Will Vladimir be fired?

For 14 years, Donald Trump starred in a "reality" TV show in which, each week, a poor-performing apprentice lost out in a competition for a $250,000 job to promote a Trump property. The host became famous for his tag line: "You're fired!" The joke ended when we hired him as our 45th president in November 2016. I wasn't the only one to suspect that he didn't actually want the job, that his campaign was just another Trump promotion. But he won, and he won again last November, only the second US president to be elected to two non-consecutive terms. Whether he will try for a third is anyone's guess.

Like a fool, I thought Trump would do better by Ukraine than Joe Biden, whose two years of dithering sent just enough help to prevent an outright defeat but never enough to risk Russia's humiliation. Then came that appalling brawl in the Oval Office on February 28, when our president and (worse!) vice-president scolded Zelensky like a fifth-grader who'd dared talk back to Teacher. This was followed by months of pleading with Putin ("Please, Vladimir!") and preemptively ceding fresh regions of Ukraine to Russian occupation.

But now it seems that Putin has overplayed his hand. "We are going to send some weapons," Trump said. "I'm very disappointed with the conversation I had today with President Putin.... We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin.... He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless."

Please, Donald! Fire the bastard!

Red Wedding and Operation Narnia

The Wall Street Journal this morning front-pages the incredible story of Israel's decades-long plans to stop Iran from developing nuclear missiles. Included were assassinations, training flights to Greece, a wink from the US president, drones and munitions smuggled into Iran, and even an actual wedding, that of Netanyahu's son. As a classical military operation, it even overshadows Ukraine's audacious Operation Spiderweb earlier this month. May Israel long be free, from the river to the sea!

You think?

"I consider [Putin] a person who is misguided," Trump said of the Russian dictator yesterday at the NATO meeting in the Netherlands.

Well, that's a start. As is NATO's decision to raise its defense spending to 3.5 percent of gross national product, plus 1.5 percent devoted to defense-related spending, significantly including aid to Ukraine. This is a level that no NATO member presently reaches, though Estonia is heading in that direction. And the US does spend 3.5 percent on its military, while sending nothing to Ukraine except insults from our president and vice president and the occasional sneer from our secretary of state. The great laggards of course are Spain and Canada, plus Slovenia, which is hardly a country at all.

Trump of course is notoriously fickle. Perhaps this latest flutter of common sense is only a refleciton of the fact that he hasn't talked to Putin lately and did spend nearly an hour chatting with Zelensky. He even hinted that the US might "find" some Patriot missiles to foil Russian attacks on Ukraine, which yesterday killed 23 civilians and wounded more than 300.

Well done, Mr President!

Sending our B-2 bombers laden with 30,000-pound bunker busters to destroy Iran's Fordow nuclear plant was a brave and necessary act. Good for Trump! What with his cringe-worthy romancing of Vladimir Putin and his (and JD Vance's) scolding of the Ukrainian president, I was beginning to fear that we'd traded Biden's dithering support of the embattled country for outright hostility to it. But apparently Benjamin Netanyahu has put some spine into Trump's back.

Let's hope that the bunker-busters are as powerful as advertised and that, even if they didn't actually penetrate the 300 feet of rock above the once-secret plant, they created an earthquake that shook the whole thing to rubble. Supposedly the US had twenty of the Massive Ordnance Penetrators -- MOPs! -- of which fourteen were used in the raid, a dozen on Fordow and two on the Natanz plant that Israel has alread pummeled. So there are still some MOPs available for a second strike on Fordow if one is needed.

Good. Let's hope the raid turns out well enough that Trump gets up the courage to shake a stick at his buddy in the Kremlin.

Happy birthday, US Army!

On Saturday, the US Army will celebrate its 250th anniversary. It is a year older than the country it defends. In all honesty, I didn't enjoy my two years and a day of active duty in what was formally known as the Army of the United States -- the draftee army, as opposed to the Regular Army. But shockingly -- to me, anyhow -- it was one of the most important things I ever did, because most of my writing life has been about the military, or anyhow about war.

I entered as a Private E-1 on January 6, 1956, and exited as a Specialist E-4 on January 6, 1958. (1956 was a Leap Year, so my two-year hitch lasted 731 days. I spent about two months in Infantry Basic at Fort Dix, NJ, followed by seven months at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, NC, followed by fifteen months at Headquarters, US Army Communications Zone, in Orleans, France.

Orleans was good duty. The US was in recession in 1958, and I was enthralled by Europe, so I took my discharge at Orleans and went to work a couple days later at the Overseas Weekly in Frankfurt, Germany, a newspaper selling to American GIs in Germany, France, and Italy. So in many ways that was a continuation of my Army career. I came home that October, and never held another full-time job.

I was with the US military in Vietnam for a few months in 1964, at which time I predicted we'd still be there in ten years, which was more or less correct. (We pulled out US ground forces in 1973 and Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975.) By the time we invaded Iraq, I was feeling rather out of the loop, so I signed up for a master's "programme" in War in the Modern World at King's College London. One of our assignments was to start a blog -- this blog. I'm still at it. Never really a soldier but still fascinated by soldiering.

"Why don't you say thank you!"

Our hillbilly elegist scolded the president of Ukraine for his lack of gratitude for US aid (which Messrs Trump and Vance have stopped). It's time now for Mr Vance to thank Mr Zelensky for Ukraine's incredible feat of arms on Sunday, launching drones on Russian strategic bombers all the way to Siberia. Whether it's 41 bombers damaged or destroyed, or merely 13 as a pro-Kremlin blogger claims, what other nation save possibly Israel could have smuggled 117 drones into Russia and triggered them remotely, each by its operator back in Ukraine? Indeed, like Israel's exploding pagers in Lebanon in last September, Operation Spiderweb will be taught in military classrooms for years to come.

And delighting me every time I think of it. Thank you, Volodymyr, thank you!

Veritas

In the curious way he has, our 46th president turned my mind toward Harvard's 384th commencement (assuming there were no years without at least one graduate) the other day. The ceremony has been wonderfully reported by Richard Rodgers, editor of the Harvard Salient who, with conservative tongue in cheek, explains that the Chaplain of the Day opened the exercises with thanks not to God or the eponymous Puritan clergyman but to the Native American tribe upon whose land the graduates were presumed to be standing. And the day was similarly closed by the Rev Matthew Potts, who "as typical throughout the week, ended the proceedings by giving a benediction without once invoking God."

Yes, the Salient is a conservative publication with offices at 8 Eliot Street "in the heart of Harvard Square" in Cambridge MA. An email subscription is free, but donations of course are welcome, and anything north of $150 gets you the year's print copies in the mail.

Book of the year!

2025 isn't half over, but I doubt it will bring us another book as compelling as On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. It was written in haste, so we have the terrorists coming in on "hand gliders", monsters that "pray" upon their victims, several sentences repeated, and some that seem to make no sense on first reading. No matter. It will be a best-seller, and it should be.

Douglas Murray was English-born and -educated, and he published his first book in his second year at Oxford. (However, he identifies himself as a New Yorker in this one.) He flew to Israel on October 8, 2023, the day after the atrocities in kibbutzim on Israel's border with Gaza, when some two thousand people were shot, stabbed, raped, and burned alive by Hamas soldiers and Gazan civilians who gleefully posted the videos online, using the victims' phones and social media accounts. The glee of the assassins was too often echoed by college professors and students in the US and Europe, even before Israel retaliated on Gaza, a war that Murray (and I) believe is perfectly justified. I downloaded the Kindle edition at ten o'clock in the morning and finished the book before I went to bed. It's hypnotic. Read it!