POLITICAL purges have been practised throughout history. The sudden removal on April 2 by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth of his army chief of staff, Gen Randy George, follows a pattern. Before him, Hegseth sent home the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the top admiral of the US navy, the No. 2 general at the US air force, and other senior officers.

Gen George’s departure during an ongoing war is not without precedent. In the early 1950s, during the Korean War, US president Harry Truman disagreed with his senior-most commander general, Geor­­ge MacArthur. MacArthur had told Tru­m­­an that “the Korean War would be short-li­v­­ed”. On April 11, 1951, Truman, tired of MacArt­hur’s bellicose advice and insolent disobedience, relieved him of his command.

In the USSR, Stalin periodically purged his colleagues and subordinates, using the notorious L. Beria, head of his secret police (NKVD). Beria survived Stalin, but within three months was himself purged.

Later, Soviet leader N. Khrushchev was removed by his Politburo colleagues, as was the last Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev whose radical policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) proved to be his undoing. Being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 did not help him. In December 1991, Gorbachev was forced out of power.

This is Pakistan’s second diplomatic coup.

Purges became a recurring feature in Chair­­man Mao Zedong’s China. The veter­­an Long Marcher Liu Shaoqi — designated successor to Mao — was purged by his mentor. Incidentally, Liu Shaoqi, as China’s head of state, visited Pakistan in March 1966. Soon afterwards, he was denounced as ‘Chi­­na’s Khrushchev’ by the Gang of Four, rem­oved and consigned to political oblivion.

Lin Biao (once head of China’s armed forces) was rewarded by Mao for his service in the Cultural Revolution and designated sole vice chairman. However, Lin — the arch revolutionary turned ‘arch-traitor’ — died in 1971 in a mysterious air crash somewhere over Mongolia.

The ‘great survivor’ in PRC’s history has to be Deng Xiaoping — the architect of China’s emergence as a modern superpower. He served as the PRC’s ‘paramount leader’ from 1978 to 1989, gradually converting Mao’s brittle maxims into ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. China’s literacy rate today (97 per cent) is the product of his emphasis on education, with ‘excellence at all levels’.

In Britain, in 1962, the ‘unflappable’ prime minister Harold Macmillan executed a dramatic ‘Night of the Long Knives’, when he summarily dismissed seven members (a third) of his cabinet. In 1989, PM Margaret Thatcher tried to quash a revolt by reshuffling her cabinet, removing her closest colleague, the outspoken foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe. Thatcher won the battle but lost the war. She left 10 Downing Street with ‘blood on the walls.’

Every political purge is essentially a test by an insecure leader who demands allegiance — in Shakespeare’s words, “to the last gasp with truth and loyalty”. Judging from President Donald Trump’s indiscreet jibe about the Saudi crown prince, Trump shares Lyndon Johnson’s very similar definition of allegiance.

Could President Trump’s hubris fall victim to his own dangerous machinations? Historians will spend their lives analysing President Trump’s waywardness. The observation of the French savant Andre Malraux may help: “To know a man nowadays is above all to know the element of the irrational in him”.

In the past two days, Trump has repeated a volte-face that earned Hitler his place in history. In 1939, Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia, then invaded it. He threatened Poland, and invaded it. He signed a pact with the USSR, and then invaded it.

This week, Trump first threatened Iran with annihilation: “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back aga­in.” On Tuesday, with-in hours of his Doomsday deadline, he ordered a suspension of bombing for two weeks, “based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir of Pakistan”.

Iran has agreed to this cordial conciliation, with the caveat that “this does not signify the termination of the war. Our hands remain upon the trigger”. For the Iranians, this pause is what Churchill said in 1942: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz Sharif welcomed the ceasefire, complimenting the US and Iran on their “remarkable wisdom”. He will host them for talks in Islamabad on April 10. Will Israel join? The truce, Sharif says, inc­ludes “the United States of America, along with their allies [presumably also Israel]” and applies to “Lebanon and elsewhere”.

This is Pakistan’s second diplomatic coup, after its role in the rapprochement between the US and China in 1971. To quote one of Trump’s most improbable tweets: “Praise be to Allah”.

The writer is an author.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Published in Dawn, April 9th, 2026

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