One war Trump got right

“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.