Snobbish British historian can never get over fatuous vitriol towards Trump

The veteran British military historian and newspaperman Sir Max Hastings, who was a competent editor of The Daily Telegraph when I had the honour to be that newspaper’s executive chairman through the 1990s, recently published a piece in The Times of London and made a statement on that newspaper’s internet site that he and his wife were marching in a parade to protest what was then the impending visit to the United Kingdom of President Donald Trump. Like most British people, Max has never had the slightest understanding of the United States, and like most British military historians, he resented the power of that country. The egocentricities and other stylistic infelicities of the current American president would cause anyone who knows Max to be certain that he would intensely dislike Trump’s public personality. The fact that he would certainly be disarmed and somewhat captivated by Donald Trump’s extraordinarily engaging and amusing private personality is something Max Hastings is unlikely to discover.

What motivates me to write is that Max Hastings’ explosion of snobbery and fatuous vitriol is in many ways illustrative of the current malaise of the Western European conventional wisdom. Despite his British nationalism, Max was a fierce Euro-integrationist, chiefly, as far as I could deduce, because he wanted a minimum of bother taking his vacations in Italy. For all his unctuous waving of the Union flag as a military historian, he was perfectly happy to have the entire British parliamentary and common-law traditions as well as Britain’s relations with the United States and the principal Commonwealth countries subsumed into the well-intentioned but unfledged institutions of a federal Europe.

Max stormed and raved, as is his usual conversational technique, that Trump was the worst president in American history, although I doubt if Max could name half of the previous occupants of that office. His principal reasons were that he thought that Trump had been completely beguiled by Putin, had disgracefully mistreated Zelensky, had failed to side with liberty over aggression in Ukraine, and he was an authoritarian ruler who was undermining the US Constitution and was conducting a vigorous assault on American democracy. He had not informed himself sufficiently to realise that Trump was only conciliatory towards Putin in order to try to avoid making the defeat of Russia’s attempt to reabsorb Ukraine so humiliating that it would drive Russia permanently into the arms of China. Max would not and did not have the strategic grasp to recognise that, next to the actual Russian takeover of Ukraine, the worst possible result of this war for the West would be that China would ship 40 million of its surplus population to Siberia to extract the resources of that vast territory and pay a royalty to the Kremlin, thus gaining the domination of the Eurasian landmass and endowing ancient China with a wealth of resources it has never before enjoyed.

He will have presumably noticed that since his intemperate outburst, President Trump has approved the sale of $825 million (€700 million) of sophisticated military equipment to the Western Europeans, which they can now afford because he has badgered them successfully into finally paying a reasonable part of their own defence expenses, getting the isolationists in his own party who had tired of European freeloading off his back, and these arms will be transferred to Ukraine, along with missiles that will soon make the population of Moscow and St. Petersburg as familiar with the vagaries of war waged from the air on civilian populations as the people of Kiev and other Ukrainian cities have become.

Max Hastings bloviates with such vehemence in favour of a Western Alliance in which Europeans graciously accept an American military guarantee but decline to contribute much to their own defence and treat the United States like a great St. Bernard dog which takes the risks and does the work while the worldly Europeans hold the leash and give the instructions. He doesn’t understand that the Americans have tired of this and of enormous artificial trade deficits. And he has apparently not noticed that for all the British and European sanctimony about Ukraine, by buying Russian oil and gas, Western Europe and the UK are bankrolling the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine whose repulse they are demanding that the Americans lead.

This is the personification of the European sickness. A successful editor of a great national newspaper and often very capable military historian fulminates about American history, which he does not know enough about to fill an eyedropper, declares the incumbent the worst president in the country’s history. He gives him no credit for eliminating illegal immigration which allowed 15 million destitute people and at least 500,000 violent criminals into the country under his predecessor. He gives Trump no credit for eliminating the Iranian nuclear military threat, in which his predecessors and the Europeans cravenly acquiesced. He gives Trump no credit for lowering taxes and torquing up American economic growth to four times the level in Western Europe, or for gathering tens of millions of underprivileged American ethnic minorities into his party by his use of the tax system to generate unprecedented job creation among them. Nor would he have noticed that Trump is liberated America from the green terror that has almost bankrupted Europe and from the violent crime wave that transformed many of America’s greatest cities into drug-ridden shooting galleries infested by the homeless. Dwelling on such details would be confusing Max with the facts.

Far too many Europeans from whom foreigners would have every right to expect better and in previous eras would have received better, asseverate such ignorant, bilious nonsense. Europe’s still hopeful cousins in North America worry for the old continent and reading and listening to Max Hastings in full blowhard mode incites relief that I only have to do so now by accident and at ten-year intervals. He said that his last protest march was in the ‘70s against the US actions in Vietnam, and he wrote a book then predicting the US would soon erupt in flames; he has learned nothing about America these fifty years.