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Even people who’ve never laced up a pair of boxing gloves realise that taking thousands of blows over a few years may play havoc with a man’s head.

That part of the body isn’t designed to replace a speedbag, and the constant jarring effect of punches leaves many pugilists demented. After all, when a boxer is knocked out or even down, he suffers a concussion. How many concussions can a brain take before its wiring goes awry?

I’d suggest you ask Mohammad Ali, but you can’t. He died nine years ago, having battled Parkinson’s since his late 30s. No wonder: according to experts, Ali took over 20,000 blows in his career, most of them to the head.

A personal note if I may: I took up boxing when I was 15, and the coach thought I was doing well in training. But then I started taking punches to the head and decided I could find a better use for it.

My football career was longer: I was seldom without a ball at my feet whenever I wasn’t at school or playing chess. When I was 12 or so, a friend’s mother told me to quit or at least not to head the ball if I insisted on playing. “You don’t want to end up more idiotic than you are already,” was how she put it with a singular lack of tact.

She was no doctor, and yet I knew she was right: heading those heavy leather balls felt like heading a brick, especially when they were wet. That was a long time ago, and yet the risk of a degenerative brain disorder for footballers was already widely known.

So much more surprising it is these days to read news articles about this or that professional player developing dementia at a relatively young age. Such pieces appear every year or so, and every time the link between football and dementia is presented as a startling discovery.

People who downplay the risk insist that today’s much lighter balls aren’t as damaging. I’d suggest those people retake their school physics course. Yes, today’s balls are much lighter to begin with and they don’t absorb quite so much moisture. But as a result they fly through the air much faster, which makes them as dangerous if not more so.

That’s where physics comes in, telling us that the force of an impact equals mass times speed squared divided by two. That squaring puts a premium on speed, not weight. A 10 per cent increase in speed makes the ball’s impact much stronger even if its weight is down 20 or 30 per cent.

Gary Lineker, a striker turned expert commentator, was certainly aware of the risks when he played, until 1994. He says he never headed the ball unless he felt sure to score.

Defenders don’t have that option, which is why they are five times more likely to develop neurodegenerative disease than someone who never played professionally. In fact, the Federation is currently working with over 200 former players suffering from dementia, and that disease may sometimes be slowed down but never cured.

In 2021 the FA introduced guidance that recommended no more than 10 “high-force” headers in training per week. And, starting from this season, there is a ban on headers in all under-seven to under-nine matches, then to include the under-10 level in 2025-2026, and the under-11s the season after.

Yet Premiership coaches readily admit they don’t keep count in training, and in a decade or so they’ll complain that the new crop of players don’t know how to head the ball. Taking heading out of football isn’t exactly like taking punching out of boxing, but close enough.

Either one takes up those sports seriously or one doesn’t. And if one does, there is a good chance of ending up demented at an early age. So why do so many boys – and increasingly girls – dream of such careers?

The answer is obvious: most of them can’t ever hope to achieve as much, in many cases any, success in any other field. For example, at the beginning of his career Mike Tyson had an IQ of 70 – and that’s before he took those thousands of punches from people trained to throw them. His chances of earning a living as a systems analyst or stock broker weren’t good.

Many footballers are brighter than that, if not necessarily better educated. They could find some jobs, but none that would offer the rewards of professional football. During my whole career in advertising, for example, I met a few people earning £300,000 a year, but none getting as much a week, which is less than some top players make.

Then there is anthropology that says that men are conditioned to take physical risks even when no financial reward beckons. Mountain climbers and sky divers risk their lives (“If at first you don’t succeed, sky diving isn’t for you,” as the saying goes) and, rather than getting paid, they actually pay for the privilege.

The joy of doing such things escapes me. Though no more cowardly than the next man, the idea of risking my life for a trivial cause appals me. Life is a precious gift, of which we aren’t only possessors but also guardians. Higher causes than staying alive exist, but sport isn’t one of them.

“He that loseth his life for my sake will find it,” said the supreme authority on such matters. “For my sake” are the key words, and they mean something other than for the sake of winning a sporting contest.

(In more up-to-date versions of that book, the same phrase reads “Whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” The medium insults the message.)

Every time I watch a boxing match, I feel glad those chaps are doing it in the ring, not in my street. If they do it with style, rather than indulging in an ugly brawl, I enjoy the show. And I don’t think of cerebral trauma when watching a goal scored with a diving header.

But afterwards, having a drink, I ponder such matters and decide that what I feel for those athletes is closer to pity than to envy. But that’s only me.

It goes – or rather ought to go – without saying that national governments should look after national interests. After all, that’s why they were instituted in the first place.

This generalising truism is the overarching absolute of politics, and it’s propped up by the proverbial platitude about charities and where they begin. Difficulties start, as they always do, when we move from the general to the concrete and then inevitably from the absolute to the relative.

Because the task of understanding what is and what isn’t in national interest is often difficult. There cracker barrel philosophy, these days fashionably called ‘common sense’, won’t suffice. Other philosophies, moral, political, utilitarian, have to come into play, along with such disciplines as history, sociology, psychology, economics, anthropology – and I’m sure I left a few out.

When that happens, objective and absolute will always be surrounded, often supplanted, with subjective and relative. And if doctrinaire absolutes fight back too hard, they can do more harm than good.

Almost 50 years ago I had a long conversation with Texas Rep. Ron Paul, then my local congressman. I still hadn’t found a way of relating my intuitive conservatism to specific philosophies and policies, and my friends from the Reagan campaign recommended Paul as a good source of knowledge.

A greenhorn though I was, I was still surprised at Paul’s commitment to no foreign aid under any circumstances. I asked several questions, such as ‘What if we must cultivate an ally in Africa or Asia?’ or ‘What if a country suffers a natural disaster and millions of lives are at risk?’ or ‘What if we must counter the Soviet influence in the region?’

All those questions received the same reply: “No foreign aid,” with an ascending emphasis on No. That answer lacked some elasticity for me even in my virginal political state and, though no longer a virgin, I still feel the same way.

The late economist Peter Bauer wittily defined foreign aid as a transfer of funds from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries, which highlighted the vast potential of foreign aid for abuse and corruption at both ends.

However, if we look at foreign aid from the standpoint of national interest, another definition may also be valid: it may be a charitable way of achieving selfish purposes (which is to say the nation’s own).

Foreign aid is justified when a nation uses it to advance its strategic position in the world and can afford to dedicate funds to achieving that end. Millions of people dying because their own government can’t cope with a natural disaster is another reason for aid. After all, it doesn’t hurt to take the odd bow to our Christian heritage.

But that’s all: no other valid reasons for foreign aid exist. That’s why the UN’s rigid demand that every developed country spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on aid is asinine, and Britain’s succumbing to that demand in 2013 even more so.

It’s impossible to attach a precise number to the need for providing foreign aid. But the need has to be sound. At the moment His Majesty’s Government feels flush enough to spend millions on such urgent projects as promoting DEI in Serbia’s labour force, bankrolling a transgender opera in Columbia, and helping China to grow more rice.

Now, China can easily buy Britain several times over, and probably has already done so to a large extent. It’s the Chinese who should send aid to us, not the other way around. As to spending public funds to export perversion globally, I have no words to describe that, having promised Penelope never to use obscenities in print.

President Trump’s approach to foreign aid is close to Ron Paul’s in its rigidity, although I prefer that extreme to using aid as a tool of socialist internationalism. Isolationist rhetoric in general, including ‘no foreign aid’, plays well to the galleries, and this is an important consideration in democracies.

Hot damn, why should I give my hard-earned dollars to foreigners 10,000 miles away, Americans say, banging their fists down, and by and large they are right. But ‘by and large’ doesn’t mean ‘always’. The public can’t be expected to think with nuances, but it would be nice if their leaders could.  

Trump’s views on tariffs have the same isolationist roots, but that matter is much more serious.

One can say a similar thing about tariffs as about foreign aid: inflexible commitment one way or the other is ill-advised. Tariffs too can serve political ends; they can act as a commercial way of achieving non-commercial aims.

Trump’s first acts prove that point: by threatening steep tariffs he coerced concessions from Columbia, Mexico and Canada. Those concessions were so slight and meaningless that one can’t quite shake the impression that the tariff bluff was simply grandstanding and a reminder of who is boss.

Aesthetics apart, there is nothing much wrong with that – what’s democracy without a touch of populism and tough rhetoric? Sometimes brinkmanship pays, and threatening war, shooting or trade, is a time-honoured tool of geopolitics.

But Trump insists on praising tariffs as a factor of prosperity, self-refutingly admitting at the same time that Americans will suffer “short-term pain” when his tariffs go into effect. “Short-term” sounds open-ended to me. What’s short-term? A year? Two? Ten?

High tariffs inflict pain on the country imposing them and on the country on the receiving – and retaliating – end. This is economic ABC and one of the few things economists of every political hue agree on. I’d recommend that Trump read Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and as many economists in between as his attention span can handle.

His argument that McKinley introduced 50 per cent tariffs on all imports and yet the US economy grew during his presidency is somewhat lacking in intellectual rigour. This is a rhetorical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc (after that, therefore because of it).

First, McKinley framed the tariff bill bearing his name when he was a congressman, not president. That Republican bill became law in October 1890, and a month later the Democrats won an electoral landslide.

Using McKinley’s example is ignoring the totally different nature of the economy at the peak of the Industrial Revolution and now. Then the economy was oriented mostly towards the producer, not the consumer.

A consumer economy hadn’t yet arrived, and most Americans worked either in agriculture or manufacturing – as opposed to only 18 per cent who are so employed today. Moreover, the volume of global trade was a fraction even in real terms of the over $30 trillion a year it is today.

Under those conditions, protecting American jobs in manufacturing and agriculture might have paid dividends, while the effect of tariffs on the standard of living was negligible.

The financial system then was also such a far cry from today’s that even its echoes don’t reach us now. McKinley was a champion of the gold standard, and in fact won the presidency in 1897 on that promise. Gold, not the dollar, was the world’s reserve currency, which gave the US no competitive fiscal advantage and didn’t encourage buying more than the economy was selling.

Also, McKinley sold his protectionist ideas by promising that tariffs would replace income tax. If the same promise were on offer today, I’m sure most Americans – most anyone – would be ecstatic. But it isn’t, and the purely economic arguments for tariffs are spurious.

The gold standard is now a distant memory, and even paper money is on the way out. America sits at the hub of the world’s financial system, and her sovereign debt is denominated in her own currency. That encourages rapacious spending on the part of both the state and the public.

Above all, since McKinley’s presidency, the whole US economy has done an about-face, turning away from producing and towards consuming. It’s not the steel manufacturer in Pittsburgh who is king, but a Mr Smith in Wichita who buys tools made of steel at his local hardware store.

And if those tools cost 15 per cent more due to the government’s urge to protect a couple of thousand jobs in the steel industry, Mr Smith will hurt. More important, he’ll have less money left over to buy products made by successful companies that don’t need protection, hurting them as well.

This is a crude way of communicating yet another truism: a trade war has no winners. Both countries involved lose, and it’s not a foregone conclusion which one will lose more. No sound economic argument in favour of tariffs exists, which doesn’t mean no argument, full stop.

A threat of extortionist tariffs can have the same effect as a threat of military invasion. If the other country takes the threat seriously, it may reconsider some practices the issuer of the threat finds objectionable. But I just wish Donald Trump didn’t take the public for fools with his specious references to McKinley. These just don’t work, Mr President.

Sigmund Freud made numerous admiring references to Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book Psychology of Crowds. But in spite of that, that book was good.

A crowd isn’t just more than the sum of its parts, argued Le Bon, but something qualitatively different. Its principal characteristics are “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement or the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others”.

I loathe crowds with unmitigated passion, partly because of physical aversion and partly because I grew up in a country where individuality was discouraged to the point of being proscribed.

We were all ordered on pain of death to toe the Party’s ‘general line’ in the spirit of ‘proletarian collectivism’, to scream ourselves hoarse at rallies blessed by the appearance of whoever embodied the general line at the moment.

I left all that behind me when leaving the Soviet Union as a young man – or so I thought. I was wrong though. The inner need of some, dare I say most, people to be part of a baying throng exists independently of any political cause.

Hence it can be marshalled in support of any such cause, good, bad or something in between. One gets the impression that the desire to emulate a herd of cows all mooing at the same time lurks in most breasts, waiting for the right stimulus to come out.

That takes some predisposition, which I lack. As I grew older and wiser, my self-esteem was abating in inverse proportion. But whether it was at its apex when I was a youngster or at its nadir as I am now, I’ve always refused to share in a collective conscience. If I go to hell, I’ll do so in my own fashion, not as part of some corporate entity.

In that connection I remember a conversation I had with an older French friend some 20 years ago. During the war he had fought with the Free French, ending the war in Berlin. Serving as an army officer, he said, were the best years of his life.

I said I could never be a soldier because I hated taking orders. “I didn’t mind taking orders,” he replied, “because I liked giving them.” “That,” I said, “is something I’d dislike even more.”

This foray into the past isn’t as an exercise in solipsism, but merely an attempt to sketch a mental and psychological vantage point from which I observe with distaste or even horror the mass psychosis surrounding Donald Trump. The videos of him appearing at MAGA rallies remind me of the Walpurgisnacht I witnessed in the USSR and also of the newsreels depicting Mussolini with his black-shirted mobs.

This isn’t about any specific policies put forth by Trump. These must be analysed on merit, irrespective of the source or the mass response they elicit.

In fact, I quite like most of Trump’s policies, although not all. In fact, speaking to a virulently anti-Trump American at a party last autumn, I said (inexcusably rudely) that voting for Harris was a certifiable symptom of a mental disorder.

Some of Trump’s policies may come to grief, or they may not. Most, I believe, will produce a beneficial outcome, and none is likely to result in a disaster. But his basking in mass adulation, encouraging the herd instincts described by Le Bon, is a disaster already. Its corrupting effect is much more toxic than the failure of any policy can ever be.

Trump isn’t the threat to democracy his detractors depict him to be with hysterical spittle-sputtering that matches the eye-popping enthusiasm of MAGA crowds. But then neither is he the saviour of mankind.

Trump has been in the public eye for almost as long as I’ve been in the West, and I remember his appearances on American TV when he was a relatively young man in his late 30s, early forties. Comparing those memories with the reality of Trump today, I feel certain that since then he must have assiduously cultivated his gesticulation, facial expressions and jutting jaw in, perhaps unwitting, imitation of another mass communicator, Mussolini.

Many observers have pointed out this parallel, and Private Eye spoofed it by mislabelling the two photographs placed side by side. Most of such commentators dislike everything Trump stands for, which I don’t. But the parallel is unmistakable, as is the crowd’s reaction.

While it’s silly and disingenuous to equate Trump’s policies with Mussolini’s, I fail to see much difference between hysterical crowds screaming “Il Duce! Il Duce!” and hysterical crowds screaming “Make America great again!” And neither can I ignore the similarity of the two men’s reaction to human beings acting like a herd of dehumanised creatures.

Even when they are on their own, having a civilised conversation over a glass of something, Trump’s camp followers – far from all of them Americans, by the way – display the characteristics Le Bon identified in crowds. They may leave the crowd in body, but in spirit they remain its fragments.

People who are otherwise eminently capable of exercising critical judgement put that faculty on hold when Trump or his policies come up. Trump is beyond criticism, just as Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini were to their acolytes. That they were evil and he isn’t is true but beside the point. I’m talking about people suspending their humanity and acting on knee-jerk instinct.

Trump’s acolytes bestow the kind of adulation on their idol that Jesus Christ didn’t even demand for himself. As he put it, “And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

In the eyes of his supporters, Trump is entitled to the same protection against criticism as that enjoyed by the Holy Ghost but not by Christ himself. And they defend that position with the ardour of zealots worshipping a secular cult.

Any criticism of a Trump policy, even if amply supported with facts and reasoned arguments, is rejected out of hand. There is no disagreement with Trump; there is only heresy. Everything Trump does is God’s gift to mankind simply because Trump does it.

This upsets me, even though I can reiterate that I wholeheartedly support most of Trump’s initiatives. But by cultivating this kind of animalistic following he risks undoing everything good he may try to do.

Someone demanding and encouraging such a response will eventually believe his own infallibility, even if he didn’t start out with that arrogant conviction, which Trump might have done. And the leader of any great nation, whatever its politics, depends on wise and, if need be, critical counsel.

Someone with Trump’s obvious character flaws, of which narcissism takes pride of place, is likely to ignore criticism and get rid of those brazen enough to offer it. That may lead him to gross errors of judgement, to which none of us sinners is ever immune.

As for those who worship and hate him with equal uncritical passion, they relinquish the advantage of being human, a moral and cerebral agent possessing and keeping up his own individual account with truth. That upsets me because I’m a closet humanist who believes we are all supposed to be made in a certain image and likeness.

In a word, you can’t. Not if you proceed from any rational criteria or such outdated notions as sound economics or democratic choice.

If you still stubbornly cling to those obsolete ideas, you’ll never understand why Labour is visibly pushing Britain towards customs union with the EU and, eventually and inexorably, some sort of sub-membership.

A customs union is a time-dishonoured trick for dragging countries into a single superstate. It was first used and refined by Prussia in the 19^th century, when the lesser German principalities were either seduced or coerced to enter the Zollverein.

That was sold as a customs union, just as the EEC was sold as merely a way to realise economies of scale by close cooperation among European countries. In both cases, that was a lie. The real purpose was political, to create, respectively, a single pan-Germanic state and a federal European superstate.

Considering that we already have a free trade agreement with the EU, there seems to be no conceivable economic reason to relinquish the sovereignty won, and since then abused, by Brexit. But I did tell you Labour isn’t about the economy.

It’s about Marxist longings that include the urge to exact revenge on the upper classes and an equally powerful craving to create a single, communist world state. As The Communist Manifesto says, “working men have no country”, which commandment gave rise to a particularly vile form of internationalism.

If you wonder about precise definitions, don’t. For Marxists, such as Starmer and his gang, words mean whatever they want them to mean at any given moment. Thus, their current definition of the upper classes includes even people at the lower end of middle-class incomes, while their ‘working people’ are what used to be called lumpen proletariat.

As typical Marxists, they disregard the wishes of the very demos in whose name they supposedly govern. Britons voted for Brexit in greater numbers than they had ever voted for anything else, and most did so out of their dislike of uncontrolled immigration.

The previous Tory governments were socialist too, but they weren’t Marxist. That’s why they went through the motions of trying to keep those criminal cross-Channel boats at bay, a pretence that Labour has since abandoned.

Whatever loose controls the Tories tried to impose have fallen by the wayside, and one understands why. Swarms of cultural aliens landing on our shores inflict damage on traditional Britishness, something Marxism loathes. They also swell the welfare rolls, which serves the dual purpose of beggaring the economy (aka ‘the rich’) and bringing more people under state control.

Edging closer to Europe won’t make our trade with the EU any freer, but it’s practically guaranteed to scupper any chance of a trade deal with the US. Say what you will about Trump, but he detests Marxism and surely he can see through its crypto variety favoured by Labour.

He also hates the EU and was a great fan of Brexit (I detect a causal relationship there). Moreover, he likes to be known as an Anglophile, a passion he evinces mainly by his affection for Scottish golf courses and the royal family.

That’s why Britain has so far not figured among the targets for the tariffs Trump has imposed already or plans to do so shortly. But ‘so far’ are the operative words. If Trump detects that the Starmer government is acting in character by indulging its Marxist instincts and edging closer to the EU, he may – almost definitely will – slap the same tariffs on Britain.

Even if he doesn’t, we can kiss any hope of a trade deal with the US good-bye. That grim prospect becomes even more real when Starmer reiterates his reluctance to raise our defence spending beyond its current suicidal level.

However, whatever happens, it’s wrong to regard the Labour government as a failure. I looked up ‘success’ in the dictionary and found out it means “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”. Since, unlike Marxists, we use words in their proper meaning, we must declare Starmer’s government a rip-roaring success.

They are doing exactly what they set out to do: turn Britain into a fully, as opposed to quasi-, socialist country, run by a Marxist nomenklatura, whose “aim or purpose” is to shove its perverse dogma down the people’s collective throat. If the people become impoverished as a result, so much the better.

After all, Marxists proclaim their undying affection for the downtrodden. Hence it stands to reason, their kind of reason that is, that they must increase the number of the downtrodden. This is a task socialists of every kind accomplish with invariable elan, making them a success on their own terms.

Take it from someone who had to study eight compulsory Marxist disciplines at university, the only way to understand Labour is to assess it by Marxist criteria. This isn’t to say that they too had to scrutinise recondite communist texts at university (those of them who, unlike our Deputy Prime Minister, actually went to one).

In all likelihood they never advanced past incendiary leaflets or, in extremis, The Communist Manifesto. Yet the way they’ve lived their lives, the company they’ve kept, the papers they’ve read, the meetings they’ve attended have all conspired to inject Marxist toxins directly into their viscera, bypassing any rational cognition.

Brace yourself for the worst: it hasn’t yet come. But any student of Marxism knows it will.

For want of the right word, a battle may be lost. And this is a battle President Trump has engaged, with the few sane people still around hoping he’ll win.

Mr Trump has commendably ordered federal employees to remove their pronouns from their e-mail signatures, firing another salvo at DEI insanity. I often describe it as such, but keeping in mind that there is a subversive method in that madness.

The woke Lefties know that the path to their autocracy lies through glossocracy, controlling people’s minds by controlling their language. To continue the military analogy, words are the units taking part in that battle, and surrendering even one of them weakens the position of righteousness.

Trump seems to understand that, and hence his order. But his troops still ceded his positions by allowing the woke Left to run away with one key word. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene unwittingly highlighted that retreat by displaying a sign outside her office, saying: ‘There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE “Trust the science!” ‘

The quotation marks around “Trust the science” can mean only two things in a world governed by proper usage. Either the phrase is a direct quote from a recognised source, which it isn’t, or Mrs Greene means one shouldn’t trust the science, which she doesn’t. Using quotation marks to add emphasis is as illiterate as it is, alas, widespread.

I wonder if Republicans have decided they owe it to their leader to support his cavalier disregard for proper syntax, but this is a separate matter. What concerns me here is that the sign is wrong on a more fundamental level.

Let me just give you what I consider the proper version and you’ll know what I’m driving at. The sign should read either “There are two sexes: male and female. Trust the science!” or “There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Trust the grammar!”

Know what I mean? Gender is a grammatical, not biological, category. Pronouns have genders, three of them; people have sexes, two in number.

The Left started the corruption of the term to add a dimension of self-identification and to downplay the ironclad biological distinction Mrs Greene has in mind. Yes, they say, biologically speaking there may be only two sexes, male and female, but that doesn’t matter one jot. What’s important is how a person identifies, which ‘gender’ ‘they’ (never he or she) chooses.

Letting the adversary corrupt language in this fashion is tantamount to ceding a vital position. That’s how battles get lost, and then wars.

Trump’s next executive order should be a ban on the use of the word ‘gender’ in that subversive meaning. But the marching order he has already issued is something all decent people should applaud.

But, unlike Trump’s declaration of war on wokery, his readiness to start a trade war is ill-considered. But not in every respect.

He is about to slap 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, along with a 10 per cent levy on China. Also, he “absolutely” promises to put tariffs on the EU which, Trump said, “has treated us so terribly”.

It’s wrong to pan these predictable announcements roundly. Tariffs may be imposed for good or bad reasons, and we should be able to know the difference.

As I understand the president, and he isn’t always easy to understand, the tariffs on those three countries are mainly punitive, with the transgressions committed by Canada and Mexico evidently seen as 2.5 times worse than those perpetrated by China.

Trump wants to punish America’s northern and southern neighbours for failing to control the flow of illegal migrants and illicit drugs across the border. If so, though its effectiveness remains to be seen, the punishment is just.

The same goes for tariffs on China, whose global economic conduct is appalling. Any step taken to slow down China’s quest for strategic supremacy should be welcomed, even if it comes at a price.

The EU is about to be penalised for mistreating the US, though Trump didn’t specify exactly which offences he means. That doesn’t really matter: the EU mistreats everything and everyone it comes in contact with, and in any number of ways, take your pick.

If Trump indeed plans to impose tariffs on America’s largest trade partners for punitive and strategic reasons, he’ll find no disagreement in these quarters. But he genuinely seems to think that the US will also derive an economic benefit, and there I think he is wrong.

“We’re going to put tariffs on chips. We’re going to put tariffs on oil and gas. That will happen fairly soon, think around the 18^th of February, and we’re going to put a lot of tariffs on steel,” Trump said.

“Tariffs don’t cause inflation. They cause success,” he added, conceding, however, that there could be “temporary, short term disruption”. “But the tariffs are going to make us very rich and very strong,” he said.

The statement about inflation and success is simply wrong, as any economist will confirm. In his first term, Trump provided direct proof of this when he slapped tariffs on steel. As a result, he protected some 3,000 jobs in the US steel industry – while causing the collateral damage of about 70,000 job losses in industries dependent on steel.

America may get away with levying tariffs on oil and gas, considering that her own hydrocarbon industries are in rude health. Her economy may suffer if foreign producers retaliate in kind, but in general energy autarky is a distinct and good prospect for the US economy. That’s more than one can say for her other industries.

Imposing tariffs on chips, for example, is cloud cuckoo land, considering that 68 per cent of the world’s chips, and over 90 per cent of the most advanced ones, come from Taiwan – and most of the rest from China.

Tariffs will make chips more expensive, driving up the price of all products that use them, which nowadays is to say just about all products. When it takes more money to chase the same volume of goods, inflation ensues – this is plain common sense and the ABC of economics.

One wonders what they taught young Donald at Wharton, but whatever it was it certainly wasn’t that “tariffs cause success”. The disruption they’ll produce may indeed be “temporary, short-term”, but only if Trump stops them after a while. Otherwise they’ll cause lasting damage.

Trump does come both rough and smooth, and his bag of goodies is very much mixed. But on balance his first policies are at least interesting and mostly promising.

By contrast, our own government policies are a different mixed bag, delivering as they do both doom and gloom. There are things HMG can learn from the US president — but won’t.

This question in no way implies that he shouldn’t have won. On the contrary, the ideas Trump shared with the electorate, the promises he made, were much more sound than those of his rival.

No, take that comparative back, let’s talk in absolutes. His ideas were mostly sound, whereas his rival’s weren’t. Moreover, he could be confidently predicted to carry his ideas out or at least do his best to try.

Yet better programmes don’t necessarily win elections under conditions of universal suffrage, nor do bad programmes necessarily lose them. For example, everything Labour proposed during their campaign last year was guaranteed to produce a disaster. And yet they won by a whopping majority.

Is the American electorate more sophisticated? In fact, I’ve heard MAGA people go out of their way to compliment the voting public who, they claim, saw through the Democrats’ Left-wing policies and revealed their true conservative nature. This ignores the fact that exactly the same electorate, give or take, elected Biden four years ago and earlier gave two terms to Barack Obama, that living argument against affirmative action.

It was Socrates who, according to Plato, first decried indiscriminate democracy. Voting, Socrates said, was a skill and, like any other skill, it had to be developed, not awarded as an automatic birthright. Specifically, an essential qualification was a heightened ability for critical thought, knowing the difference between truth and falsehood, fact and judgement, opinion and argument, likely and unlikely.

Anyone who says today’s masses in any country, including the US, have that ability is lying, probably for ideological reasons. Voting for most people is a knee-jerk reaction to some irritants, either positive or negative. Usually it’s the latter, with most people voting not so much for one candidate as against the other.

Our 2024 general election is again a prime example: even many Britons who tend to vote Tory went for Labour because, according to them, the Tory government was useless. So it was, but they lacked the skill Socrates considered essential. They couldn’t put two and two together to see that Labour would be even worse, catastrophically so.

That’s why Trump won not just because the voters found his programme to be better upon mature deliberation. That alone wouldn’t have carried the day, and even his rival’s vapid vacuity, though doubtless helpful, wouldn’t have been decisive.

Trump realised that underneath the outer shell of wokery the electorate wore either willingly or under peer pressure sat a vast reservoir of uniquely American patriotism. And he had the demagogic skills to tap into that reservoir more successfully than any candidate since Ronald Reagan.

When Trump shouted about the Democrats keeping America from being great again, he was a preacher fulminating against heretics and for true faith. He was a priest of the secular American creed of self-worship, replete with messianic connotations.

Winthrop’s (and Christ’s) “city upon a hill” and O’Sullivan’s “manifest destiny” came together in Trump’s rhetoric, and sparks flew. Americans were served a reminder of their secular cult of national exceptionalism, shamed about their prior apostasy, and their knees jerked.

It so happened that this time around they voted for the right candidate since Harris would have done to the US what Starmer is doing to Britain. But a similar osmotic appeal could under different circumstances have brought to power someone considerably less qualified to wield it.

For over two centuries, Americans were taught that their country is more than just a country. It’s God’s message to the world, the fulfilment of His plans for mankind, a lesson every other country should heed. That’s how they were conditioned to understand national greatness, and Trump found a way to refresh that lesson in their minds.

I’m aware of only one major country other than the US where patriotism takes on a quasi-religious dimension: Russia, with her self-serving idea of the Third Rome, replaced for a while with an equally messianic communism and then revived.

The other two nations I know well, British and French, aren’t immune to regarding their countries as exceptional, but any attempt to express that feeling in quasi-religious terms would elicit a wry smile in London or Paris.

Britons may happily sing their intention to “build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land”, but deep down they know there can be only one Jerusalem and it already exists. Anything else can only be an impostor, or else a metaphysical simulacrum.

Yet there are many Americans who understand ‘a city upon a hill’ and ‘manifest destiny’ literally. This messianic feeling continues to fertilise American grassroots, for all the attempts of the liberal intelligentsia to weed it out.

Donald Trump is both a product and promulgator of the secular religion of American self-sacralisation. He sensed its dormant vitality and awakened it with consummate skill.

One has to be American to stand up in response to that clarion call, and my American passport is long since expired. However, one has to acknowledge that the US has become a great country largely on the strength of her religious self-worship.

Unlike the Russian vintage, this has been channelled into creating a secular paradise as free of suffering as it’s possible to achieve in this world. But it’s a peculiar paradise, suspect and ultimately unfathomable to people weaned on (if eventually off) the culture owing its existence to a formative act of suffering.

By all means, we should root for Trump’s America, regret her failures and applaud her successes, especially since we all stand to lose from the former and gain from the latter. But we’d try to emulate her at our peril since that would involve repudiating not just Britain’s national history but also her national character.

Anyone who thinks that’s possible or indeed desirable is deceiving himself.   

Three typological figures have traditionally stood against the spiritual background.

The religious man says he believes. The atheist says he doesn’t believe and can explain why. The agnostic says he doesn’t know one way or the other.

The difference between the last two types is marginal. Neither of them believes in God, but the atheist is prepared to support that position with arguments, invariably spurious ones. The agnostic shies away from the argument but not from the disbelief.

As the masses march through history, a typical progression one can glean is from faith to agnosticism and then to atheism, that is first to doubt and then to aggressive denial. By and large, it was the believer who dominated the first 15 centuries of Christianity, with only a trickle of agnosticism dripping into the mighty stream of religion, and but the odd drop of atheism.

Then, over the next few centuries, faith ran incrementally drier, and agnosticism itself became a mighty stream with a few atheist tributaries. In the 19^th century atheism gathered strength, and in the 20^th it broke banks to flood the social landscape.

None of these has disappeared: the atheist, agnostic and believer are still extant. But none of them dominates any longer. A new type has appeared to shove the old ones aside.

He doesn’t believe, disbelieve, nor even says he can’t make up his mind. He just doesn’t care one way or another: the subject of God isn’t one on which he expends any mental energy.

Whenever religion comes up at a party, apathy overcomes him. He yawns and moves towards another group, where discussion revolves around subjects that really matter: sports, investments, home decoration, TV shows, sex, sometimes politics. Real life in other words.

Since this type deserves his taxonomic slot, I’d call him an apathist. His whole being exists on one plane, religion on another, and the two planes never intersect even tangentially. He has more important things to worry about, and when he hears a reference to God he is neither indignant nor doubtful. He is apathetic.

I also find him excruciatingly boring. A man who never asks what Dostoyevsky called “the accursed questions” about first causes and last things really has no interest at all in matters of the spirit. Such questions force their way into the conscience of anyone who has ever read serious books, heard serious music or pondered anything of serious interest.

The apathist is several rungs below the vagrant in the O. Henry story The Cop and the Anthem. When cold weather comes, that man deliberately commits minor crimes just to spend the inclement months in the warmth of a gaol. And then he walks past a church, with the sound of an organ chorale heard out in the street. The vagrant is transfixed; he feels in touch with eternity and decides to make something worthwhile of his life (and at precisely that climactic point he has his collar felt).

Our apathist has never had such an experience. He may be more comfortable than O. Henry’s hero, he may be rich and even educated, after a fashion. But, to me, he is still a crushing bore. Someone not worth talking to or indeed about.

However, the apathist has one thing going for him. He may be vulgar and probably is, but at least he doesn’t have to be. All he has to do is continue to ignore that subject altogether. The agnostic and the atheist don’t have that option, at least not when they broach religion, as, unlike the apathist, they tend to do from time to time.

The agnostic’s vulgarity quotient is lower, and it comes into play only when he laments that the proof of God’s existence is lacking. That statement ought to be part of the dictionary definition of inanity.

A man can’t prove God’s existence by definition: a higher system can understand the lower one, but not vice versa. The greatest religious thinker of all time, Thomas Aquinas, knew that, which is why it’s a mistake to refer to his famous Five Ways as proofs of God’s existence.

St Thomas himself never called them that. He came up with five deep and impeccably logical arguments (from ‘first mover’, from universal causation, from contingency, from degree and from final cause), but he had the intelligence and humility not to call them proofs.

He ended each argument with the words “and that is what we call God” (not “that is what God is“), showing that this was the greatest height to which the human mind can aspire. After that an impassible partition comes down: thus far, but no further.

The same goes for the earlier ontological argument put forth by St Anselm of Canterbury. That was an exercise in philosophy, not forensic proof. Anselm defined God as “a being than which no greater can be conceived.” Even someone who denies the existence of God, he argued, must have such a concept in his mind.

Conversely, someone who denies or even doubts God for lack of the kind of proof one expects in a lab forms a conclusion on the basis of ignorance and absence of any cogent thought. That’s neither grown-up nor clever. It’s intellectually vulgar.

At least, the agnostic doesn’t push his vulgarity to an unbearable level. He just shrugs, says he can’t be sure one way or the other and leaves it at that.

The atheist is much, much worse. He emblazons his vulgarity on a banner and waves it around for all to see every time he tries to prove that God doesn’t exist.

These days I can’t be bothered to join such verbal jousts, other than saying that he’s right. God doesn’t exist. It’s because of God that everything else exists, which is an oblique reference to both Anselm and Aquinas.

But the atheist seldom stops there. He has a bit between his teeth, and nothing can stop his gallop towards the far reaches of vulgarity.

He’ll commit the gross logical faux pas of mentioning natural science, not realising that he is crawling along a separate – and lower – epistemological level. He’ll talk about the continuing misery in the world, showing his ignorance of elementary theodicy. And he’ll do so with the passion of a zealous vulgarian proud of his vulgarity.

God looks down on those shenanigans and smites the atheist with the lightning of inanity. A miracle happens, one I’ve witnessed many times.

An otherwise intelligent, erudite and even subtle thinker immediately starts sounding like a blithering idiot, something he never does when any other subject comes up. I’ve heard people whose logic is forged of high-grade steel commit infantile logical errors that would put a secondary school pupil to shame (or would have done before the collapse of our education).

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat, Romans used to say, repeating the thought first uttered in Greek by Euripides and Plato. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” They do, but gods don’t stop their punishment there. They also make such a person sound vulgar.

As one of the 24 members of the Russell Group, Cardiff University is among Britain’s finest, whatever this distinction means these days.

That’s why it’s telling that its vice-chancellor, Wendy Larner, is about to swing an axe, citing a black hole in funding. Over 400 academic jobs will be cut, mostly in modern languages, ancient history, music, religion, theology and nursing.

With the exception of nursing, which really belongs in a medical school, these subjects should be the mainstays in the curriculum of any university worthy of the name, never mind one of Britain’s finest.

“I know that these proposals impact some staff more than others and they will cause a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety for those potentially impacted,” said Prof Larner, whose own syntax suggests an urgent need for a remedial English course.

Then again, she is a sociologist whose alliterative field is ‘globalisation, governance and gender’. One can impact an impact in that discipline by speaking in impactful bureaucratese only. In fact, that must be a job requirement.

You’ll be relieved to know that the vice-chancellor hasn’t announced any cuts in either her administrative and DEI staff or in her own annual £290,000 salary. Nor do I think she will: such things must be held sacred.

Some people may wonder why the university’s non-academic staff of 3,660 outnumbers its 3,419 dons. Yet every one of those admin jobs is much more vital: there are forms to fill by the tonne, and it takes a large labour force to make sure diverse people are equitably included.

Such is the zeitgeist: any public institution functioning according to modern principles, be it an NHS hospital, a major charity or a university, is increasingly dedicated to activities extraneous to its mission. The ideal for which they strive is hospitals getting rid of doctors and nurses, charities of their ultimate recipients, and universities of academics. Such people only get in the way of the higher purpose pursued by such outfits.

At universities, it’s the humanities that bear the brunt of redundancies. We don’t need historians, linguists, musicologists or theologians. We need DEI enforcers.

This again compels me to recall my youth misspent in the Soviet Union, so here comes another sleepless night of cold sweats. There, in 1919, Lenin ordered the execution of the few grand dukes still alive after the spate of 1918 murders.

One of those nobles, Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, was an historian renowned well beyond Russia’s borders. The Enlightenment Commissar Lunacharsky, who leavened his bloodthirstiness with smatterings of cultural pretensions, cited that fact when asking Lenin to commute the sentence.

Comrade Lenin’s reply laid out the blueprint that evidently still inspires our universities. “The revolution,” he said, “doesn’t need historians”. That uppercut of a response carried the day, and Nikolai Mikhailovich followed his relations into an unmarked grave.

Lenin’s adage can work the other way too: no need for historians betokens a revolution under way. As part of it, British universities are going the way of their Soviet counterparts.

Rather than elevating students’ minds, they combine the functions of brainwashing laundries and trade schools. This academic debauchment is so far expressed in a less sanguinary fashion than it was in Russia circa 1919, but the effect is similar.

Cardiff blamed the state of its finances on “declining international student applications”, and one wonders why Chinese and Indian youngsters, the principal groups of foreign students in Britain, are shunning Cardiff University. Could it be because they are more interested in real knowledge than in gender studies and DEI?

Cardiff doesn’t hold exclusive rights to this nonsense. Other Russell Group universities are following the same path at the same speed if half a step behind.

Durham University is slashing 200 academic jobs and Newcastle University is adding 300 to the unemployment rolls. Some 72 per cent of English universities are getting into the red, and more than half of all UK universities are laying off academics or cutting courses.

You get no prizes for guessing which courses they are cutting. Gender studies? Women’s studies? Black studies? Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, the government is raising tuition fees from £9,250 to £9,535, but that’s unlikely to plug the hole made by foreign students voting with their feet. That increase will be a drop in the bucket, considering that universities are currently making a loss of about £2,500 for each domestic student.

However, when Labour charges more for anything, be it taxes, duties or education, the purpose is usually not fiscal but punitive. Britain under their stewardship is the only Western country imposing VAT on school fees, which, with thousands of pupils having to migrate to overcrowded state schools, has a negative net effect on state revenue. But at least the middle classes are taught who’s boss, so they don’t get ideas above, or even at, their station.

That’s Leninism in action, if so far without attendant violence. The social pyramid has to be truncated, with another top put in its place. Statesmen, nobles, haute bourgeoisie and scholars have fallen by the wayside, with socialist apparatchiks taking their place.

Socialism doesn’t eliminate social hierarchies; it just puts at the top those who barely qualify to be even at the bottom.

The damage this does in academe is the most devastating for being the most enduring. We can just about survive a few years of inept government staffed with jumped-up nomenklatura. But I’m not sure we can ever recover from the knock-on effect of universities run by experts in ‘globalisation, governance and gender’.

The degrees they dole out are increasingly worthless, and people are beginning to realise this. That has to be the greatest part of the financial difficulties experienced by even our top universities — and of the social disaster lurking just round the corner.

Now, if at all possible, one should never pan without proposing, so goes the imperative British wisdom. Alas, doing something about the quality of our higher education would involve sweeping long-term changes to the whole modern ethos.

I don’t know how that can be accomplished without a revolutionary upheaval, and I detest revolutionary upheavals. However, I can offer an instant solution to the funding problems of our universities.

Do a Trump on them: sack at least 80 per cent of the administrative staff and eliminate DEI departments altogether. And oh, by the way, that same approach would also do wonders for public finances in all other areas too.

As for Cardiff University specifically, I’d suggest it start by getting rid of the vice-chancellor. She isn’t up to the job.

Who has insisted that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him? And that, had he got his just deserts, Russia wouldn’t have invaded the Ukraine?

If your answer is ‘Trump’, you are only half-right. Yes, Trump did say those things, and more than once. Yet the other day Putin repeated those statements practically verbatim.

“I’ve always had a businesslike, pragmatic and even trusting relationship with the current president,” Putin said. “And I can’t help but agree that if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020, the crisis in Ukraine might not have emerged in 2022.”

Call me a Trump hater and report me to the MAGA police, but this kind of consonance bothers me, as it should bother anyone concerned with the advance of Russian fascism into Europe.

Suspicions of collusion between Trump and Putin have been floating about for years. A thorough investigation into the matter revealed no evidence to vindicate such suspicions, but, as Carl Sagan once said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Absence of evidence may only mean the perpetrators were adept at hiding it. Considering that in this case one of the parties is a career KGB officer, the requisite skills were always on tap.

Still, even when there is no evidence to indict, there may be enough evidence to suspect, especially if the two parties constantly provide grounds for sound conjecture. Last week, Trump did just that by giving his (and Putin’s) version of the war.

Essentially, he apportioned the blame equally between Putin and Zelensky, an even-handedness that absolves the aggressor of a criminal violation of international law.

Trump magnanimously allowed that Putin was slightly rash when he set out to recolonise the Ukraine and stamp out her hard-won independence. However, “Zelensky… shouldn’t have allowed this to happen either. He’s no angel,” added Trump.

Fair enough, the last time I looked at Zelensky’s photographs I didn’t see a pair of wings attached to his back. But a victim doesn’t have to possess celestial qualities to be victimised. Raping a prostitute, for example, is still a felony.

The Polish leaders in 1939 were far from being cherubim too, and yet the world had no problem identifying Nazi Germany as the aggressor. Nor could Gen. Mannerheim and other Finnish leaders be readily confused with seraphim – and yet the League of Nations kicked the Soviet Union out for committing an act of blatant aggression against Finland later the same year.

Zelensky has his flaws, and so does his country. I’ve heard Putin fans accuse the Ukraine of corruption a thousand times if I’ve heard it once, and yes, there is plenty of corruption there. Not as much as in Russia but enough. So does that justify a brutal invasion, mass murder and indiscriminate bombardment of residential areas. Does that justify rampant rapes, torture, looting, kidnapping of children?

Anyone answering yes to these questions should push that magnetised iron bar away from his moral compass. It’s going haywire.

Getting from moral to practical matters, how does Trump think Zelensky could have not “allowed this to happen”? What should he have done on 24 February, 2022, when enemy armour crossed the Ukraine’s border and advanced on Kiev?

Simple. Zelensky should have surrendered immediately because Russia is so much stronger. But let’s not paraphrase Trump’s pronouncements; they speak for themselves:

“Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful,” Trump said. “He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal.”

Is that the royal ‘we’? Yes it is.

“I could have made that deal so easily, and Zelensky decided that ‘I want to fight’,” Trump continued. This is, mildly speaking, disingenuous on more levels that one finds in your average Trump Tower.

First, on that fateful date Trump was in no position to make any deals, other than those involving the construction of yet another Trump Tower. He was not the US president then, and neither did he have any official capacity to act for the administration.

So that’s just our typical MAGAlamania, but it’s also much worse than that. No ‘deal’ (and I think Trump’s use of that word should be rationed by an act of Congress) could have been struck at that stage – not by Trump, not by Biden, not by NATO, not even by God Almighty.

Putin declared that the objective of the invasion was to “de-Nazify and demilitarise” the Ukraine, which is to wipe out her sovereignty and reincorporate her into Russia. His timetable for that operation was short: three days to a week.

Unlike Trump’s defunct 24-hour deadline for ending the war, Putin’s plan was realistic. Had the Ukrainian army not put up resistance, Russian armour could have indeed covered the 400 miles from the border to Kiev in three days.

And then no deal could have been made any longer. Zelensky and his whole government would have been murdered, Putin’s stooge Yanukovych or another quisling would have been wheeled in, and the world would have been faced with a fait accompli.

An independent Ukraine would have sunk into oblivion, millions of Ukrainians would have been purged, more millions robbed, and the country would have been forced to become a Russian satrap. Yet there was that obstreperous Zelensky who “decided that ‘I want to fight’.”

The blame for the ensuing massacre is thus apportioned equally and, if anything, Zelensky is slightly more culpable. By taking on “a much bigger entity” he scuppered the chance of a deal, meaning he is neither “pragmatic” nor “businesslike”.

It’s from the wobbly platform of such understanding that Trump will start negotiating with Putin, possibly allowing Zelensky to sit in at the talks between the two grown-ups.

An essential part of that understanding is Trump’s certainty that the US has squandered too much money supporting the Ukraine. Yet the figures he has cited in support of that belief are as factual as the US taking credit for splitting the atom.

The US, he said, spent “200 billion dollars more than Europe” in support of the Ukraine. But hey, if facts stand in the way of a deal, then so much the worse for facts.

In reality, the US Congress has allocated (as distinct from delivered) about $170 billion to the Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion, $65 billion of it in military hardware. The corresponding number for the EU is $145 billion, plus another $15 billion contributed by Britain. I detect almost parity there, but let’s not quibble about numbers. It’s the thought that counts.

Moral and pragmatic often go their separate ways in politics, but this is one of those situations (which are more numerous than is commonly believed) where they coincide. The moral position on the war has to be unequivocal, but then so does the strategic need.

An evil regime has a self-declared aim of reconstructing the Soviet empire, understood in the broad sense as the whole of Eastern Europe. Ten of those countries are NATO members, as now is Finland, a neighbour of Russia.

By heroically holding the invaders at bay, the Ukraine is the West’s first line of defence, with her blood filling the moat separating absolute evil from relative good (Western countries aren’t angelic either, let’s concede this point). Allowing the aggressor to overrun the Ukraine is bound to have the same consequences as the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s – but with a new twist.

Delivering a victory to Putin is tantamount to disassembling the system of collective security that has more or less kept Europe at peace for 80 years. A subsequent attack on a NATO country, most likely one of the Baltics, will put NATO before a stark choice. Either engage Russia in a full-blown, possibly nuclear, war or repudiate Article 5 of the NATO charter, leaving Europe at the mercy of Russian hordes.

I agree with Trump that Europe should invest much more in her defence and, unlike him, I also believe that both Europe and the US should remove all stops from their support of the Ukraine. This is the moral thing to do and it also happens to be the practical one.

Trump is also right when saying that the Ukraine “has had enough”, although I’d be tempted to add that so has Russia. Yes, the war must be ended, and the only way to do so is to bring the two countries to a negotiating table, with America perhaps overseeing the proceedings.

But starting the negotiations from the presumption of equal guilt means putting the Ukraine in an invidious losing position from kick-off. That’s why I see Trump and Putin singing in unison as a portent of gloom.

My advice to Trump is to find a spot somewhere between a deal and a holy crusade against evil, and use it as the starting point of any negotiations. Closer to the latter would be my preference, but then I too can be pragmatic in my expectations at times.

This phrase usually means making things worse. However, President Trump has hinted at the possibility of reversing its meaning.

Ostensibly speaking to the World Economic Forum at Davos but in reality to Putin and OPEC, he said: “If the [oil] price came down, the Russia-Ukraine war would end immediately.”

Don’t know about immediately, but Trump has a good point. Overlaying the historical graph of oil prices over that of Russia’s military forays one can see a different inverse relationship, as I’ve found out by following expert opinion.

Thus, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, when the oil price was at a record high. Corrected for inflation it equalled $140 in today’s money.

In 2008 Russia attacked Georgia. The oil price was still high, about $130, again in today’s money.

In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimea and set the Donbass on fire. The oil price was stubbornly staying in triple digits, at about $110 a barrel.

And the price was still $110 a barrel in 2022, when Russia embarked on a full-blown aggression against the Ukraine, plunging Europe into a war the likes of which hadn’t been seen since 1945.

Since then the price has come down, to about $78. But it’s still high enough for Putin to finance the war by circumventing Western sanctions and dumping his oil at sale prices to anyone willing to do business, mainly China.

That relationship also works the other way: Russia tends to succumb to peace overtures when the oil prices dip.

In 1986 Ronald Reagan struck a deal with Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer. The Saudis agreed to crash the price per barrel by stepping up their production. The prices went down from $140 a barrel to $30, and the button for Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan was pushed.

In January, 2015, the oil price dipped from $110 to $50 a barrel. A month later, Russia signed the Minsk agreements, which she broke the instant oil became more expensive again.

Oil economists believe that getting the price down to the 2015 level of about $50 will force Putin to sue for peace straight away. That strikes me as way too optimistic, the kind of optimism that can only ever be based on a deficit of knowledge.

If currently Russia is spending over a third of her budget on the war, a collapse in oil prices may raise that proportion to 50 or even 75 per cent. That would turn the Russian population into cold and hungry paupers deprived of even the bare essentials of life.

But that wouldn’t deter Putin, or at any rate wouldn’t do so immediately. Concern for the well-being or even lives of the people has never figured prominently on the Russian list of priorities, certainly not since 1917 and not all that much even before then.

Their conduct of the on-going war shows that treating lives with cavalier disregard hasn’t exactly gone out of fashion there. Putin’s generals are pursuing the war effort by paying no attention to the growing list of casualties. They are throwing wave after human wave at fortified positions, with their forces advancing through the puddles of their comrades’ blood.

Conditions in the rear haven’t yet reached catastrophic proportions, but the Russians are considerably worse off now than they were three years ago. Yet one doesn’t see any mass protests, nor any fiery headlines in the papers. Such is the nature of any totalitarian state – and of the Russian people whose tolerance of deprivations has been honed throughout their history.

Having said that, the avenue to peace that Trump hinted at looks promising. The president’s transactional talents may not work on the Russians, but the Saudis are more receptive to pressure. They may grab at any carrot dangled by Trump because they stand to lose a lot if he swings a stick.

Trump’s entreaty of “Drill, baby, drill” may produce the same effect: if America boosts her fracking effort, she can flood the markets with liquefied natural gas, which too is bound to push hydrocarbon prices down.

There is no reason for the oil price not to drop as far down as $30 or even $20. That would indeed crush the Russian economy, making any foreign forays unthinkable even for Putin and his accomplices.

The Saudis may scream bloody murder, but that’s where the carrot can come in. The US could offer OPEC countries any number of concessions that would make up for the lower price of their principal export. In any case, such a dip would only have to last as long as the war. Once it has ended, the prices may be allowed to seek their natural level.

Donald Trump is on to something here. He might have identified the only way for the Ukraine and her Western allies to occupy a position of strength in any negotiations with Russia. Instead of appealing to Putin’s nonexistent good nature, Trump could simply whip his trusted calculator out and show him a few simple sums.

Here, Vlad, this is what’ll happen to your economy at $50, $40, $30 or $20. And did I forget to mention it? Here’s a copy of my agreement with OPEC who are ready to do what it takes. So this is where you sign.

This approach has got to be more successful than trying to intimidate Russia with more sanctions they know how to circumvent, or to bully Zelensky with the threat of cutting supplies off. As a concomitant benefit, a period of cheap energy would inject some resuscitating medicine into the sclerotic veins of Western economies.

A footnote has to be attached to every pronouncement made by Trump, good, bad or indifferent. His words and his deeds have been known to go their separate ways, and he doesn’t always take the trouble of thinking before talking.

But I have a feeling that this time around he has found, and is prepared to act on, the right ploy for ending the war – not in 24 hours, not immediately, but soon. Best of luck, and do let’s hope the strategy will succeed.