Oscars’ weekend, and the Oscar for best picture should really have gone to High Noon II, in which Europe replaced the US as the sheriff that confronts the villain Frank Miller, now played by Vladimir Putin. This rewrite involved the Grace Kelly-character taking on the Miller gang: yes two-gun Ursula von der Leyen is in town, her Colt 45s (actually a pair of broom-handles) slapping meaningfully against her hips. However, at the last minute, von der Leyen, perhaps the worst German Minister for Defence since the Thirty Years’ War, stepped aside, allowing the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to assume the Gary Cooper role.
If Starmer is to be a Cooper, it really should be Tommy, the English comic, whose humour depended entirely on his spellbinding incompetence. Indeed, Starmer’s government might well have been assembled by Tommy Cooper. His Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, lied to get her job, and as “Rachel from Accounts” – as she is now known – duly crashed the British economy. After George Floyd was accidentally killed in Minneapolis, Starmer genuflected in brainless deference to Black Lives Matter, while he also believes that women can have penises. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? As Crown Prosecutor he did nothing to curtail the Pakistani rape-gangs that were rampaging through white English working-class estates, perhaps in the belief they were simply young Muslim women looking for a good time.
Last weekend at Lancaster House, he announced his leadership of the posse that he has dubbed “The Coalition of the Willing,” to take on Putin’s gang, though “The Coalition of the Witless and unWeaponed” would have been a better title. By his side metaphorically is Kaja Kallas, who is something less than an EU foreign affairs minister, (and a plausible double for Grace Kelly) who proclaimed, “The free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge. We stand by Ukraine.” Yes, and the deafening sound you hear is the hysterical gales of laughter shattering the Kremlin’s windows.
The chances are that you have only seen the final video clips of The Great White House Fiasco starring Trump, Zelensky and Vance, which were carefully chosen by news outlets to show Trump in a bad light. As in the Oscars, editing of news bulletins is key to just about everything, so you will not know that Trump began his forty-seven minutes with Zelensky by heartily congratulating the Ukrainian Army and its soldiers for their incredible courage. Those words alone declare that he is no stooge of Putin.
But Trump also knows that politics is the art of the possible. Dreams are for Hollywood, as they were when an aged Gary Cooper wiped out Miller’s gang, to a backing track from a Ukrainian composer, Dimitri Tiomkin. That’s not life, which doesn’t have backing tracks, but merely a screenplay, and neither Donald Trump nor JD Vance auditioned for parts in a film. Politicians who declare that Putin should never be allowed to profit from his criminality are talking like Tommy Cooper. Russia has won Crimea and Donbas, and its’s giving neither back, any more than Washington is going to return Texas to Mexico. Fact.
Probably few people who declare that Trump has “accepted Putin’s narrative” (as Kallas did) have also listened to the entire and excruciating encounter between Zelensky, Trump and Vance in The Great White House Fiasco. The most riveting declaration came from Trump when he said that the previous week, 2,000 soldiers on all sides had been killed in action. That is around ten thousand bereaved parents. Tens of thousands of wives and sweethearts, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, likewise. The same again will occur over the next week. And the following week. Europe and the Commonwealth know what this is called. The Somme. Verdun. Ypres. Were the wartime leaders 1914-1918 not subsequently excoriated for not ending the war sooner? Is not the moral case for ending the Ukraine war, regardless of who started it, now irrefutable?
Far worse than the White House spat was the sadistic glee with which it was welcomed by liberal commentators. Do those unpleasant sneering know-alls prefer the war to continue, to the last surviving Ukrainian warrior, blind and on his stumps, waving a flag of defiance, and watched by thousands of silent Russian soldiers? While Trump was trying to end the war, Zelensky was trying to get him to commit in public to the kind of post-ceasefire guarantees to which Trump had repeatedly promised the American people he would never commit them again. Why would Trump, and on television, abandon those electoral undertakings for Zelensky, who last year even suspended the presidential elections that might have led to him being dethroned?
Those who think that Russia can be defeated are either idiots or war-mongers, yet last week the European media turned the man who was trying to end the war, Donald Trump, into a heartless, pro-Putin war-monger. He is nothing of the kind, but he must keep channels to Putin open. He did not need President Zelesky using the White House meeting to repeat allegations of Russian torture and waving photographs as proof of Russian war-crimes, no matter how genuine. The time for peace has arrived, just it had when the delegates from France, the UK and Germany met in a railway carriage in Compiegne in November 1918. They did not discuss the various sides’ war-crimes but got down to the nuts and bolts of ending the killing.
Admittedly, nobody behaved well during the Great White House Fiasco. It was a tragedy from which only Putin could benefit. Perhaps the largely off-camera figure of Secretary of State Marco Rubio was at fault for not laying down tennis-court rules about which matters would be in-play and which would not. An umpire might have helped. But more shocking than the angry exchanges was the ecstatic delight of anti-Trump liberals that followed. These barbarians clearly do not care about the ticking away of the mortal metronome of war, endlessly harvesting lives, separating limbs from torsos, eyes from sockets, spines from brains.
To be sure, Vance did himself no favours by repeatedly jabbing his forefinger accusingly at the Ukrainian President. Both as a former US Marine and merchant banker, he should have realised that no encounter remains civil once finger-pointing begins. But whatever his mistakes, they do not compare with the remorseless continuation of a war that cannot be won.
Moreover, Trump was correct when he pointed out that all of Putin’s foreign excursions occurred while Democrats were in power, and never when he was in the White House. The most egregious event, and the deadliest in terms of mass-murder of almost 300 people, was the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine by Russian forces eleven years ago this July. This was an act of war that demanded a proportionate response. But tragically, the President of the USA was Barack Obama, perhaps the most divisive and pusillanimous occupant of the White House in that building’s history. Obama was always able to hide his incompetence and cowardice behind a comforting shield that was composed of his race, his verbal fluency and his wily charisma. On his watch, Syria grew mighty and out of control and Russia knew that it could kill at will and duly did, while Obama salami-sliced his way through the US electorate, wooing enough self-defined “minorities” to manufacture a majority. If you want to know from where Putin drew his strength, look no further than the son of a cook with the King’s African Rifles, who once in the White House, and as his own job-definition, added an ‘r’ to his father’s culinary vocation.
Trump knows that no victory is possible over Russia, and by this time Europe should grasped, no matter how dim welfarism has made it, that no unarmed peace is possible with it, ever. For example, if a Demilitarised Zone is achieved in Ukraine, the front is so vast that it could absorb all the available troops of Europe’s armies, there to be deliberately drawn into conflict by a programme of endless Russian ceasefire violations. There can be no solution to this dilemma: none. What the EU now faces is permanent conflict simmering on its eastern borders like an open sore, with Checkpoint Charlie having been shifted a thousand kilometres east.
For Putin, his short-war strategy having failed, now begins his long war. Provided he keeps his casualties low, he could well try to sap the willpower of western democracies through military provocations and achieve victory that way. Road deaths of blameless civilians in Europe are politically far more acceptable than the deaths of one tenth as many professional soldiers who have chosen the call of arms. There is little that one can do about such a bizarre and illogical inversion of moral priorities, except to register it as another milestone in the downward trek of western civilisation.
So dark days probably await us. Societies that do not cherish resilience or reward strength will in time fracture, for behind Putin await many other Putins. It is now Europe’s historic and inescapable duty, and not the USA’s, to confront and contain these endless Russian dolls marching endlessly to war. In other words, Aux armes, Citoyens, but not, dear God, under the Tommy Cooper that is Keir Starmer, or worse, his possible successor, Yvette Cooper. Which is perhaps why people prefer the Gary Cooper of High Noon, to the real-life Coopers, though it is of course these that we must wake up to each morning. Sigh. So be it.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
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