Euro War-Games Are No Longer Trump's Concern: Iran is The Big Kahuna

The squabbles of Paris and London are sideshows in the global circus

Europeans are going nuts. Privately, we feel guilty and ashamed. On the other, hand we’re disgusted, angry, and ready to lash out in vengeance. Today’s european has the psychological profile of a rape victim. The monstrous failure of the multicultural ‘experiment’ forced upon us; 30 years of broken promises that sent a whole generation chasing a hash-pipe-dream sold by activists posing as experts. Like our American cousins, instead of choosing leaders who revered our culture, we elected traitors who sold it to the highest bidders. We could and should have stopped them- but we were too busy watching television. Now the dream is over, Trump has woken the sleeping giant and the world is echoing to the sound of American drums.

Still trapped in some Bidenesque illusion, europe’s chickenhawks have now begun pretending they can fly without Trump supplying the wings. France and Britain are apparently fearless warrior nations -according to their effete Prime Mini-stars: Emmanuel Macron and Kier Starmer. To the French and British public, however, this pair are about as threatening as two wine-mums at a ballet class. They will ‘spit in the eye of the Evil Russian Empire and drive Putin back to Siberia’ -just as soon as daddy comes home from work.

Not even the children of europe believe this battle-cry claptrap. France has become, under Macron, a collection hub where migrant freeloaders assemble for delivery to Britain. Britain is the last stop on the benefit-tourism journey that starts on the shores of Africa and ends in a Holiday Inn. Neither Macron nor Starmer will defend their own borders, yet both claim they must now conscript their underclass to defend Ukraine’s. Crackpot words from professional patsies. All they can do is throw more hastily-printed money into the black hole of arms-dealing, while praying for a successful head-shot in Washington. However empty they may prove to be, Trump is hyping the JFK assassination files to focus the world’s attention on the darkness at the heart of American politics. The posturing clowns in europe are beneath his contempt.

We grown ups, alas, know exactly what the PR war-waffle really portends: it’s time for another Covid-scale rip-off, with hundreds of billions heading off into the wide blue yonder. This is the one and only 21st century storyline. No matter what the problem, the answer is always always the same: tax the mugs into oblivion and send the money somewhere else. Tanks and guns and rockets will save us from a Russian invasion if we can just send enough billions to somewhere else. Heat pumps and electric cars will save us from the Angry Sun God -if we send enough billions to somewhere else. Vaccines and testing and masks will save us from the Corona Holocaust if we send enough money to…well, somewhere else of course.

For all the big talk, europe has nothing left to throw at its enemies without Big Daddy holding a nuclear stars and stripes overhead to stop the fallout. But the Pentagon is no longer a travelling circus, and the White House is no longer just a cash-dispenser for EU parasites on the take. The verbal skewer Trump left in Zelensky applies equally to the chocolate soldiers from Paris and London: “you don’t have any cards.”

The say the dealer always wins, and everyone dealing with Washington is now up against the richest American president in history and the world’s richest man. The list of weaklings already crushed by this new regime is growing. Starmer and Zelensky flew west to take their beatings in person but Justin Trudeau and a dozen others from Venezuela to Romania have been well and truly Trumped by mail. The message from the Oval Office is loud and clear: A limited supply of carrots are still available -but the price has gone up, and won’t be coming down anytime soon.

Flexing America’s economic muscle is not, however, the end in itself. Finance is the means by which the America First agenda will be advanced -and that is where the carrots make way for the sticks. Only a fool would mistake the Trump/Musk axis for a merely administrative phenomenon. While the EU countries rattle their comedy sabres at Russia, the real war-game is developing elsewhere -and nobody in Africa is laughing.

Trump’s recent statement that he has no plan for a war with Iran carried a familiar ring of presidential bluff. The whole point was to put the words “war” and “Iran” in the same breath. He has a plan alright, and the Houthis know it. So far the America First doctrine has centred on hacking off domestic waste and slamming the door on serial beggars from abroad -and it’s been great fun for the rest of us to watch. But the Trump presidency, like all others, will be judged on how he deals with the bad guys pointing the big guns. There are rumours that three US aircaft carriers and a fleet of over 30 warships are being readied for rapid deployment to the middle east. [SEE THIS]

It was not accidental that various pre-blackened middle-eastern hearths caught fire during the last months of the pre-Trump adminstration (it can’t be called a presidency because Biden was a vegetable). Nowhere was the drama more bloody or predictable than that centred upon Israel. In the immediate aftermath both Israel and Iran were, predictably, jockeying for advantage in anticipation of a typical post-election lull in USA intervention.

That was a logical assumption. What nobody expected was the supercharged onslaught of change that Trump would launch -literally within hours of taking charge. Heads of state were left reeling when the traditional process of US diplomacy-pitifully slow; devoid of purpose; generating meaningless cliches for the press- was trashed. Instead, every outpost from Mexico to Moscow was sprayed with a machine-gun spurt of right-now / my way or the highway offers, invitations and thinly-veiled threats. As one shrewd commentator observed -“Trump has decided it’s a better idea to just do stuff.”

Trump’s astonishing -and extremely funny- aside about buying Gaza and building a desirable holiday restort in its place had two unpredictable consequences once the screaming and shouting stopped. First, the concept of Gaza as an area of potential investment -as opposed to a smouldering slaughterhouse- captured imaginations far beyond the Oval office. The Egyptian government is apparently interested, and I can’t imagine anybody had that on their geo-political bingo-card. Second, the gauntlet of imagination was very much thrown down in a ring where only moronic repitition has been considered possible for half a century. “We don’t have to keep repeating the same mistakes” may be the epitaph when Trump leaves office. It makes a kind of crazy sense. Trump’s first presidency was derailed because the forces of globalism united to torpedo everything -almost the entire western economy- to remove him. There can be little doubt the Donald was caught offguard by the scale and ferocity of the powers leveraged against his agenda. Not one to be fooled the same way twice, Trump 2 will be likely to strike first in every battle, and take few prisoners along the way.

These are weird and dangerous times, but only the short-sighted would persist in seeing Russia as the major potential flash-point for that endlessly trumpeted WW3. That game is all but over -for now. Alert readers will have noticed how the daily news-cycles are suddenly treading lightly around the make-or-break north-african tussle, as there is far, far too much at stake to be gambled on a thoughtless headline. Trump’s decision to reclaim control of the Panama canal -barely mentioned let alone analysed in western mainstream media- has signalled his intent and also his lack of inhibition to take radical steps in the region. While europe’s minnows are squabbling over the blood-soaked billions still to be wrenched out of the damned Ukranian soil, the trillion-dollar bets are being placed on the various possible outcomes -political, financial and military- of USA v Iran. Watch this space.

Ian Andrew-Patrick