Europe can stop Trump – here's how |
In the Cold War satire film, Dr Strangelove, an insane US air force general, Jack D Ripper, launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union believing it to be poisoning his “precious bodily fluids” through water fluoridisation. A British officer, seconded from the RAF, tries to reason with him but fails and the world is blown apart.
President Donald Trump’s sudden obsession with the control of small islands, like the Chagos, and huge ones like Greenland, as vital to US security is as irrational as Ripper’s paranoia about fluoridisation. “Shockingly,” Trump writes in his Truth Social posting, “our ‘brilliant’ NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital U.S. Military Base, to Mauritius, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.”
As in Dr Strangelove, his British sidekick, Sir Keir Starmer, ineffectually seeks to moderate his behaviour and de-escalate the crisis, but is ignored.
Even the most Trump-friendly European leaders should by now be getting the message that treating Trump like a child having a tantrum with soft cooing noises and flattering conciliating words does no good when dealing with a megalomaniac.
Muting criticism or giving a quiet thumbs-up to his illegal bombing of Iran last summer, or his equally illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro this month, has simply fuelled Trump’s conviction that he can get away........