Month: April 2025

“Wars aren’t won by generals,” Bismark once said. “They are won by school teachers and parish priests.”

Adjusting for our heathen time, we must replace parish priests with universities. But otherwise the Iron Chancellor was right.

Modern wars are either won or lost not by armies, but by nations. And nations become strong when their minds are properly educated and their hearts are properly primed.

If that condition isn’t met, the strongest army on paper will become the weakest army in battle. And vice versa – as the Ukraine is showing, a smaller nation blessed with a strong mind and morale can keep a major power at bay.

Both mind and morale don’t just happen by themselves. They must be developed and nurtured, which indeed makes schools and universities the smithies of nationhood.

If such institutions are in default of their mission, a responsible government must do all it can to get them back on track by any legal means necessary. If that means war, then so be it.

Such is the approach of the Trump administration, which seems to be in a combative mood. There are two other wars in which the US is currently involved either directly or indirectly: the trade war America is waging on the world and the aggression Russia is perpetrating on the Ukraine.

Trump’s approach to both covers a broad range from idiotic to criminal, but he is on the right side in the war he is waging on American universities, specifically Harvard. Acting in the capacity of loaded guns is the federal funding, which the government may withhold at its discretion.

That’s precisely what the Trump administration did when it froze more than $2 billion in such funding for Harvard. The immediate reason was the White House’s commitment to “ending unchecked anti-Semitism and ensuring federal taxpayer dollars do not fund Harvard’s support of dangerous racial discrimination or racially motivated violence”.

That was a reference to a wave of pro-Palestinian, at base anti-Semitic, rallies regularly held at Harvard and other universities under frankly incendiary slogans. But the issue is even worse than that.

American – and European – universities are increasingly replacing their core business of education with indoctrination, trying to turn their students into ignorant woke zealots committed to DEI subversion. Rather than educating the students’ minds, the universities are inflaming their passions, and pernicious passions at that.

Trump’s message to Harvard is that if that’s what you want to do to your students, by all means continue. But the federal government isn’t going to pay for it.

Harvard President Alan Graber predictably screamed bloody murder, or rather threat to academic independence. The Department of Education, he wrote, wants “to control the Harvard community”, jeopardising its “values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge”.

I don’t get this, and neither by the sound of him does Trump. If Harvard is such a stickler for its independence, it shouldn’t need federal billions to stay afloat. And if it wants the money, it should accept the strings attached to the purse – and in this case the strings are much needed.

I don’t know whether Trump can win the war against DEI madness, but it’s certainly one worth waging. Otherwise an agricultural analogy comes into play.

One way to combat a blight caused by locusts is to catch as many male ones as possible and turn them into drones by castrating them with radiation. When then released into the wild, the insects try to mate with their females but fail to produce any progeny. This disrupts the reproduction cycle and eventually wipes out the whole crop-destroying population.

That’s what taking one or two generations out of normal intellectual life does to the mental and moral health of a country. And this is exactly what Western universities do by churning out alumni well-versed in such disciplines as Black Lesbian Paraplegic Studies and proudly displaying degrees in cultural and intellectual subversion.

Just as I was sensing a nice warm feeling about Trump appearing somewhere in my breast, he had to go and spoil it all by uttering what my good friend called “the most revolting statement I’ve ever heard from a politician in my whole life.”

That was really saying something considering that my friend is roughly my age and must have heard quite a few revolting statements. He was referring to Trump’s comments on yet another war crime committed by Putin’s fascists, a murderous rocket attack on Sumy city centre.

That was Putin’s way of celebrating Palm Sunday (for botanical reasons, it’s called Willow Sunday in Russia), although I don’t think he got his theology right. On that day, Jesus entered Jerusalem to begin his Passion that led him to the Calvary on Friday.

Someone as committed to ‘traditional values’ as Putin claims to be ought to know that the idea was self-sacrifice for the sake of others, not sacrificing others for the sake of evil. Vlad made a mistake, and that was how Trump interpreted the war crime that killed 34 civilians and injured over 100, as a lapsus manus.

Putin, he said, “made a mistake”, sort of like capitalising words that shouldn’t be capitalised. Asked to elucidate, Trump added that “they made a mistake… you’re gonna ask them”.

But the real mistake, he explained, was made by Biden and especially Zelensky who is “always looking to purchase missiles”. Then came the statement that upset my friend so much.

“You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” Trump told reporters. “When you start a war, you got to know you can win.”

Yes, that’s why Zelensky didn’t start that war. Putin did, by committing an act of aggression aimed at rebuilding the Soviet empire and dictating terms to the West, certainly its European part.

Trump’s idea of avoiding that war against a stronger enemy is for the Ukraine to have surrendered the moment Russian hordes crossed the border. Things like honour, liberty, sovereignty don’t come into that.

Nor should Zelensky “hope” for missiles and other US assistance. That was explicitly guaranteed the Ukraine under the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. In exchange for the Ukraine relinquishing her nuclear arsenal, the signatories, the US, Britain and Russia, undertook to protect the country’s territorial integrity.

No one took Russia’s promises seriously, but the US and Britain were supposed to be civilised countries bound by their word. Thus, Zelensky shouldn’t have had to “purchase missiles” or beg for them. Military hardware ought to have been provided to the Ukraine without quibbles or charges the moment Russia violated the terms of the Budapest Memorandum.

But then Trump has a peculiar idea about America’s contractual obligations. If he wasn’t president at the time they were signed, as far as he is concerned they are null and void.

He didn’t mind spelling out that notion in his own inimitable fashion: “The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening.

“President Putin, and everyone else, respected your President! I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR, BUT AM WORKING DILIGENTLY TO GET THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO STOP. 

“If the 2020 Presidential Election was not RIGGED, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible War would never have happened. President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin.”

I fully expect Trump to develop this thought on Good Friday by saying that, had he been president at the time, Jesus would never have been crucified. Nor would either World War have happened, the Bolsheviks wouldn’t have taken over Russia, and the Great Depression would have been avoided.

I don’t know whether the latest round of Trump’s pronouncements on the Ukraine are among the most revolting political statements I’ve ever heard. Let’s just say there are quite a few close seconds, and the Donald can claim proud ownership of many of them.

There’s a scandal with strong dental implications unfolding in America, and sides must be taken. Hence I have to repeat what Leo Tolstoy said on a different subject: I cannot remain silent.

The other day, the American comedy show, Saturday Night Live, used an actress with prosthetic teeth to mock the White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood for her characteristic English incisors.

Miss Wood took exception to that, calling the parody “mean and unfunny”. Since I haven’t seen the sketch, I don’t have a view on its quality. But I do have a view on English teeth, which I regard as a badge of national honour.

Foreigners tend to make fun of them, but only because they are secretly envious of the English, aware that they themselves drew a losing ticket in what Cecil Rhodes called “the lottery of life”.

Recognising this, Spike Milligan, though himself half-Irish, wrote a song celebrating his better, English, half: “English Teeth, English Teeth!/ Shining in the sun/ A part of British heritage/ Aye, each and every one/ English Teeth, Happy Teeth! Always having fun/ Clamping down on bits of fish/ And sausages half done/ English Teeth! HEROES’ Teeth!”

Penelope, my better half in the more usual sense of this phrase, is also a proud possessor of that hallmark of Englishness, which, as you can see in the photograph, does her looks no harm. I often say, only half in jest, that her teeth are the foundation on which our 40-year marriage rests.

If you like the English and their language, you must also like their teeth, it’s as simple as that. For it’s the language that gave the English dental structure that most endearing overbite.

Many English vowels are enunciated with the lower jaw retracting slightly, and I’ll leave you to decide the nature of the causality there. Did God who, as we know, was Himself an Englishman, make the English that way to make it easier for them to speak the best language in His creation? Or did the language have a formative effect on the English dental structure?

One way or another, the link exists. American sounds, by contrast, are formed deeper in the mouth and involve the lower jaw much more. Over time, this phonetic peculiarity has produced the heavy, jutting jaw typical of that nation. Such sound production also creates more resonant waves, making many Americans talk more loudly than they intend.

That’s partly why one can always hear two Americans talking across the restaurant floor. The other, non-phonetical, reason is the inherent American belief that, since all men are created equally interesting, even strangers must find whatever they say to each other fascinating.

Interestingly, both that tendency and indeed the jutting jaw begin to disappear the higher up the American class ladder you climb. Paul Fussell, whose seminal (and humorous) book on American social divisions, Class, I can’t recommend too highly, compared upper-class and lower-class American profiles and reached the same conclusion.

The higher the social class of an American speaker, the closer his accent moves to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, making his speech no louder than British, and his jaw no heavier. Though less pronounced in Britain, this tendency also exists here, which is why “chinless wonder” is a widespread prole putdown of the upper classes.

It pains me, as a patriot of England, to admit that, while the English lead the world in dental configuration, they don’t enjoy quite the same excellence in the quality of their dentistry. On the other hand, I find the American obsession with perfect teeth quite ludicrous.

Without wishing to go too far out on a limb, I’d suggest that this reflects the overall American tendency to uniformity. By contrast, English teeth may be imperfect but they are a marker (sometimes the marker) of individual character.

Thus, I much prefer Miss Wood’s teeth to the gleaming gnashers of her co-star, Walton Goggins. They make one think of Wedgwood porcelain more than of any part of human physique. One’s teeth, Mr Goggins, aren’t supposed to gleam in the dark, nor especially to light up a room when the electricity is out.

Speaking of the link between the English overbite and phonetics, when I was studying English at my Moscow university, by some quirk of nature a few of my fellow students had that same overbite. And what do you know, they found it much easier to produce authentic English sounds.

I don’t know whether the formative effect of phonetics on oral structure has been covered in medical literature. Perhaps it has been, unbeknown to me. But my lifelong observation suggests the link exists, and not just in English.

The French, for example, produce most vowels labially, which often gives them slightly protruding lips, predisposing them for… Well, I’d better quit while I’m behind. I don’t want to get into more trouble than I’m already in.

At first glance, this title may strike you as odd. After all, Trump’s hopes for winning that coveted accolade were mainly linked to him ending Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine – within 24 hours or thereabouts.

Yet it turned out that the deal our peace-maker had in mind was the unconditional capitulation of the Ukraine. To begin with, Trump sided with North Korea, Russia and Belarus to vote against condemning Russia for that aggression, or even recognising it as such.

Then he agreed with Putin that the Zelensky government was illegitimate because it refused to hold elections while 20 per cent of the country’s territory was occupied by the Russians. Consequently, Trump had accepted every Russian demand before the negotiations even began.

Proceeding from that wobbly platform, his representatives have now proposed that the Ukraine be treated the way the victorious Allies treated Nazi Germany, splitting it into sectors. To be fair, the Ukraine will be magnanimously allowed to control one of them.

The nuanced differences between Nazi Germany and the Ukraine seem to have escaped Trump. First, the former was the aggressor and the latter the victim of aggression. Second, Nazi Germany was thrashed, while the Ukraine is still holding her own. And third, Nazi Germany was an anti-Western totalitarian dictatorship, while the Ukraine is a pro-Western democracy, albeit not as perfect as Trump’s version of that form of government.

Predictably, the Ukrainians refused to bend over and offer Trump his favourite gluteal tribute. There go his chances for the Nobel, right? Wrong.

For at the other end of the earth the Donald has managed to achieve an improbable peace-making feat that has been defeating diplomats’ best efforts for centuries. Surely, that accomplishment merits the ultimate recognition.

You see, Asian, what used to be called Oriental, countries have a long history of animosity towards one another. The Chinese hate the Japanese, so do the Vietnamese, the Chinese hate the Vietnamese and also the Koreans, who too detest the Japanese. The Japanese both hate and despise them all. China wants to occupy Taiwan, and the Taiwanese have stated their intention to fight to the last man.

And the less said about China and India, the better. It’s only by a tremendous exercise in self-restraint that the two countries have so far refrained from lobbing nuclear bombs at each other.

This maelstrom of ill-will also draws in Malaysia, Cambodia and Indonesia. All those countries are at daggers drawn with their neighbours in the region, especially Japan but also China and India.

Such sentiments go back a long way, centuries definitely, millennia in some cases probably. Wars involving the countries mentioned are too numerous to count (including some during my lifetime) and if, as is prudent, you believe their rhetoric, they are nowhere near finished.

But then rode in Trump, wearing the white vestments of a peace-maker. And, in one fell swoop, he made those warring nations realise they have more things in common than those setting them apart. Unity has emerged out of disunity, friendship out of enmity.

Trump set out to cut off America’s economic nose to spite China’s face by introducing 125 per cent tariffs on all Chinese imports. The Chinese responded in kind, which has effectively put paid to all trade between the world’s two biggest economies.

The other day I tried to argue that, while that American policy made no economic sense at all (unless the underlying aim is to impoverish US consumers), it could be justified in terms of strategic necessity. Communist China is getting too strong and too dangerous, making it vital for America to repatriate some manufacturing while also enfeebling China.

That argument owed more to my reluctance to come across as an anti-Trump zealot than to any serious analysis. Repatriating strategic industries does make sense, and not just for the US. But that would take much more than just stopping trade with China.

Also, although the tariffs will damage China, they certainly won’t destroy her. Trade with the US accounts for only two per cent of China’s GDP. Losing that would hurt, but the Chinese are used to pain. And even if they weren’t, there would be precious little they could do about it without asking their communist rulers for another Tiananmen Square.

Then again, ready remedies are on offer. China may simply start dumping her exports on Europe and all other continents except the southern half of North America. And her strategic position has been strengthened no end because all those other countries have also been hit with punitive tariffs, although neither they nor anyone else can figure out what it is they are being punished for.

With the world’s biggest economy declaring war on them, the problems those countries had with one another began to look trivial. Now they are ready to close ranks against the common enemy, which is America expertly guided to the precipice by Trump’s hand.

Japan and North Korea have already signed an agreement with China, and you aren’t getting any prizes for figuring who will be the senior partner in that alliance. The other countries I’ve mentioned are in the advanced stages of similar negotiations, and even the EU is making overtures to Peking.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited China yesterday, and Xi told him that China and the EU should “jointly resist the unilateral bullying practices” of the Trump administration. Sanchez agreed with alacrity: Spain and, by implication, the EU aren’t going to follow America’s suit.

Also, the EU and China are discussing the possibility of removing European tariffs on Chinese cars, to be replaced with a minimum price instead. Next Xi will visit Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia, while his ministers are holding high-level discussions in South Africa, Saudi Arabia and India. The subject is the same: greater economic cooperation.

If that doesn’t get Trump his Nobel Peace prize, I don’t know what will. One thing for sure: he isn’t going to win one for economics.

When the stock market crashed last week, Trump just shrugged. Who cares?

Well, he should, considering his braggadocio during his first term, when he took the credit for the markets going up. Make up your mind, Donald: either your policies affect the stock market or they don’t. If they do, then the same person responsible for the ups is also responsible for the downs, as dialectics would suggest.

Then came a little legerdemain, with Trump declaring out of the blue a 90-day suspension of the worst tariffs. He had obligingly told his loyal lieutenants about that a few hours in advance, giving them time to buy at rock bottom. When the stock shot up, his friends cleaned up, with, for example, Musk rumoured to have made over $30 billion.

The market euphoria didn’t last, and the bond market crashed next. When that happened to the shares, Americans, 65 per cent of whom are involved in the market one way or another, cringed. But what happened to the bonds was even worse.

US Treasury bonds finance the country’s sovereign debt, to the tune of some $36 billion. Their yields determine the cost of public (also, indirectly, private) borrowing. And the yields depend on the traders’ confidence – or in this case lack thereof.

Markets are unsentimental, and they aren’t going to kiss any portion of Trump’s anatomy. With the US economy suddenly unpredictable, and its government playing Russian roulette with each chamber in the cylinder loaded, some invisible button got pushed and institutional investors began to get out of the T-bills.

As an immediate result, the cost of borrowing went up, just at the time when America needs to refinance $9 trillion of her debt. Inflation rise is sure to follow, and more borrowing will be necessary to fund even more borrowing.

Add to this the rising prices of all goods wholly or partly imported, which is to say just about all goods, and US consumers are going to bear the brunt of Trump’s illiterate brinkmanship. Hence, if he is to make that trip to Stockholm at all, it won’t be because of his seminal contribution to economics.

Yet, as far as I’m concerned, he is still in the running for the Peace Prize. That’s the least the Nobel Committee can do for someone who made China, India and Japan see eye to eye.

Donald Trump sees the world in terms of deals, deals in terms of personal relationships, and personal relationships in terms of who’s on top.

America is top dog in the world, Trump is top dog in America, and as long as foreign leaders recognise this and pay appropriate obeisance, he sees them as friends – in the same sense in which Vito Corleone saw his underlings as friends.

(I know I’ve drawn analogies between Trump and The Godfather before, but that’s the kind of shoe that fits.)

If, however, they choose to play silly Barzinis, then no punishment seems severe enough. Trump will remind them who is boss even if that means destroying the economy of the whole world, including the US.

That’s what he did, explaining that foreign countries had “ripped us off left and right, but now it’s our turn to do the ripping … I know what the hell I’m doing.” What he was doing in the full knowledge was wiping untold trillions off the world’s wealth in one fell swoop.

Trump proved his ability to turn people into millionaires, provided they were billionaires to begin with. He was also taking a sledgehammer to millions of nest eggs, and everyone ran scared, fearing that perhaps Trump didn’t really know what the hell he was doing.

With his characteristic flair for English, Trump branded them as “weak and stupid people” and coined his own neologism, “panicans”, because only weak and stupid people used the old word ‘panickers’.

When a loose cannon careers about, crushing everything in its way, then the best thing to do is get out of its way. But there was nowhere for those uppity foreigners to go, what with Musk’s project of mass emigration to Mars still being in design stage.

Hence foreign leaders had to reenact the opening sequence in The Godfather and offer Trump their respect in exchange for his protection.

Trump commented on that submission with his customary elegance: “These countries are calling me up, kissing my ass … they are dying to make a deal.” With the Pope, supplicants only have to kiss his ring, but then it’s Trump and not His Holiness who is truly infallible.

“Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything,” is how Trump described their supplications. I don’t know whether he told them that one day he’d expect them to provide a service, but The Godfather ethos seems to demand that sort of thing.

His personal objective thus achieved, Trump must have cast a panoramic look at the world’s economy and found it lying in ruins. Having extracted from the economic primer every prerequisite for a global recession, possibly depression, he knew he really was top dog.

Now he had shown the world his true power, people were offering him proper rispetto. Actually, this was the sort of respect offered to a chap who pulls the safety pin out of a hand grenade on a crowded bus, but that didn’t matter to Trump.

Something else did though. His capi de regime were getting restless. You see, some of them, such as Musk, Bessent and a whole raft of major donors got caught in the crossfire.

Musk, for example, lost $8.7 billion as a direct result of Trump’s affection for tariffs, and he had been a loyal lieutenant. Bessent too suffered huge attrition, although, as a former hedge fund manager, he wouldn’t own up to the number of billions wiped off his books.

When Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor, tried to tell those dissenters to shut up and follow the leader, all hell broke loose. Musk called Navarro “a moron” who is “dumber than a sack of bricks”. Leader, schmeader, that was serious business they were talking about, billions, for crying out loud.

That gave Trump a dilemma. Dropping his trousers to let foreigners pay their respects was one thing, but upsetting his nearest and dearest wasn’t on. What if they did a Tessio and switched sides?

An announcement followed that all tariffs above the ironclad 10 per cent were being suspended for 90 days. The markets and, more important, the wealth of his loyal servants, shot up, and Trumps capi di regime began to smile again. This, though Trump had declared just two days earlier that “my policies will never change”.

After that, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and indeed his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, explained that had been the plan all along. Trump had staged that little demonstration of power to gain “leverage”. They didn’t explain what the leverage was for and whom it was against, leaving that to their listeners’ imagination.

Let me see if I understand. So the plan was to crash the world’s markets and, just as the world was bending down to pay its respects, to withdraw – well, suspend – most tariffs, putting the economic roller-coaster on a steep upswing. Do I get this right?

If I do, then let me draw your attention to a little fact. At 9.37 AM yesterday, when the markets had hit rock bottom, Trump posted that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” Why was it such a great time?

Buying low makes sense only if you confidently expect the market to climb up soon or at least eventually. Yet no one expected that, quite the opposite. Every economist, analyst and commentator was sure that, since Trump had declared that his policies would “never change”, the market was going to continue its accelerating downward slide.

Buying under such circumstances would have meant throwing good money after bad. Only one thing could have made yesterday a great time to buy: foreknowledge that the tariffs would be dropped the next day and the markets would surge in consequence.

And only one man, Trump himself, possessed such foreknowledge, which he could then vouchsafe to some of his loyal servants, such as Musk and Bessent. Did they follow that advice? And if so, how much did they make from such knowledge?

I wonder if Bessent and Leavitt realise what they said. They actually hinted at the possibility of market manipulation, an offence for which uncountable traders have been sent down for rather long stretches.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that’s what Trump did – only that it looks as if he might have done. The trick is as old as the hills: you find a way to depress the market, buy as long a position as your finances allow, then watch the market shoot up, sell and laugh all the way to the bank.

Have Tessio whacked, reward your loyal capi di regime, make everyone else pay their osculating respects… well, I don’t want to keep banging on about The Godfather. It’s just that the analogy refuses to go away.

A question, if I may. What happens after 90 days? Another roller-coaster ride? More people losing their pensions and more of Trump’s friends making a killing?

Let’s just say I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of Trump’s lieutenants eventually got done for insider trading. But, I hasten to add, the Donald himself will have to remain above suspicion, like Caesar’s wife.

Or else they use the word ‘religion’ loosely, to denote a sense of something mystical, spiritual and extra-material in nature.

True enough, few Russians, indeed few people in general, ever deny the presence of something that can’t be described in strictly physical terms. Those who do so are sorely unobservant and also illogical. After all, they argue in favour of their obtuse materialism using a manifestly non-material faculty, their reason.

Yet sensing that there is more to the world than just an aggregate of molecules has little to do with religion. By itself, that perception is more likely to lead to superstition, including all kinds of its brutal forms, or else to abstract natural mysticism.

Yet natural mysticism isn’t a religion, though it can be the first step along the way. Mysticism is amorphous; it is a hazy instinct that hasn’t yet reached, nor may ever reach, God. It is content in search of form, not yet sure of itself and therefore uncertain which form will suit it best.

Only religion can steer a man to God, by crystallising a vague longing into faith and offering a moulded shape into which the longing can flow.

The shape is well defined: whereas amorphous mysticism has to remain abstract, religion is always concrete. There exists no religion in general. There are only specific religions, each with its own revelation, dogma and rituals – its own way of looking at God and his world.

Mysticism, on the other hand, can only exist in general, and in that sense it is not only different from religion but indeed opposite to it. That’s why many who flirt with mysticism, including some of Russia’s greatest writers, such as Tolstoy, only ever use it as a stick with which to beat religion on the head.

As religion is both higher and grander than mysticism, it tends to subsume it, channelling it into religion’s own reservoir. Mysticism, on the other hand, sometimes refuses to be diverted into that conduit.

One can say that mysticism relates to faith the way anarchy relates to liberty. When it is particularly recalcitrant, it may rebel against religion to protect what may appear to be its freedom, but is in fact its amorphousness. When such a rebellion occurs, it can be expressed in ways that are not only non-religious but also actively anti-religious. Thus, while ‘an atheist Christian’ doesn’t sound plausible, ‘an atheist mystic’ does.

It is amorphous mysticism, rather than true religiosity, that is a characteristic Russian trait. This could have led to genuine faith first and real religion second, but, alas, disdain for any formal restrictions to their self-expression has prevented the Russians from following such a progression, en masse at any rate.

This anti-formalism doesn’t just affect religion. It also explains why the Russians have never developed a knack for improving the state or any other public institutions. If they can’t destroy such institutions, they are more inclined to run away, preventing the state from destroying them.

In fact, the Russians tend to be averse to any disciplined form that might contain their fluid substance, which is why all those democracies and free markets can never succeed there even when, or rather if, they are ever tried for real.

This tendency extends even to aesthetics. For example, though all Russians hail Pushkin as the greatest poet of all time (“our all”, as the critic Apollon Grigoriev described him), his classicist form and cut-glass Mozartian cadences had no followers.

According to the philosopher Nikolai Lossky, this disdain for form even penetrated the Russians’ gene pool, having produced so many ill-defined, amorphous facial features clearly different, say, from the chiselled Northern European profile. Indeed many Russians, even those from old families, show a certain lack of straight lines in their faces.

It is as if, having drawn a sketch of their features, God then went over it, smudging every line with his thumb. Lossky’s observation may be too sweeping, but it is certainly evident that the Russians’ amorphousness extends to the way they treat every public institution, from justice to religion.

Traditional Russian lawlessness is well publicised, but mostly in the context of the state being bound by no legal constraints. It is less often mentioned that not only do Russian rulers seldom obey their own laws, but they don’t even insist that the ruled do – for as long as the latter don’t mind being ruled.

In that sense, it is Russia herself, and not just her governments, that has always been lawless. Nor do the people define liberty in any legal terms. The old Russian word for freedom, volia, is etymologically related to ‘will’, which stands to reason. Freedom to a Russian means being able to do as he wills, not obeying just laws that protect his liberties.

Many ascribe this tendency to the Asian part of the Russian character. However, lawlessness in Russia is markedly different from that in the traditional Eastern tyrannies.

There the populace was expected to follow every letter of the law, even if the despots themselves ignored its very spirit. But in Russia lawlessness functioned at all levels even under the tsars. At the top the arbitrary will of the tsar was the only law, and he could punish anyone with utmost cruelty for the slightest infraction. At the same time, he could let anyone get away with murder if such was his wish.

For example, Paul I once ordered the promotion of an officer who had had a trader hanged for having refused to sell hay for his company’s horses. On another day the same officer could have been severely chastised.

Those who derive their knowledge of Russia from Kremlin propaganda, refracted through our press, like to repeat the canard about Russians flocking to churches in their droves. In fact, church attendance in Russia is no higher than in Britain, and no one has ever accused the British of excessive piety.

Only between 0.5 and 2 per cent of Russians in big cities attend Easter services, and overall the number of actively practising Orthodox Christians is only marginally greater. In light of what I’ve said about the Russian character, it could hardly be otherwise.

Orthodox Christianity is an apostolic religion and, as such, imposes a strict discipline of dogma, ritual and doctrine. That sort of thing is alien to much-vaunted Russian spirituality, and many Russians, if they ever go to church at all, prefer various Protestant sects, which they find more conducive to free expression.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to write about this. Perhaps the proximity of Easter has made it hard to think about mundane matters. But this is a passing aberration, and tomorrow we’ll be back talking about Trump.

At some time “in the course of human events”, Western statesmen were replaced with politicians, politicians with nonentities, and nonentities with spivs.

Explaining why would take a book-length essay, but suffice it to say in a short article that some regression along those lines is easy to observe. The cited phrase in the first sentence comes from The Declaration of Independence, which hints at the leading role played by the US.

This isn’t an exercise in Americanophobia, but simply a recognition of the country’s role as the leader of the free world. It stands to reason that, if the US leads the West, she does so on a path not only to successes but also to failures.

Hence one doesn’t find among American politicians of today the same human calibre that was taken for granted, say, the 25 years on either side of 1800 – or even of 1900. The same goes for Europe, which makes it hard to escape the feeling that the US leads the free world on its way down, politically at any rate.

Myopia describes the unsavoury political types I mentioned earlier, whereas statesmen’s vision is hyperopic, able to see far into the future. This type of sight isn’t to be found among today’s politicians in the US or elsewhere in the West.

That’s why, ever since the world was cursed with truly satanic regimes, in countries like Russia, Italy, Germany and China, along with their allies and satellites, the West has consistently demonstrated strategic short-sightedeness, exacerbated by declining moral and intellectual standards.

Unable to see much farther than their noses, Western countries, but especially the US, busily built up those regimes to a point where they became a genuine threat to our civilisation. Then, when the threat became impossible to ignore, American and other Western governments would desperately try to snuff it out, exposing their countries to immense losses of money and, as often as not, human lives.

The late Stanford scholar, Dr Anthony C. Sutton, described that folly in a series of copiously documented studies, including the seminal trilogy Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development and also Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Without going into detail, let’s just say that the piles of documents he cites prove that without US economic and technological help, neither Bolshevism nor Nazism would have grown to its diabolical maturity.

China is another case in point. Her rise to her present status of an economic and military superpower began on 2 October, 1959, when the Sino-Soviet split kicked off with Khrushchev’s outburst and Mao’s reaction. Cold war was in full swing at the time, with America trying to contain Soviet expansion and growing influence.

The Sino-Soviet split turned China into a natural ally of America – our enemies’ enemies, and all that. Myopically, a succession of US presidents didn’t see China as a threat. The country was backward, impoverished, ravaged by communist terror, the people were starving – China was seen as a useful ally able to add her penny’s worth to the anti-Soviet cause, but not as any potential threat in her own right.

American courtship of China began, and it was eventually consummated in February 1972, when a beaming Richard Nixon shook hands with Zhou Enlai at Peking airport. From then onwards the trickle of US assistance to China has been steadily growing into a mighty stream.

Egregious folly, partly springing from an inability to plan for the future and partly from a misguided faith in the redemptive potential of commerce, made the US pump funds and technology into the sclerotic veins of China’s economy.

The picture Nixon and all subsequent presidents saw in their myopic mind’s eye was of China becoming richer and eventually democratic. How could she not? Once the Chinese people got enough rice to eat and wash down with Coca Cola, surely they’d see the democratic light shone by America?

That sort of thinking shows a profound misunderstanding of political evil, in fact an inability to think in such terms. People in general and Americans in particular like to think that deep down everyone is, or desperately wishes to be, just like them.

They know that they themselves are good people thinking of nothing but “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. So the Chinese have the same aspirations, even if they are latent at the moment. All those poor souls need is a little help, and what better way of providing it than through commerce?

This hopelessly naïve and short-sighted view of the world ignored the evil nature of China’s communist regime holding total, not to say totalitarian, sway over its people. Chinese people didn’t matter: they were either brainwashed or browbeaten by the regime. And the regime realised that what was being offered to it on a platter was a chance to dominate the world, that perennial daydream of all communists.

Some US presidents, such as Clinton, meekly tried to link further assistance to some progress in the issue of human rights, but they quickly abandoned such half-hearted attempts. China was steadily built up into the workshop of the West, with more and more products manufactured there.

Westerners would then slap their labels on those products, turning them into respectable brands. But their affection for cheap labour gradually turned into an addiction: if the Chinese could make the same things for less, one would be stupid not to take advantage of that opportunity. Especially since the Chinese could only provide the muscle, not the American capacity for technological innovation.

In 2001 George W. Bush generously welcomed China into the WTO, plugging her fully into the West’s supply chain and, as a corollary, acting as Dr Frankenstein to China’s monster. The evil communist regime was well on the road to global power.

Then, what do you know, the Chinese, who are a talented and industrious people, showed that they can do so much better than just toiling in factories for coolie wages. Their perfidious communist masters wisely loosened the reins a bit, and Chinese scientists and engineers were able to go to work.

Today, 40 per cent of all patents issued in the world go to China, and suddenly she no longer needs American labels on her products. She can put her own on, while continuing to build up her manufacturing base to a point where China can match up to America economically and militarily anywhere in the world.

The communist reins might have been loosened, but the harness is still there, and China’s regime remains as evil as ever. But it’s infinitely stronger than it has ever been.

Much of the debacle visited by Trump on the world has been caused by the belated realisation setting in: as always, America first builds up her evil adversaries and, when they grow strong enough to challenge her, has a Damascene experience.

The worst words in the political lexicon, We must do something!, then thunder from all media and certainly the White House. Rather than preventing monsters from growing to maturity, the West, especially America, weans them first and then tries to slay them when they already breathe fire and threaten to incinerate the world.

Trump is economically illiterate, but some of his advisers aren’t. They must have explained to the president that wholesale sanctions make no economic sense. And if you don’t believe us, Donald, just look at what’s happening in the markets. You used to blow your own trumpet when the stock market went up during your first term, so are you going to eat crow now?

All that is fine and well, but no economic sense doesn’t necessarily mean no sense at all. Even Trump is beginning to understand that there is more to life than just a commercial transaction at the end of which he gets richer.

Progressive, century-long myopia has led to the nurturing of a succession of evil regimes, of which China just may be the most dangerous. So yes, of course it’s cheaper to outsource most manufacturing to countries like China, those that can do manufacturing for less.

But being dependent on our enemies for the supply of strategic goods, from food to steel to electronics to everything else in between, means courting disaster. So America finally perched bifocal glasses on the tip of her nose and saw that she is on the verge of losing her superpower status to a bunch of communists who have stubbornly refused to be guided by the light of democracy.

The world is pregnant with conflict and it may give birth to war at any moment. That’s why Trump is trying to repatriate the manufacturing his predecessors foolishly allowed to go elsewhere. He is doing that in a typically bullyish and heavy-handed fashion, causing more harm than good at the moment.

But at least that dread phrase, We must do something!, is clearly sounding in the back of his mind. Instead of being the John Wayne of the world, kicking doors in and shoving the nasties aside, America is now in a clearly defensive mode.

Aware that the US can no longer afford to be the leader of the free world, Trump is trying to cut his losses by withdrawing, or as near as damn, from all traditional alliances and obligations. He says he isn’t going to lift a finger in defence of a corrupt Ukraine, pathetic and freeloading Europe, and thieving Taiwan.

Let Putin have the first, along with as much of the second as he can swallow, and let China have Taiwan. America needs to buy time to become a manufacturing autarky again, but she now needs too much time.

Even assuming that this goal is achievable, it’ll take years, more likely decades, to achieve it. Rebuilding, say, the steel and aluminium production will take longer than the same 24 hours it didn’t take to end Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine. America might have waited too long, reaping the short-term harvest and leaving the really vital fields fallow.

We should all hope America gets the time she needs, and we must all follow her on the same path, one leading to strategic survival. A quick course of political ophthalmology treatment is sorely needed though.

Trade war can only make us less prosperous. Class war can make us less civilised, and prosperity is much easier to recover.

For all the pseudo-conservative noises Starmer makes, his is a Marxist government that only ever contains its carnivorous instincts for fear of electoral reprisal. And Marxists don’t rationally weigh the pros and cons of class war any more than a dog considers the advisability of chasing a cat.

Both breeds follow the imperatives coded into their DNA, and in doing so they act without a choice. Dogs dislike cats, Marxists hate everything to do with Western tradition.

It’s only in this context that one can properly evaluate the Labour bill to do away with the 88 remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords. “Hereditary peers are indefensible,” said the Labour manifesto in the latest election, presumably because they’ve been neither elected nor appointed by Labour governments.

Such illiterate idiocy strikes a chord in untutored hearts, which alas constitute an overwhelming cardiac majority in today’s Britain. We are a democratic country, aren’t we? We are. Then those who govern us must be elected or, at a pinch, appointed by those who have been. End of story.

Many of those who mouth such bilge don’t seem to have any problem with having an unelected and hereditary head of state, but that problem will arise sooner or later. The God of Democracy is athirst, demanding more and more sacrifices.

Yet the very existence of a king should have tipped off those people that, a democracy though Britain may be, it’s also a monarchy, albeit a constitutional one. That fact alone points to the essence of Britain’s polity, the oldest and most consistent realisation of the most sound political idea, that of mixed government.

Having analysed the three principal methods of government known at the time, aristocracy, oligarchy and democracy, both Plato and Aristotle found each of them wanting. No political arrangement can exist in its pure form without degenerating into something unsavoury. That’s why the synthetic constitution of Lycurgus in Sparta lasted longer than the purely democratic constitution of Solon in Athens.

Following the Greeks, Machiavelli argued in his Discourses that, when their purity is intransigently maintained, a principality turns into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy and a democracy into anarchy. For a political arrangement to last, and for liberty to thrive, a state must combine the elements of all three known forms of government. A division of power, in which none of the estates feels the need to usurp the total power, is thus a proven guarantor of social longevity.

That idea lies at the foundation of most Western democracies, but especially of England and all the countries directly influenced by her. The constitution of England combines the monarchy of the king, the democracy of the Commons, and the unelected fulcrum between the two, the House of Lords, ensuring that neither end of the seesaw shoots up too vigorously.

This system goes back centuries. It was from barons’ councils that our modern parliaments have evolved, and the post-Hellenic system of representation has ancient roots as well.

For example, in England before the Norman conquest it was the Witenagemot, the assembly of the kingdom’s leading nobles, that would convene after a king’s death to select a successor. That was, to name one instance, how Harold Godwinson took the throne, which he then lost to a Norman arrow in 1066.

So yes, Britain is a democracy, but she can’t be a democracy run riot. If she becomes that, she won’t be Britain in any other than the geographical sense. For Britain is defined by her ancient constitution more than any other European country (the US is equally dependent on her own constitution, but it’s just a modification of the English antecedent).

Since the 1789 Revolution, France has had 14 different constitutions, the current one established in 1958. Replace it with a fifteenth, and France will remain France, to paraphrase Maurice Chevalier’s song (Paris sera toujours Paris). Take Britain’s constitution away, and we might as well become an American state – I’m sure Trump would welcome such a development.

I don’t know if Starmer and his merry men understand such ABC things. They may or may not, but that doesn’t matter one way or the other. Visceral hatred of the upper classes has been encoded into their DNA by Marx, and that overrides any rational considerations.

Class war, as far as they are concerned, can have only one end, that articulated by the proto-Marxist Denis Diderot: “We’ll hang the last priest on the entrails of the last aristocrat”. I’m not sure the Starmer gang see that end in similarly sanguinary terms, but that’s a difference of form, not content.

They are fighting their class war on all fronts, by driving wealth producers out of the country, suffocating the middle classes with extortionate taxes, and doing their level best to destroy public schools that alone can be expected to provide a semblance of education.

None of this makes any sense on any level, except one: the Marxist craving for the politics of envy and hatred. But I’ve got news for this lot: class war and trade war have one thing in common. Neither ever produces any winners. Only losers.

Call me an inveterate snob, but I feel an acute sense of schadenfreude when reading about Americans living in England or just visiting.

Lately, The Mail has been publishing articles on the culture shocks experienced by such innocent visitors to our shores, and none of them is a PLU (if you don’t know what this acronym stands for, you aren’t a PLU yourself).

Birds of a feather and all that, it’s natural that the English people those Americans know also come from the lowly strata of society. Visiting Americans may not be aware of our social nuances, and there is no reason they should be, but one would expect Mail journalists to enlighten them.

I’m sure they could if they wanted to, but most of their paper’s readers belong to the same demographic group. They can let The Mail get away with utter, even subversive bilge (Peter Hitchens springs to mind), but they’ll never forgive even a hint of class snobbery.

That’s why the paper allows those culturally shocked Americans to persist in the folly that their comments apply to Britons at large, rather than strictly to those of the proletarian persuasion.

The other day, for example, one perplexed visitor wrote about his confusion over tea. Not only are Britons obsessed with that beverage, he complained, but they use the word to describe the main meal of the day. Go figure.

I don’t propose to write a treatise on the class structure of British society, with its main groups, each featuring any number of hyphenated sub-groups. However, simplifying the structure to just three tiers, low, middle and high, no member of the two top groups would ever refer to a major meal as ‘tea’.

However, when I myself moved from the US to London, I too was taken aback when my advertising colleagues asked what I was cooking for tea that evening. Tea for me was strictly a hot (in America, sometimes iced) drink accompanied by a biscuit (cookie to Americans) or drunk on its own.

Moving up the social scale in the after hours, I referred to the evening meal as ‘dinner’ or more usually ‘supper’. But, being sensitive to the perverse vagaries of English usage, I knew that ‘dinner’ to my co-workers and their class comrades often described lunch.

Thus, when a London taxi driver declines a fare at noon, saying, “I’m going ‘ome to ‘ave me dinner”, he doesn’t mean he is driving to Liverpool to be just in time for his wife’s Lancashire hotpot.

The same chap, by the way, could confuse Americans even more by describing them as either ‘Shermans’ or ‘Septics’, but Cockney rhyming slang deserves a separate essay. (Just this once I’ll help out the outlanders among you by explaining that a Sherman or septic describes a tank, which rhymes with ‘Yank’. Such are the little word games played within earshot of Bow Bells.)

Britons who use such locutions seldom mean them as a compliment. For example, my erstwhile co-worker Barry detested septic tourists.

Truth to tell, Barry didn’t have much time for any foreigners, but he felt he could be more open about his animosity to Shermans. They were a free hit, and one could indulge one’s feelings without being accused of racism or Euroscepticism.

Barry lived for the moments when an American tourist asked him for directions to, say, Hampton Court. Barry’s stock reply was: “Take the Piccadilly Line, go to Cockfosters, then get out and ask again.” Those familiar with London’s geography will know that such a wild-goose chase would take the hapless sightseer at least two hours out of his way.

Another quaint idiosyncrasy spotted by the same confused visitors to The Mail‘s pages is that Britons apologise all the time in situations that don’t call for excuses in America. ‘Sorry’ with various adverbal modifiers, such as ‘awfully’ or ‘terribly’, seems to be the most popular locution.

So it may be, but only in the middle classes, especially the lower reaches therein. As one climbs the social ladder, self-confidence increases, and apologies are heard less and less.

Some Americans are amazed at the absence of power sockets in our bathrooms. This is indeed an abomination, but one motivated not by class but by what’s fondly described as ‘elf and safety.

Our powers that be are concerned that, should sockets be available in bathrooms, an irate husband might plug a hairdryer in and drop it in the tub just as his wife (‘missus’, ‘old lady’ or ‘trouble’ to Mail readers) is taking a bath.

And speaking of that facility, some Shermans have trouble with the word ‘toilet’, as do I, but for different reasons. Their response is TMI (Too Much Information), an offence avoided by their own awful euphemisms, such as restroom, powder room, little boys’ room and some such, all prole, which euphemisms so often tend to be.

Alas, this is the only room in the house for which no non-euphemistic name exists.

The flushing facility we take for granted (but one about 14 per cent of all Russians still don’t have) was invented by the Victorian plumber Thomas Crapper, an aptronymic surname if I’ve ever seen one. For a while, he lent his name to the room, but that didn’t last because of the term’s association with an older and cruder Anglo-Saxon word.

Britons can’t escape excretional euphemisms, but they can arrange them in the ascending order of social acceptability. Thus, ‘toilet’ is strictly prole in the UK (though not so much in the US). Penelope, for example, is physically unable to articulate it.

At the opposite end of the social scale sit words like ‘lavatory’, ‘lav’ or ‘loo’. The first one is a smidgen more PLU than the other two. ‘Lav’ is obviously a shortened ‘lavatory’, whereas ‘loo’ comes from ‘Waterloo’, supposedly because at the time Mr Crapper died British outhouses bore that brand name.

My own theory is that the connection with Waterloo is rather different. That room used to be called ‘water closet’, and the perverse English mind formed an association with Waterloo, later abbreviated to ‘loo’. Just a guess.

Americans also cause the natives’ mirth by struggling with the pronunciation of words like Leicester and Gloucester, both featuring in the name of tube stations. Not only do they laboriously and amusingly articulate every syllable, but they even can’t understand those words when properly pronounced as ‘Lester’ and ‘Gloster’.

Those chaps are lucky they don’t revolve in the circles inhabited by Messrs Featherstonehaugh and Cholmondeley, pronounced ‘Fanshaw’ and ‘Chumly’. If they did, they’d have even more to complain about, but I doubt The Mail would print such gripes.  

This hardly earth-shattering observation makes me even more sceptical about the debacle Trump has visited on the world in general and the US specifically.

Tocqueville pointed out some similarities between America and Russia, prophesying that one day they would rule the world together. But his prediction was based on the two countries’ potential for demographic growth, which has been partly realised in America but not at all in Russia.

Yet Americans and Russians do like to remark how similar they are, even though both are aware of the many traits they don’t share. One salient similarity is their historical animosity to Europe, not necessarily geopolitical but always psychological, cultural and, if you will, civilisational. In such terms, both countries are envious upstarts and rancorous outsiders.

“Repudiation of Europe,” the novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, “is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.” His Russian colleagues, even those better than him, often said something similar about their own nation, as any reader of Dostoyevsky’s or Tolstoy’s diaries will confirm. In his Karamazovs, Dostoyevsky talked about genuflecting before “the sacred stones of Europe”, which didn’t prevent him from loathing every animate European.

A propensity to xenophobia and insularity makes it easy for expert demagogues in both countries to sell the idea of the world ganging up on them. They could all repeat the slogan of the notoriously thuggish football team, Millwall FC: No one likes us, but we don’t care.

The Russians have indeed turned their paranoia into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their tendency to pounce on their neighbours like rabid dogs, coupled with their persistent threats to conquer or, barring that, annihilate the world, have instilled affection in few foreign hearts.

In America’s case, the Millwall Syndrome isn’t so clear-cut. It’s true that educated Europeans, both Leftists and traditional conservatives, tend to treat the US with, respectively, visceral hatred and supercilious condescension. Yet the uneducated, which these days is to say overwhelming, majorities are tropistically attracted to America.

While both Russia and America talk about their love of the common man, for the former it’s just talk, whereas for the latter it’s reality.

America actually is what Russia purports to be: a country dedicated to the elevation of the common man. Common men around the world sense that and respond with sympathy, if not always with love. Many had the same feelings for communist Russia, having swallowed her canard about equality. However, eventually Soviet beastliness helped most people see through Soviet lies.

But Trump’s economic broadside against the world, including the 20 countries with which America had a free trade agreement, makes his Millwall-like claims more credible. Traditional friends of America are being turned into her enemies and, even worse, friends of China.

The only major country Trump didn’t hit with new tariffs is Russia, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained that the US didn’t do business with that sanctioned rogue. That’s not quite true: last year the US did about $3.6 billion’s worth of trade with Russia, but Bessent and his boss can only think in trillions, not paltry billions.

Anyway, my title above suggests that I’m going to talk not about the two nations’ similarities but their differences. These are numerous, but one that seems apposite today is that the Russians are historically used to a life of deprivation and the Americans aren’t.

Such habits have had a formative effect on both national characters, with the austere Russians (en masse, that is) satisfied with having the bare necessities of life and prepared to tolerate even their shortage. Americans, on the other hand, are as different in that respect as different can be.

A country dedicated to the elevation of the common man will inevitably be defined by materialistic desiderata, the prime of which is a guarantee of ever-growing comfort. This is the implicit promise of America, and she can only ever break it at her peril. (The promise first came across in the Declaration of Independence that identified “the pursuit of happiness” as an “unalienable [sic] right.”)

Acting on that promise consistently has produced a hedonistic culture of instant gratification spreading over an infinite number of instances in eternity. That’s why, and not just because of the wily foreigners’ chicanery, Americans tend to consume more than they produce, and that’s why, in the 10 years leading up to the 2008 crisis, personal indebtedness in the US was three times as great as personal income.

This critical difference between the two nations has seeped into the collective DNA. As a result, the Russians are better prepared to accept the message of what we in England call ‘jam tomorrow’, a promise of a bright future offsetting a guarantee of penury at present.

In his Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote a poem lampooning that mass psychosis in the Soviet Union.

It starts with this verse: “Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,/ Beasts of every land and clime,/ Hearken to my joyful tidings/ Of the golden future time.” And, in the penultimate verse, “For that day we all must labour,/ Though we die before it break;/ Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,/ All must toil for freedom’s sake.”

Orwell would have a field day looking at Trump’s assault on the global – and specifically American – economy. In essence, Trump is making the same jam-tomorrow promise to Americans: you’ll have to suffer in the short term for basking in untold riches tomorrow.

The exact timing of that tomorrow is rather hazy: some time in the future. Well, if you insist, ten years or so. Maybe less, maybe more. This is underpinned by the claim that brings back the fond memories of my Soviet youth.

As a child, I was told that the Soviet Union stands alone against her enemies that include every non-communist country in the world and also at times some communist ones, such as Yugoslavia, Albania and above all China. The worst of them are the US, Britain and other ‘capitalist countries’ that all try to exploit Russia, possibly even occupy and colonise her.

As an old man, I’m hearing similar noises, mutatis mutandis, from the US President. Possible occupation and colonisation haven’t yet been mentioned, but exploitation is the buzz word.

The world is out to “rip off” and “screw” America, as evinced by all those “pathetic freeloaders” having a positive trade balance with the good old US of A. Actually, the Donald forgets to mention that such disparity exists only in goods – the US trade balance in services is hugely positive.

In any case, I’ve often argued, along with Messrs Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and every other conservative economist on record, that a negative trade balance is a sign of a healthy economy. It means that the country can exchange a small amount of exports for a large amount of imports – something akin to a butcher exchanging £10 worth of his meat for £15 worth of a greengrocer’s vegetables. Thus, there exists an equal if not better justification for saying that America is ripping off the rest of the world.

Then Trump came up with a bogus formula derived from trade deficits that supposedly shows that all other countries levy extortionist tariffs on US goods. Now, even if true, the same economists I’ve mentioned agree that, above all, tariffs are a tax that hurts the country’s own consumers. That’s why they advocated no retaliation leading to a trade war.

Trump hasn’t read those economists. Neither, by the looks of it, have his foreign colleagues who, with the exception of Britain, have all hit back with retaliatory tariffs. A full-blown trade war has broken out, and it has already claimed huge casualties.

Economic growth is grinding to a halt, inflation is about to climb high, world markets (including US ones) are in meltdown. The Dow has lost over 2,000 points, the FTSE 280, markets in Asia have registered similarly catastrophic drops. Altogether, in just two days some nine trillion dollars were wiped off the world economy (five trillion of it in the US), and personally I can’t even count that high.

Those losses were registered even before China responded with tit-for-tat tariffs on US goods. What we looking at is the worst crash in history, rivalling the market collapse of 1929. It’s useful to remember that at that time only about two percent of all Americans owned any shares, and foreign trade accounted for only two per cent of a largely autarkic US economy.

Still, when the Hoover administration introduced its Smoot-Hawley tariffs, that became the last straw that tipped the country from a stock market crash into the Great Depression. I don’t want to make apocalyptic predictions, but today some 62 per cent of all Americans are invested in the securities market, and 27 per cent of US GDP comes from international trade.

I rather doubt America will have another Great Depression, but every economist worth his salt is predicting that the world, including the US, will slip into a prolonged recession spiral. Americans (and the rest of us) will be paying more for computers, I-Phones, clothes, food – well, for just about everything.

It’s predicted that the average household income in the US will go $3,800 down. That’s hardly a famine of Holodomor proportions, but then, as I suggested from the start, Americans aren’t Russians.

Part of the reason for the American trade deficit in goods is the rapacious spending of US consumers, an activity they seem to regard as their God-given right. One doesn’t need a crystal ball or any other fortune-telling appliances to predict a backlash.

One intimation of that has already come in Wisconsin, a solidly pro-Trump state, where the Republican Supreme Court candidate lavishly financed by Musk lost the election. What do you know, $20-odd million can’t even buy a lousy State Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin, and Trump is just getting started.

It’s a distinct possibility that newly impoverished voters (impoverished by American standards, that is) will before long take away Trump’s majority in both Houses, turning him into a lame-duck president – or else, perish the thought, a dictator.

One way or another, the consequences of Trump’s ill-conceived actions are unpredictable and therefore exceedingly dangerous. People who call him a conservative should look up that word in a dictionary.

In my article The Court is Mightier than Le Pen three days ago, I commented on the news-worthy verdict in France. Among other things, I wrote that: “I’m sure Donald Trump will have something to say about this case too: after all, he sees himself (with somewhat greater justification) as a victim of a legal witch-hunt too.”

The Donald didn’t disappoint. Yesterday he wrote, with his usual illiterate flair: “In The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison.”

Trump ended by issuing a peremptory demand: FREE MARINE LE PEN! Such deliverance seems unnecessary, considering that she isn’t in prison and nor is she ever likely to receive a custodial sentence harsher than house arrest. But hey, it’s the feeling that counts.

Talking to reporters later, Trump reminded them that he had a personal dog in that fight: “That’s a big deal. That’s a very big deal… That sounds like this country. That sounds very much like this country.”

Two parenthetic remarks are in order on the form of Trump’s self-expression. I wonder if his tendency to capitalise all nouns is a tribute he pays to his German father. Considering the way Trump uses English, I doubt he can speak any foreign language, but I suppose obsessively illiterate capitalisation is the least he can do for his verstorbener Vater.

The other observation is more serious, and I must run it by my two psychiatrist friends. Trump has a worrying tendency to repeat the same words or phrases several times within a few seconds. Called ‘perseveration’ in psychiatry, this is usually caused by a brain injury or some other organic disorder.

Trump perseverates all the time: for example, he told Zelensky several times in rapid succession: “You aren’t holding any cards.” Not being professionally qualified, I don’t wish to indulge in homespun diagnostics. I just hope the US isn’t cursed with two consecutive presidents who aren’t quite compos mentis.

Trump’s kindred souls echoed his sentiment. JD Vance identified Le Pen’s offence as “very minor” and opined that barring her from holding elective office was “not democracy”. Vlad Putin agreed, mentioning the “violation of democratic norms” that are so dear to his heart.

But the most telling statement came from Georgia Meloni, Italian prime minister. I’d suggest that her surname is a perfect aptronym, but won’t, for fear of being branded a male chauvinist or, perish the thought, gender stereotyper.

Unlike more perfidious politicians, Miss Meloni didn’t even try to couch her thoughts in rhetorical subterfuge.

Speaking from the heart, she too expressed concerns about France’s democratic deficit: “I don’t know the merits of the accusations against Marine Le Pen, or the reasons for such a strong decision. But I think that no one who cares about democracy can rejoice at a sentence that targets the leader of a major party and deprives millions of citizens of representation.”

Like all ‘populist’ politicians, Miss Meloni doesn’t always take the trouble to think before talking. If she did, she’d realise how cosmically awful her statement is.

Allow me to paraphrase. Miss Meloni neither knows nor cares whether Le Pen is guilty or innocent. All that matters to her is that a fellow ‘populist’ has been suspended from politics, which is a blow to democracy whatever “the merits of the accusations”.

What if such a politician were guilty of murder, Georgia? Still a blow to democracy? The underlying assumption is that, simply because he is a ‘populist’, no ‘populist’ can possibly be guilty of any crime. And even if he is guilty, he still should be issued a blanket pardon covering all misdeeds past or future. Have I got it right, Georgia? Donald? Vlad? JD?

The amazing thing about this brouhaha is that none of Le Pen’s defenders, and not even Marine herself, has said she is innocent. No one seems to care about such incidentals, and yet they are the only thing that ought to matter in a country ruled by law.

And the rule of law is one of the few remaining vestiges of our civilisation, one of the very few things that still keep us from descending into out-and-out barbarism. Apparently, some of the West’s political leaders have made that descent already, and they luxuriate in the putrid swamp at the bottom.

A voice of sanity came from the French journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, who occasionally graces our conservative papers with her perceptive comments on the French scene.

Marine Le Pen shouldn’t bother to appeal her conviction, writes Mlle Moutet: “Nobody has any doubt that if she tries to appeal the ban, she will be found guilty again. Le Pen has no chance at appeal. She’s guilty as hell and all her people are guilty as hell… It was an obvious fraud.”

There you have it in a nutshell. Marine Le Pen isn’t a martyr for democracy but a fraudster. The Gaullists Chirac, Sarkozy, both former presidents, and Fillon, former PM, also had their collars felt, and Mélenchon, the Trotskyist leader, is currently under investigation for similar offences. Dura lex, sed lex, as the Romans used to say.

French prosecutors deny that the decision to prosecute Marine Le Pen had a political component. That too ignores the salient legal point, one way or the other.

A man found guilty of murder can’t get off by pointing out that someone else got away with the same crime. Murder is murder, and fraud is fraud. If those prosecutors went after Le Pen for political reasons, they are reprehensible. But that doesn’t make the crime of which she has been convicted any less criminal.

All her champions ought to remind themselves of the rule of law and the vital role it plays in Western polity. It’s not all about ‘populist’ sloganeering.

Speaking of which, has anyone noticed that the slogan Make America Great Again screams insecurity and defensiveness? The word ‘again’ implies that America isn’t great any longer, and I emphatically disagree. She is Great, but I Doubt She’ll Remain Great for Much Longer with that Lot in Charge.