking and bullying – the superpower revelling in its power.

What does this mean for us?

Simple but hard to grasp or implement. Nothing his administration says or does can be trusted to last, nor can it be placed in some coherent construct or process. It’s entirely a function of his profoundly damaged personality and liable to pivot on a whim, and that capriciousness is entirely amoral.

Whether it is throwing entire countries like Ukraine under the bus in cahoots with Putin - his kind of dictator – or creating a system where individuals are plucked off the street into arbitrary detention, it’s all the same to him. This is a loathsome man, surrounded by loathsome backers, creating a loathsome system to routinely do loathsome things.

The US is too big to ignore, but we should focus on disentangling ourselves as much as possible, and nor should we assume it’s ever going back to anything approaching normal. Four years of Trump and his dark enablers will change the US forever.

Remember, the bottom line is he doesn’t care about us, and that won’t change whether we kiss his ass or not.

[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/william-barr-testimony.html

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mark-laity-b6b86b6_as-trump-and-his-sidekick-vance-berated-and-activity-7301995621903745024-jMeO/?rcm=ACoAAAEx9sMB64wcSfQ2-uW_LgRrQh7ZIGRuCfM

I asked what Churchill would be thinking if he could see Trump and Vance bullying Zelensky? My guess would be sympathy with Zelensky and shock as well as contempt for the US president and his sidekick.

But I have also asked myself, what would Churchill do as well as think? After all Britain’s position in 1940-41 had many similarities with Ukraine – as well as differences, which we will come to. In his speech to Parliament in June 1940 at the depths of Britain’s crisis his most famous quote still stirs the soul, “…we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

It should also be remembered that he acknowledged the risk of defeat, saying “even if this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving” the struggle would go on to beyond our shores “until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.” In that speech he was referring to the British Empire, but re-reading that today, then that ‘New World’ reference obviously better fits the United States. And, within months, the New World he was calling upon for help was indeed the US.

And he got it, albeit at a price that, until Pearl Harbour, could sometimes hurt. But the one thing he never doubted was that America was on Britain’s side. He may have wanted more, but it never occurred to him that FDR had some fellow feeling and a sneaking admiration for Hitler.

Extraordinarily that is where we are now. Just as Hitler’s invasion of Poland was unprovoked, so also was Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Hitler also came up with some flimsy claims of provocations which were accepted by no-one sentient. Sadly, with regard to Russia/Ukraine, there seem many in the US administration who are prepared to blame Ukraine for being invaded, with Trump telling Zelensky, “You've allowed yourself to be in a very bad position.” Yeah, right.

Neither should we forget that a couple of weeks after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 then the Soviet Union also invaded. Russia, in its various guises, has form in Eastern Europe.

PRAGMATISM WHEN IN PERIL

Churchill himself loathed the Soviet Union for all sorts of reasons, but once Hitler invaded it in June 1941, then he became a full-on pragmatist – my enemy’s enemy is my friend, or as he elegantly put it on why he embraced Stalin, “If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

So, my view is what Churchill would think about that appalling scene in the Oval Office is not entirely what he would act on.

This is not to criticise Zelensky or blame him for that debacle, but that’s last week. It’s more important to move beyond it. Zelensky’s recent statement reflects this exactly, and at time of writing, Trump’s response seems to indicate it’s working.

Risking this post being outdated very quickly, let’s assume there is another meeting to sign the deal.

Firstly, we and he all need to rise above the supposed humiliation. Recent juvenile comments from some of his advisers about ‘goofing off’ and wearing ‘track suits’ say far more about Trump’s acolytes than him, and the rest of the world regard them with contempt.

The same applies to most people’s opinions on last week’s events. In my entire career in the defence and security arena I have never seen such visceral anger and outrage over a single event – and aside from the MAGA cultists almost all aimed at Trump and Vance.

But, handsome is as handsome does, so it’s time for Zelensky to take yet another one for the team. The more they demean you the more the United States’ reputation sinks. Trump may think acting like this makes him the big man and enhances America’s reputation. Quite the reverse. People saw that, and they said we may have to do business with then, but it will be while holding our noses. The ugly American writ large.

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

So, let’s assume there can be a meeting and it’s in the White House, I am putting on my Strategic Communications hat and experience of preparing senior leaders for news events.

News events are performance art, and Zelensky is an actor, so he knows the form, but when those performances matter so much it’s easy to forget that it is still a stage.

Firstly, if they want you in a suit, put on a suit. We all know Churchill didn’t always wear a suit at the White House, and it really shouldn’t matter, but if they think it does, frankly, who the hell cares? If it makes them a bit happier then so what? If the more childish sections of the alt-right media crows, then it really doesn’t matter. Whatever.

So, put on a suit, have a US/Ukraine lapel pin, and a tie in the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Even better, try and get a combi with the colours of both US and Ukraine flags – although that might be a bit garish. Then after you leave, put the suit and tie up for auction, proceeds to medical aid for Ukrainian war injured.

Then there’s the news event itself. Here, Trump has introduced some unusual practices on the so-called presidential pool spray. Traditionally, this was when a limited pool of media gathered before the closed meeting took place. It could get a bit rowdy, but was limited in duration, with only a few questions and the whole thing was more to get some images before the closed-door talks. With Trump they’ve got bigger and longer, and become more like a full-blown press conference but far more chaotic.

This is what did for Zelensky.

Not only was the spray way too long but, unlike normal news conferences, it was uncontrolled with questions coming from odd directions and the media being allowed to debate the principals. As a spin doctor, I always knew the longer an event went on the more likely it was to go wrong – we never like anything longer than 30 minutes. Zelensky’s advisers should be pressing for any pre-meeting media opportunity to be short and image-orientated.

INTERPRETING FOR SUCCESS

The informality put Zelensky at even more of a disadvantage, given he is a non-native English speaker. His English is OK, but not really up to a bearpit like that. Also, the longer an event like that goes on, the more strain on speaking English. Notice in the Macron/Trump meeting earlier that week, Macron – whose English is good – had an interpreter at the post-meeting presser.

The aggression of Vance coming out of left field was also completely inappropriate. These events are meant to be limited and only the principals speak. Other officials are there for window dressing. I rather doubt the intention was to entirely collapse the talks, but I have no doubt Vance intended to humiliate Zelensky and at the least grandstand for the MAGA base. If Vance had not intervened I think the deal would have been signed.

So, the lesson here is that Zelensky should always use an interpreter. This will not only slow the pace of proceedings but enable him to give more controlled answers. He can even tell the White House that it was his poor English that led to his ‘regrettable’ answers, and there’s actually a lot of truth in that.

This may already be a lesson learned in that when he engaged with the media in the UK he did speak through an interpreter. It may be less newsworthy in some ways, but in this context that’s a good thing.

REHEARSING THE PERFORMANCE

Then there’s preparation. Macron and Starmer were very well prepared. This was a performance, and they had rehearsed. I rather doubt Zelensky was as well prepared. Also, he had travelled by train for about 10 hours then another eight on a plane with a massive time difference. His body clock would have been all over the place and he’s been a war leader for three years.

As a spin doctor, we sometimes used to ‘murder board’ our principal to give them a hard time, red team the participants, and refine messages. One thing I always told anyone I advised was to NEVER debate a point. A news conference is not a debating chamber, with fair rules of engagement, but a place where you make your point and stop. Zelensky probably didn’t expect to be put in the position he was, but he still ‘broke’ the debating rule. By extension, such events are not for sophisticated arguments. Keep it short, keep it simple and then stop.

AVOIDING THE TRIGGER POINTS

Part of the murder board would be to identify and mitigate potential triggers points. All the worst Zelensky/Trump clashes have been on known trigger points. Again, this is all about preparation, saying what needs saying without pushing a button. Both Macron and Starmer managed this, albeit in easier circumstance.

When Zelensky said Trump was in a disinformation bubble he was right, but he was implying the world’s thinnest-skinned, self-identifying stable genius was being fooled. Following that statement was when Trump called Zelensky a dictator.

During the White House debacle, after Vance said Ukraine was having problems with its conscripts, Zelensky said the US in a similar position would have the same problem. Suggesting to the America First president that Americans might be less than totally 100% wonderful was the point at which Trump fired off, having up to that point not intervened between Vance and Zelensky.

Most recently, Zelensky said a peace deal could be a long way off. This was a trigger to a president who originally promised to end the war in a day, and still believes he can deliver a quick peace deal. The pause of arms supplies to Ukraine quickly followed.

To be clear, none of this should matter, or would to anyone but Trump – but it’s grist to the mill of the anti-Ukraine acolytes inhabiting the White House and dripping poison into his ear.

DETAILS THAT DERAIL STRATEGY

If this all seems a bit tactical, then sometimes tactical events have strategic effect – as we saw last week.

Trump lives on the public stage, so managing that public stage assumes outsize importance.

To emphasise, I do not blame Zelensky for last week or accept he somehow provoked Trump & Vance. Vance wanted to be ‘provoked’. Blaming Zelensky for any mis-steps rather reminded me of the domestic abuser, who blames his partner, saying ‘you made me hit you’.

Unfortunately, Zelensky doesn’t have the option of walking away.

So, once again he will have to walk the line – but where’s the line he cannot cross?

The minerals deal itself had already been agreed, just not signed. If it hasn’t been changed (I wouldn’t put it past Trump) then it’s effectively no change. It’s also clear there’ll be no US security guarantees, but again that’s no different from last week.

A ceasefire in place has also been sort of accepted already and, quietly, that some occupied territory is going to stay occupied. The real Ukrainian red line is sustainable and real independence for what’s left, not some pause for Russia to build up its forces for Round 3 somewhere down the road.

Where it gets difficult is gaining security guarantees from anyone else to act as a deterrent to Russia. The supposedly great dealmaker has done zero to encourage Russia to make concessions, quite the reverse – hence the growing belief he is not mediating but take sides with the aggressor.

FIGHTING FOR PEACE

We need to get beyond any simple-minded applause or nodding of heads for anyone who says, ‘we just want peace’. It’s most often a debating tactic and rarely to be taken seriously. There’s nowhere more peaceful than a graveyard, but no-one wants to live in one. There are things worth fighting for, and the kind of peace Ukraine wants is very different from the kind of peace Russia wants. Frankly, we shouldn’t have to say something this blindingly obvious, but it appears we do.

It means at this stage the Russians are rejecting any European troops being placed in Ukraine, while the US is more or less refusing to provide the so-called ‘backstop’ of some critical support such as intelligence.

All that said moving beyond a signature on the minerals deal means we can at least start putting Russia on the spot with discussions about what a ceasefire means and how it can be made to last. At the moment they can just laugh at us.

WHO WAS THE REAL LOSER?

And of course they are laughing even more loudly at Trump. He is the man with gossamer-thin skin who craves respect, and yet the Russians will just regard him, in their terms, as a ‘useful idiot’. In his terms, he’s a sucker.

Meanwhile, we – his supposed allies and friends – are horrified. As a communicator who regards narratives as a driving force in how we do business and relate to the world, last week may be a story for the ages.

Aristotle’s three core elements of communication are: Logos; Pathos; Ethos – Argument: Emotion: Credibility. Most important of them is Pathos, and what most of the world saw was deeply unpleasant and distasteful. Second is Ethos, and what America’s traditional allies saw was someone who can no longer be trusted, or even be on our side. Last is Logos, and what we saw was a nation we currently need, but one that doesn’t care about us, so we had better find ways to reduce that need.

This current America First administration may not care, and probably even glory in its swaggering, brutalist strength, but it has turned its back on the world of eight decades that it largely built and was the prime beneficiary of. A world where it led allies and friends in supporting it to do pretty much what it wanted.

Last week’s display symbolised the turning of that page. Who knows when America will ever need our support, but it will inevitably come, and when it does I hope they will make clear what’s in it for us and express their gratitude loudly and frequently.

Firstly though, anyone who thinks Donald Trump has a theory of international relations clearly hasn’t been following him very carefully. He is instinctive not thoughtful, and has a mindset driven by his own pathologies and business practices, which he has extrapolated into how he wants to rule the world.

All the same – however he arrived where he has, and whether he realises it or not – he is still operating within a framework about the US’s place within the world and how it should operate within that framework. And even if Trump doesn’t understand or care about such theories or intellectual constructs, others do.

Even more to the point, they use that thinking and related understandings to formulate and drive a coherent foreign policy over time. They would consider that gives them an advantage over an opponent who thinks with their gut. I think they’re right.

So international relations theory and thinking matters, and the recent Trump pivot marks a major shift in the US approach to the world.

Anyone kind enough to read my substack will already have read some remarks on this from me as part of wider comments. However, I have also recently been asked by a number of people about the background to terms like ‘Great Power politics’ and the ‘Rules Based International Order’. So, I thought I would write something on my (non-academic) understanding of what they mean.

The lessons of Ancient Greece still resonating today.

To start then, we should go back to the Greek historian, Thucydides. He wrote one of the great works of ancient history, The History of the Peloponnesian War. Relating the 27 year war (431-404 BC) between the Spartan and Athenian alliance, the history has had a lasting influence to this day.

In particular, we have the so-called Melian dialogue, containing the following much-quoted sentence (including by me in my presentations for almost a decade): “…you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

This is perhaps the seminal statement of the international relations theory of political realism. Those with power use it to their own narrow ends, while the weaker have to suck it up. It’s useful to look at the example Thucydides used to come to this conclusion.

Melos was an Aegean island, seeking to remain neutral in the Sparta/Athens war. To cut a long story short Athens said it couldn’t afford to allow them to stay neutral, so they should surrender, pay a tribute and live on in relative peace. In the negotiations that followed the Melians say they are not a threat, so surrender is neither fair nor necessary. The Athenians basically tell them the world runs on big boys rules, so get real, or else, hence the quote above.

The Melians opted for ‘or else’, and after a brutal siege surrendered, following which the Athenians executed the fighting age men and enslaved the women and children. Point proved.

In a less-used quote, the full cynical perspective on the nature of global politics, and indeed human nature, comes through: “Of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can...all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.” Everyone’s as bad as each other given the chance.

This view of international relations, elaborated over the centuries by later thinkers, was not just based on the bigger powers calling the shots, but the nature of the world order and what actually mattered – defining the critical interests that nations were competing over.

Thus, the proponents of this world view assumed a basically anarchic global order, where dog ate dog, and everyone operated to a purely national interest to survive and if possible prosper.

Great Power competition and ‘Realism

In the view of such thinkers those interests were also defined quite narrowly to military and economic power – basically values-free. Alliances were transactional and temporary, according to convenience. Britain’s 19^th century Prime Minister is famously quoted as telling parliament in 1848, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Of that, more later.

In international relations this theory and thinking is known as the ‘realist’ school and would broadly include historical figures such as Thomas Hobbes, Machiavelli and Clausewitz. In the 20^th century it remains highly influential but, as is the nature of such things, has spawned off-shoots such as ‘neo-realism’ and ‘offensive realism’.

All basically see an anarchic world order, with competing Great Powers, whose dangerous competition is often only stabilised by the spheres of influence they dominate.

It’s of interest that one of the most prominent current realists – the main proponent of ‘offensive realism’ – John Mearsheimer, has been a strident critic of western support for Ukraine. He has blamed us for the conflict, and says Ukraine should accept being in Russia’s sphere of influence, not seek its own path, stating "This is a dangerous way for Ukraine to think about its foreign policy choices. The sad truth is that might often makes right when great-power politics are at play.” Pure Thucydides. Also, it’s no surprise that the Kremlin are great fans of Mearsheimer.

But if Great Power competition has dominated international relations for much of history, is it eternal, and also so bluntly restrictive in its view of what national interests matter?

I should say at this point that I have always noticed that cynics tend to describe themselves as realists. Leaving aside its inherent gloominess, why is a cynical mindset any more realistic than an optimistic mindset?

Is there an alternative to dog eat dog?

That brings us to another perspective – one, amongst other things, driven by the rise of modern democracies and latterly globalism. Its proponents challenge both the inevitability and necessity of Great Power competition and also the narrowness of what the realists define as critical national interests.

These alternative schools of thought and approaches to international relations are more idealistic and could be broadly labelled as ‘liberal’ or ‘constructivist’, and this kind of approach is what lies behind the so-called ‘Rules Based International Order’ (RBIO) which has been highly influential since the end of World War Two. Most notably those rules have been expressed through the UN Charter, signed up to and agreed by, amongst others, the USA and Soviet Union.

The Charter and the very creation of the UN is itself a continuation, develop and expansion of conventions and treaties largely dating from the latter part of the 19^th Century. They include, to name but a few, the Hague Conventions of 1899 & 1907 on the laws of war; the creation of the Red Cross along with various Geneva Conventions on international humanitarian laws dating from 1864; the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, banning chemical weapons.

But this rules-based order goes far wider than just warfare. They include: The World Trade Organisation (WTO) replaced the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS); and of course, innumerable bilateral agreements between countries over trade, borders and much else. And then there are groupings such as the EU and NATO.

So, the rule-based order is very much the story of the post-war world. Partial, by no means always fair or fully applied, but still very real and to huge effect. Equally to the point, it has been to a large degree accepted and respected by the great powers. Indeed, the ultimate superpower, the USA, was the primary driver in the creation of much of the RBIO.

But there are two other elements that marks a key difference with the hard-eyed viewpoint of the supposed realists. Firstly, enlightened self-interest. Not simple charity, but a view of the world that saw big and small could individually gain more through co-operation than competition and that needed a common set of rules.

The other element is a much different and expanded perspective on what the national interest is – what matters and what motivates. In general terms the realists talk about hard power and economics. This is challenged by other schools of thought, especially supporters of constructivism. They argue ideas and values also matter in nation’s judgement and influence their actions. In particular we seek and support allies who share our values.

If all this seems a little theoretical, it’s not. It’s very, very real.

And values have value, even if they don’t easily fit into a balance sheet.

Why otherwise would there be a NATO, that saw the now 30 nations of NATO combine their military forces to defend each other? An Alliance, for instance, that sees Britain, over 1500 miles and the channel away from Russia, send troops to Estonia, and be prepared to go to war with Russa if Estonia is attacked.

I

Is the US really a sucker and are we just freeloaders?

It’s absolutely fair to say the US has carried too much of the burden of defending Europe, and indeed the free world, but it has also benefitted hugely.[i]

When it went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, very few other nations really wanted to join in, but they did all the same, and paid the price in blood as well as treasure and often electoral unpopularity. In its Great Power competition with the Soviet Union, Europe provided the bases. When it bombed Libya in 1986, its planes flew from Britain. US intelligence is massively enhanced by the ‘5 eyes’ sharing with Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. Its leadership in NATO was repaid with support from the West in so many areas, extending far beyond just security. A shared outlook and values as well as a sense of obligation aligned the West behind the US – it was not a simple one-way street.

So yes the financial balance sheet is unbalanced in some areas, but America has hardly been a sucker, as Trump claims – the 20^th Century was not rightly proclaimed the ‘American Century’ for nothing. Neither is America poor. Indeed, the prosperity generated in the era of RBIO has disproportionately gone to the US, even if it was badly shared once it got there.

Even in the 19^th Century, an era when Great Power competition was at its most obvious, the idea that values and putting them into effect had no role in foreign policy was rejected. I have already quoted Palmerston saying in 1848, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” However, in the same speech he also said, “I hold that the real policy of England… is to be the champion of justice and right, pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is, and whenever she thinks that wrong has been done.”

Self-serving? Maybe to some degree, but still a recognition of the role of ideology and values in foreign policy. In this century RBIO’s advantages have been well spread, but the US, as prime instigator, has been a prime beneficiary.

From a unipolar to multipolar world

It could do this because it was, firstly, the leading Great Power, and then over the last three decades the only superpower, a sort of global policeman. This unipolar world could not last and, leaving Trump aside, the move to a multipolar world was inevitable as other powers rose.

Most obvious of course is China – already a serious competitor at all levels, whether security, soft power or economic – but also more aspirational rising powers, often currently regional, such as India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

And of course, there’s Russia, with Putin’s narrative openly relishing the end of Western – by which he means American – unipolar dominance, claiming in one speech last year, “We can frankly say that the dictatorship of one hegemon is becoming decrepit. We see it, and everyone sees it now.” In a later speech he said, “We are witnessing the formation of a completely new world order, nothing like we had in the past, such as the Westphalian or Yalta systems.”

Dangerous times then, and we can again turn to Thucydides for a pithy summary of the risks from shifting balances of power when, describing the origins of the Peloponnesian War, he said, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

The battlelines are drawn

There in broad terms, are the battlelines. A world in flux with a contest between Great and Rising Powers competing for dominance, and the RBIO, the Rules Based International Order.

Fighting for the RBIO is a distinctly uninspiring battle cry, and I have always preferred this simple summary from a former Norwegian Prime Minister, Erna Solberg, who said in 2016, in the aftermath of the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, “We cannot have a world where big countries decide what to do with their neighbours.”

How to defend that kind of RBIO has been the dominating theme of NATO and many other international discussions for two decades, and a rising sense of threat.

But in those discussions what wasn’t predicted was the seeming 180 degree turn by Trump. There was real concern, even a little fear, about the level of his commitment to NATO, to Ukraine, and many other elements of US foreign policy, but not what looks like an actual switching of sides, and that’s what we have seen in the last two weeks.

When the US votes against a UN motion condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump mouths Russian talking points while calling Zelensky a dictator this is more than symbolic. His casual offhand denial of saying he’d called Zelensky a dictator a few days before only adds to the sense of disconnect and shifting sands.

Taken along with a raft of other actions and statements Trump and his representatives are signalling a break with 80 years of leadership, policies and an abandonment of a certain kind of values-based approach.

As stated at the beginning, Trump has no grasp or interest in international relations thinking – there is and will be no Trump doctrine. However, by temperament he is a hardline Great Power kind of guy. He lives in a zero-sum world where there are only winners and losers. Also, winning and losing is defined in the only thing Trump understands, which is hard cash. What America has gained from the American Century can in part only be expressed in intangibles, and is based on shared values and mutual benefits.

Trump’s world view is amoral and value-free, and his simplistic art of the deal is to say ‘what’s in it for me’, and ‘what’s in it for us’ is alien to his mindset. His lack of empathy and self-awareness is exemplified by his remarks on the mineral deal being planned with Ukraine and recovering the cost of the help already given, “We want to get that money back. We’re helping the country through a very, very big problem… so we have to straighten it out, but the American taxpayer now is going to get their money back, plus.”

Is there anything more contemptible than the leader of a rich country not just demanding payment to help a democracy under attack, but wanting to make a profit – and then boasting about it?

But that is the reality, as is Trump’s sense of fellow feeling with dictators, and his disdain for the rules-based order his country led in creating, already being shown by his willingness to ignore it.

In my 25 years in NATO the contest between the RBIO and to prevent a return to Great Power competition, where might trumped right was real, not theoretical. At one stage there seemed grounds for optimism, but certainly not today.

I think it is somehow symbolic that in raising defence spending Keir Starmer funded it from the aid budget – soft power funding hard power seems an apt metaphor for the return of hard-eyed Great Power conflict, even if dismissing the value of soft power is arguable.

Regardless, as the sun seemingly sets on the RBIO, we are in huge danger of returning to the world of Thucydides – one where the ‘strong do what they can’, while the institutions such as NATO created to prevent ‘the weak suffer(ing) what they must’ look to be in some jeopardy.

Moreover, we had assumed that in any Great Power competition, we had ‘our’ Great Power, the US. We can no longer assume that. At best, it’s clear a price will be demanded, and the intangibles alliances offer won’t cut it. At worst, the US may not even be on our side, and cannot be consistently trusted. Additionally, we now live in a multipolar world of rising powers with their own interests. Even with the US onside we would be living in a far tougher neighbourhood.

All is not lost. To some degree we are the authors of our own misfortune because we did not pay the insurance premium needed to guard against a change in the international weather. Whatever the current stresses we remain rich nations and we still have huge resources to draw upon – as long as we change our mindset, recognise the scale and nature of the challenge and rise to it.

The world has changed and it’s going to require painful sacrifices, but how weak we are and how much we must suffer is still in our hands.

[i] It does not excuse Europe’s lamentable underspend to highlight that the US’s defence budget is far from all spent on Europe or NATO. As a global superpower only a portion is committed to NATO and much of the 3.4% of GDP it spends on defence goes elsewhere, for instance in Pacific Command in (legitimate) support of its own national interests. As an example, in February 2025, of the eight Carrier Strike Groups or Amphibious Ready Groups, only two were in NATO’s area of operations.

In large part this is down to the nature of Trump’s personality, which is impulsive and emotional not strategic. The oft-stated nostrum that Trump’s negotiating tactic is to keep others on the backfoot may have some truth, but it ignores the simple fact this is a reflection of his personality, not some sophisticated aspect of the art of the deal. Trump is contradictory by nature, not by design, and will switch for emotional not strategic reasons – hence everyone tip-toeing around him to avoid offending this notoriously narcissistic, thin-skinned and vindictive man who has ended up with such power at his fingertips.

In fact, when one party to any deal, Russia, is ecstatic about what’s happening, and everything that’s been said so far is undermining what’s meant to be your side, it’s fair to ask not just how this can be seen as good dealmaking but also whose side are you on.

So, where does this leave us, apart from worried and confused – a perfectly reasonable response to the US’s, but not a basis for action.

And action requires planning, and planning requires assumptions on which you can confidently build a plan which can be acted upon. Those assumptions include an agreed end state, but also, in the context of Ukraine, the details of any ceasefire, and as you are working towards those details the planners need to be engaged to give it a sanity check and ensure it’s actually deliverable.

At present none of this exists, and what we do know is not just confused and sometimes contradictory, but undermines its viability.

One thing we should not be surprised at is the US leading and then dominating negotiations. For instance the Dayton talks that produced the Bosnia peace deal in 1995 very much had the US in pole position. It’s not unreasonable to limit the number of negotiators in the negotiating room – the Russians will have one voice on their side of the table, and you don’t want a cacophony on the other side.

The break with reality comes with what happens when you leave that room, because whatever may be agreed in there then has to be enacted, and that on the basis of what little we do know not just requires Ukrainian backing but also Europe’s.

For Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defence, has said there will be no US involvement in any peacekeeping force, which assumes Europe’s forces will be the so-called ‘boots on the ground’. In practical terms then, if there are to be any peacekeepers then the nations expected to pony them up will need bringing onside.

And this itself is not a simple process. How many, where, with what Rules of Engagement? What does Ukraine want? Besides they would have views on troops coming in and how they’re deployed. Neither can this be done after some unilateral deal between the US & Russia, even assuming the Russians would agree to NATO nation troops being in Ukraine, which itself is a stretch.

So, the idea the US can cut a deal, slap it on the table, tell those who have to make it work to crack on, and then walk off for a celebratory McDonalds in the Oval Office is for the birds.

The latest statements from the US presenting their first talks in Saudi Arabia with the Russians as more exploratory and process-driven is perhaps a sign of realism, albeit hardly comforting. But it also moderates much of their previous language, which was aggressive in tone and content. Rubio’s tone was certainly more realistic about the way ahead, notably stating the need for a deal that would not lead to a restarted war in a couple of years. But US comments are still free of any hint of anything that would discomfit the Russians, so we shall see.

And more confusion is now being added by the US suggesting it also sees itself as having a mediation role. Really? Is America now presenting itself as some neutral party? That’s astonishing and also incoherent when we know it will use its power to leverage a deal – which is not a mediation role.

For if any realistic deal is in the offing then very quickly it will have to cease being a purely US/Russia negotiation. Even the broadest outlines of an outcome will require the buy-in of Ukraine and Europe, and for the planners to start work out how to deliver it.

That is unless of course the US would be content to present it as an ultimatum and say, ‘Here’s what you’re going to do. Do it, or else. Bye.’ The fact this could even be considered a possibility by supposed allies shows how much damage has already been done to the transatlantic alliance.

Among other factors, that relationship rested on shared values and outlooks – and trust. In different circumstances the US leading on talks with Russia would have caused less alarm if it had not been for the feeling we are being deliberately cut out, that the US no longer leads but imposes, and operates purely in line with its national not shared interests.

It’s horrible to say, but currently we cannot trust the US administration.

I personally find that very painful to say. I am someone who felt privileged to spend 16 years working directly for successive American SACEURs, as well as working alongside and closely with hundreds of other Americans, including in conflict zones.

Trustworthy or not, unless the US just says to hell with this and walks away, they will need to bring Europe and Ukraine in to gain our support for any deal because we are indispensable to making it happen.

So, what is needed to make it work?

In terms of outcomes then it’s all about a sustainable peace, which means a ceasefire that doesn’t just create a pause for Russia to re-arm and then have another go in a few years’ time. We should not kid ourselves that Russia will ever be satisfied just with retaining the parts of Ukraine they currently occupy. They want the lot, either directly through occupation or through a puppet regime.

A sustainable peace therefore rests on deterring Russia from believing it can successfully defeat Ukraine. Peace through deterrence.

That in turn can only be achieved through a combination of, first, building up Ukraine’s armed forces and, second, given Russia’s malign intent and size, enduring security guarantees. Ideally Ukraine would like that to come from NATO membership, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, and it’s not only the US that would veto that at present.

Hence we would be looking at individual NATO nations, rather than NATO the institution, forming a coalition of the willing to provide that guarantee – not a peacekeeping but deterring.

Now the planning assumptions, and unanswered questions start mounting up alarmingly.

Given this is a substack and I can be harmlessly (if embarrassingly) wrong, let’s make a few assumptions to get us going. An open-ended ceasefire is agreed, and the frontline is frozen pretty much where it is and the Russians agree (and as I said above, this is a stretch) to a so-called ‘peacekeeping force’ which includes NATO nation forces.

Firstly, our frazzled, anxious planners will be asking what kind of force this will be.

There are a fair number of options here. Classical peacekeeping forces are often little more than ceasefire monitors, with so-called Rules of Engagement (RoEs) which only allow them to use weapons in self-defence. We saw the effect of this with UNPROFOR in Bosnia in the 90s where well-armed soldiers, many from NATO nations were effectively humiliated, watching on helplessly as the country descended into chaos and barbarity.

Then the Dayton agreement was signed and many of the same troops changed from UNPROFOR to the NATO-led IFOR, and moved to a peace enforcement role which meant they could use their weapons to enforce the deal, not just in self-defence. Virtually overnight, IFOR became as successful as UNPROFOR was not. Not only did they have permissive RoEs, but it was backed by the weight of NATO’s power.

Therefore, a peacekeeping force is a non-starter – in some form or other it will have to be a peace enforcement operation. In the context of Ukraine any peace enforcement operation against Russia is an order of magnitude many times greater than facing down Bosnian Serb militias. It should also be noted that at its peak IFOR had 54,000 troops in-country. Ukraine is both bigger and more dangerous.

So, if it is to have an enforcement mandate and RoEs, what kind of force is needed then?

For a start the language being bandied around of a Reassurance Force should be dispensed with. It’s an empty euphemism. The only way to reassure Ukraine is to deter Russia from breaching any deal. It needs to be some kind of Deterrence Force (a ‘DFOR’), not a RFOR.

Will it be deployed near the front or further back? How much of the almost 2,000 kilometre frontline should it cover. All of this will dictate the size and composition of the force. Will it be configured as some kind of tripwire force, where a Russian attack leads to some kind of bigger response? Will it have the capacity in terms of firepower and mobility to strike back in substance? How will we work with Ukraine, what are the liaison links to Russia?

So many questions. Having been a (small but closely engaged) part of NATO planning for various major operations then we need an agreed endstate and concept of operations, and right now planners have very little to go on.

Whatever it is, then it will require sophisticated operational planning to handle a large multinational force. There is really only one country, the US, and one organisation, NATO, with this kind of capacity. The US may say this won’t be a NATO operation, but if you want anything of this kind to happen at the scale needed and at speed, then you need NATO’s planning mechanism, which includes Americans working at NATO. That’s what happened with IFOR/SFOR in Bosnia, KFOR in Kosovo, ISAF in Afghanistan.

Then, you have to get the force into theatre, and presumably at some pace. In all previous operations, much of that heavy lifting, literally and metaphorically, has been done by the US, making up for European logistic shortfalls. The US may not want combat boots on the ground, but if it wants European boots on the ground it will need to help get them in.

And once they’re in this force will need high grade Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) capabilities to see what’s going on, along with the ability to dominate the airspace above our forces and counter Russian electronic jamming. The best European forces all have some of this, but none have enough. Again, if the US want European forces in high threat areas then they will need American support, and the best way to manage this is through NATO, even if it’s not a NATO force.

And if the force’s tripwire is tripped? If it’s going to be any form of deterrent then Russian breaches of a ceasefire will need a response that prevents a repetition, and that is mostly likely going to need airpower and again the US has the best capacity to provide the all-round force packages that would be needed.

The US does need to face up to the inherent contradictions within its own public statements. It unilaterally agrees a deal with Russia, then says the Europeans must put it into effect, but they’re not going to help, even if they get into trouble. Even more, by saying they will not allow NATO Article 5 to be declared, they are positively encouraging Russia to attack them, not least to further undermine the Alliance. That’s the reverse of deterrence.

Perhaps we’re already some signs of the response from Europe. As I wrote this Keir Starmer was reiterating his willingness to put troops on the ground in Ukraine – provided there was a US backstop.

So, more questions. Can Britain actually support the operation? That of course depends on the size and nature of the force, but the uncomfortable fact is what we could provide is pretty small, and it highlights the scale of the decline of British military power.

From an army of around 70,000, what we currently promise to NATO is a single armoured division, which is about 16,000 soldiers. For comparison, the Russian operation group of forces in occupied Ukraine in mid-2024 was estimated at over 500,000. What’s more, that British division is not fully combat capable.

At best, we could perhaps supply a brigade of about 5,000, but sustaining that over time with all the necessary support will be hugely difficult and certainly mean we can’t meet our NATO commitments. Few other nations will be able to offer much more.

Of course, the aim of a Deterrent Force (DFOR) is not to end up in full-scale combat with the Russians, but to deter it is going to have to robust and capable both on the ground and in the air. The Russians also have to know that if they take it on then what follows on will hurt them – a lot.

Psychologically, the Russians are also unlikely to be deterred by European forces alone, however capable. It’s the threat of US intervention that deters. So, when Pete Hegseth told NATO that the US was not going to help enforce any ceasefire and would block NATO being involved it must have felt like all their Christmases had come at once.

None of this changes the absolute requirement for Europe to start ramping up their defence spending. However, I would reject Trump’s zero sum calculation that the US has somehow been subsidising Europe to its own cost. It may have been over-paying on defence, but it still got a good return, and the US has been a massive, perhaps the prime, beneficiary of the rules-based order its superpower status has hitherto sustained. Only a man like Trump who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing could not see that.

Be that as it may, Europe has to accept the blame for allowing its peace dividend to turn into a fire sale, and is now paying the price with this lesson on the brutal realities of power within its own backyard. The storm warning of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was not ignored, but the rise in defence spending was too little, too slow, and that continued, even after the second invasion in 2022.

No more so than in Britain. In 2014 we spent 2.1% of our GDP on defence, now it’s 2.3%. It’s risen ever so slowly but in real terms we are still spending less on defence now than we did in 2010. Now Starmer has said, "We're facing a generational challenge when it comes to national security” but the stated commitment to an increase to 2.5% of GDP is still at some future date.

If we do indeed face a generational challenge – and I think we do – then his actions need to match his words, and that means more than 2.5% in a few years’ time. It means urgent spending now on known gaps, and if we are going to fill a US void it will be 3% at least. If we are going to help Ukraine build the defences it needs to combat Russia, we need to be building up our defence industrial base – something we should have started years ago but have not.

But we are where are. Doing what needs to be done will knock a massive hole in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ budget, but if Starmer means what he says then taking on a ‘generational challenge’ can’t be done by half measures and on the cheap.

During the end of the Cold War defence spending was at about 4%. What price our defence in this new Cold War when we can no longer rely on the US, and a US which is cosying up to Russia, asking little of them while criticising us?

So many questions, so few answers, and none of them reassuring.

On that basis, I have decided to give a payment option for subscribers, but to be clear any payments will remain optional. I started this Substack to share my thoughts, not as a moneymaking venture, and remain grateful to anyone who thinks it worth spending some of their time reading them.

However, as some are generous enough to offer some money, I will take it - but not for me. Any and all payments made will go to a Ukrainian NGO, the Ukrainian PR Army.

As any of you who have looked at my LinkedIn profile will have seen I am an advisor to this brilliant group who self-mobilised to support their country following the second Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2023.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/pr-army/posts/?feedView=all

As an independent group who were professional communicators in civilian life, they have done a brilliant job highlighting their country's battle for continuing independence against Russian aggression. In particular their focus on Russian forcible deportion of Ukrainian adults and children helped the issue gain worldwide attention.

I already support this group, and any donations on this Substack will go first to my account and then passed 100% to them.

As I said above, there will be no obligation to pay for a subscription - I am very happy to have you even read what I have to say - but if you are so minded then a paid subscription will be in effect a donation to Ukraine and the PR Army.

My thanks for being a subscriber, regardless of whether you pay or not. Slava Ukraini.