It’s becoming increasingly clear America has elected a madman
So Ukraine, it turns out, has significant quantities of lanthanum, cerium beryllium and neodymium, frankincense and myrrh.
Okay, I made the last two up, but you get the point – neither you I nor anyone else has any idea what these elements are.
Nor does Trump (you really could add kryptonite to that list and he’d believe you) but he knows he wants it.
Because he wants everything, and he wants it now.
The age of democracy is over, any notion of post-war consensus which has brought us the longest period of sustained peace in world history is dead and buried.
Welcome to Trump’s mercantilist age – where everything, EVERYTHING, is no more than a deal to be done.
Democracy, nationhood, human life, hope… all just chips on the table, financial assets to be traded.
Nothing has moral status, everything has a price, nothing is worth fighting for because it’s right in itself, and nothing has intrinsic worth over and above how it can benefit America and its President.
I had lunch with a very sage hugely experienced politician yesterday and he mused “we are at the end of an epoch, which probably ran from Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 to Trump assuming office in January 2025.”
And he’s right.
In just a matter of days Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the world order which has kept humanity, or most of it, just about safe pretty much since the death camps were liberated in 1945.
China, Russia and North Korea can only stand back aghast.
Right now no-one is safe.
Indeed that fellow Mr Putin is starting to look like a decent cove and a safe pair of hands by comparison.
Wikipedia, with its genius for deliberate understatement, says of mercantilism “Historically, such policies may have contributed to war and motivated colonial expansion.”
Ya think?
Whole mindsets and belief systems are today having to be discarded and new ones brought in to fight the fires Trump is starting.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has kept the post-war peace using diplomacy, unity of intent and a big (largely American) stick.
Only a fool would rely on a US-led NATO right now.
Which means what previously seemed like a dreadful idea, a EU-Army, is now probably inevitable. And we almost certainly need to be involved.
Whatever the EU Army outcome, nation states across Europe, including ourselves, need to massively increase defence spending – 2.5 percent isn’t even close Mr Starmer.
Oh and the Anglo-US “special relationship” we have frankly deluded ourselves over probably since the Thatcher-Reagan era? Don’t make me laugh.
Britain has been deliberately frozen out of Ukraine negotiations to humiliate us, and when Starmer goes to Washington next week he goes as a supplicant attending the court of King Donald.
There are those of us who mightn’t have said at an Islington dinner party.. But we thought Trump might provide a welcome, decisive, antidote to Biden dithering and inaction.
But it is becoming clear the Americans have elected a madman.
His demands that Greenland, Canada, Panama become US colonies put him on a par with Hitler, Stalin and, er, Putin.
His real and present threat to Ukraine is that it should be an economic colony of the US.
His threats are those of a tw0-bit gangster running a protection racket – except this gangster appears to want HALF of Ukraine’s $15 TRILLION mineral wealth with US contracts and profit-taking running in perpetuity.
Using a threatening line straight out of the Putin playbook he warned Zelensky and the Ukrainians: “They may make a deal. They may not make a deal. They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday.”
There are those who think Trump is right – that the US should be able to claw back the £237bn they have provided in cash and materiel for the Ukrainians to hold off Putin’s occupation.
Indeed there are commentators who believe the whole thing to be a genius-level diplomatic play to introduce US mining firms to Ukraine thus almost guaranteeing Putin would never set foot again.
Indeed Zelensky himself first mooted the idea some months ago, which may be his undoing.
Why is colonisation by the US any different to colonisation by Russia?
The rule it seems with Trump is “be careful what you wish for.”
