I have a letter in The Herald today, complete and unabridged. The headline is the editor’s, and I was happy with it.
Don’t appease Donald Trump
Dear Sir,
Most European countries are of the opinion that it is a bad idea to attempt to appease President Putin. I wonder if Europe should take the same attitude towards President Trump.
Since March 4, 2025, when Trump reneged on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum offering security to Ukraine (Putin having done the same in 2014), we can state unequivocally that the President of the United States is no longer the Leader of the Free World. His overtures to Putin are eerily reminiscent of the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Hitler and Stalin, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 24/8/39, containing a secret protocol carving up huge tracts of Eastern Europe, including Poland and the Baltic States. Hitler invaded Poland on 1/9/39, and Stalin ordered the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17/9/39, because he was “concerned” about the welfare of ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians.
With Trump’s ambitions to acquire Canada and Greenland (“one way or another”), The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (in George Orwell’s 1984) is shown to be extraordinarily prescient:
“The splitting-up of the world into three great super-states was an event that could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia… comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.”
Lech Walesa, former President of Poland, has written to Trump expressing his fear and disgust on witnessing the now notorious 10 minute car crash of a meeting in the Oval Office last Friday. He was reminded of the interrogations he had to endure at the hands of the Security Services, or in the communist courts, during the Soviet era. I think that’s why these 10 minutes, witnessed across the world, have caused such widespread revulsion. It is evident that the current US Administration cannot endure hearing somebody who speaks the truth to power.
Trump is a bully. Churchill’s words concerning another bully are as apposite to today as are the words of Orwell:
“If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
Yours sincerely…
Meanwhile President Zelenskyy has headed for Saudi Arabia for further talks with the US, in an attempt to achieve peace in Ukraine. The week ahead, therefore, is critical. Will the talks be conciliatory, or will they be a repeat of the car crash in the Oval Office on February 28th? I must say it does not augur well. This last week, in addition to withdrawing funding, the US denied Ukraine intelligence, and satellite imagery. Predictably, Russia increased its bombardment. President Trump said that anybody in Putin’s shoes would have done the same. Russia’s war aims, essentially the obliteration of Ukraine as a sovereign state, apparently remain unchanged. At the negotiating table, nothing is being asked of Russia, and everything of Ukraine. I can’t see Russia countenancing the presence of a NATO peacekeeping force on Ukrainian soil. When I heard a quote from President Zelesnkyy, that he was willing to work “under the strong leadership of President Trump”, I got the strong sense that he was being leaned on. According to the BBC, he is being “coerced” (the BBC’s word) by Europe, because Europe is not ready to fill the gap if the US ducks out. Europe is desperately trying to keep the Donald on side. Good luck with that.
It’s a strange situation, in which the US is browbeating a country to end a war in which they are not involved, and in which they now apparently have no interest. Well, leave them to it. We should hold our nerve. Europe has a bigger population than America, and is a bigger land mass. Canada is on-side. So is Australia.
So, now that the President of the United States is no longer the leader of the free world, I wonder who to nominate for the role?
I will stick my neck out and say, Mark Carney.
jamescalumcampbell 