Events were moving very fast the first weekend of March as the diplomatic bromance between PM Starmer and President Trump turned into the undiplomatic, made-for-TV mugging of President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.
What has happened to the land of the free? We can only speculate about the motives and strategy of the so-called leader of the free world. In my view there is rarely strategy to Trump. He seeks only TV ratings, cutting real estate deals over the heads of affected people and, above all, avoiding blame.
Avoiding blame seems to be a significant motivator as Trump works in his unethical way to ensuring he can blame Zelenskyy and the Europeans for any failure to secure peace in Ukraine. Trump made hay with Biden’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan, and he will want to set up scapegoats for anything that looks remotely like failure.
The public mauling of Zelenskyy at the White House needs to be seen in the same way that, for all the tactile patting and public grooming by Starmer and Macron of Trump the gorilla, the two European chimps still left their respective tea parties with no guarantees of US support from the Donald – but at least Europe and allies are working on a plan.
Never mind the tea party: we need to smell the coffee! Like far too many professional soldiers in recent years, I started to believe fashionable military talk of hybrid warfare, sub-threshold effects, cyber and influence operations that would all make so-called sunset capabilities irrelevant.
But there was always the nagging question of “does clever tech really beat artillery?”
I well recall the visiting US Marine Corps general who asked my staff college cohort to remember that “a virtual presence is an actual absence”.
We need to rebuild our forces quickly, with lots of good – not gold-plated – equipment and stocks. We need to do it with allies, to get best value for money and cut duplication. We need to recruit talent and retain experience. And we need to be prepared to make savings and pay more to achieve these things, even if the full first cut did not need to choke off international aid. Previous generations spent eight per cent of GDP on re-arming in the years before 1939: and that was too little to deter our enemy.
We are beyond the looking glass in the politics of Donald in Wonderland, where everything has been turned on its head. Europe’s enemy is Russia, but if Trump’s statements and actions make us feel that he thinks Europe is his enemy, are we wrong to believe that Trump sees Putin as his like-minded friend? It’s time for Europe to be strong against both the bullies in front of us, and behind.
Gary Jackson
North Dorset Liberal Democrats
