The Old World has recently been quite taken aback by the rapidity with which the New World has been trumpeting fresh initiatives in the form of Presidential Executive Orders. I suppose things can move this quickly if you don’t have to bother about the checks and balances of parliamentary democracy. Such it is to be a monarch. I don’t know about you, but I’m becoming increasingly irritated by the swagger of the new US administration. They are certainly throwing their weight about. They have, for example, been critical of the “firewall” policy of mainstream German political parties not to make deals – at least until very recently – with the Far Right. And they have even been critical of Scottish legislation creating buffer zones around women’s health clinics. I cite these two examples because they perhaps reflect the provenance of the president, whose grandparents were German and mother Scottish. Mr Trump is from a family of immigrants.
You have to put the German issue into context. Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Coming to terms with the past. The Germans don’t want a repeat of the Third Reich. And of course the German elections are imminent. I’m not sure if the current US administration has much of a sense of history. They would do well to remember the much quoted remarks about the past from George Santayana. If we don’t study it, we are condemned to repeat it.
And the US government has also rather misrepresented Scottish legislation, saying it is illegal to pray for an unborn child in the vicinity of an abortion clinic. Ergo, this is a thought crime. That is not entirely accurate.
But who cares? I wish somebody would turn round and say to them, “Why don’t you mind your own bleeding business?”
Of course, these issues may pale into insignificance next to the Gaza Strip “Riviera” initiative, and even more so the impending talks in Saudi Arabia, putatively to discuss the carve up of Ukraine. Of course the British Empire spent hundreds of years carving up large chucks of the map without much regard to local customs and usage. It was ever thus with “the great powers”. At time of writing, Ukraine has not been invited to Saudi Arabia, and nor indeed has Europe. Apparently the US and Russia are going to take decisions on our behalf. The Europeans learned this, to general consternation, while attending a security conference in, of all places, Munich, last week. Munich has of course been associated, since 1938, with the policy of appeasement. The then disputed territory, the Donbas, or Crimea of that time, was the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Mr Chamberlain, who considered himself rather adept at the Art of the Deal, was convinced that Herr Hitler could be trusted, and that he would stop his territorial expansion at the Sudetenland. Chamberlain came back from Munich with the agreement written down on a piece of paper. The Czechs were not invited to that meeting. In fact, Hitler was not about to stop at the Sudetenland. He took the whole of Czechoslovakia. But he didn’t stop there. On September 1st, 1939, he invaded Poland. And he didn’t stop there. On May 10th, 1940, he invaded the Low Countries. The same day, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister.
The parallels with today are striking. Yet, with due respect to the Santayana trope, history seldom repeats itself exactly. Yet it may sometimes rhyme. Back then, Americans like the aviator Charles Lindbergh, and the Ambassador to the Court of St James, Joe Kennedy, wanted to keep America out of a European War. But today, the difference is that American policy cannot be described as isolationist. They are intent on making America great again, in Europe, in the Middle East, in the “Gulf of America”, and Panama, Canada, Greenland… Between May 10th 1940 and December 7th 1941, Churchill bent over backwards trying to get America into the war. But America has always been guided by self-interest. They only came in when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and Hitler declared war on them.
I remember during the Brexit Referendum, the Remainers expressed concern that the UK’s leaving the EU would adversely affect the security of Europe. The counter-argument from the Brexiteers was that the security of Europe was not dependent upon the EU, but rather NATO. I think Mr Putin was delighted when we left the EU, and now he will be delighted if the US dissociates itself from NATO. I wonder if Mr Trump would have been so pally with Mr Putin if Smersh had murdered a couple of people in Salisbury, Maryland, or left a vial of novichok lying around on Fifth Avenue New York; or if Mr Putin decided that the idea of selling Alaska to the Americans had, after all, been a bad one, and that the Russian “sphere of influence” extended across the Bering Strait.
I’m afraid we live in interesting times.
jamescalumcampbell 