Two throbbingly inflamed world hot spots and the post-American question mark

What will the Very Stable Genius do regarding Ukraine and Israel?

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As I said in the last post, among the many claims on our attention worthy of serious discussion, the conflagrations in the Middle East and between Ukraine and Russia are the ones with immediate existential implications. Also, as I have asserted here many times, they are morally equivalent. In each case, a sovereign nation with a Western orientation has been under dire threat from vicious rogue actors. And in each case, the biggest variable in the prospects of the nation in question is how the United States, under the “leadership” of its president, is going to respond to the juncture to which each crisis has come.

It would be right on a moral level for the US to drop a GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator on the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant ensconced deep inside a mountain in Iran. That’s where the key component of Iran’s nuclear program is, and putting it out of commission would be the final blow to the theocracy’s apocalyptic ambitions.

Many have found Trump’s Truth Social post exhorting Tehran citizens to evacuate their city, as well, as the all-caps “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” post, and his cutting short his G7 participation to head back to Washington encouraging. They’re pretty confident that he’s been brought around.

I have to say that, in isolation, I did like his “I don’t care what she said” response to being reminded of Tulsi Gabbard’s March testimony to the House Intelligence Committee that Iran wasn’t working on a nuclear bomb.

But we know that the Very Stable Genius prizes being adored above all else, and a number of his most identifiable sycophants - think Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson (whom Trump does seem to have at least somewhat distanced himself from, calling him “kooky” in a recent social media post), and Marjorie Taylor Green - have publicly positioned themselves as being on the verge of disappointment with the object of their adulation. JD Vance and Charlie Kirk are willing to defer to Trump’s judgement on the matter.

But a slightly wider scope on Trump’s latest signals ought to temper any encouragement. It was only last month in Saudi Arabia that, at the Saudi Investment Forum, he ripped into “interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they didn’t understand themselves.” And it was only five days ago that he mused that the spate of assassinations of Iranian leaders might clear the field for a “deal.”

I hope the sober minds that I respect and turn to for clear-eyed analysis of world-stage developments will refrain from hanging their hats on any one thing Trump is saying at present. Yesterday’s Commentary podcast came uncomfortably close to declaring that, should the US bunker-bust Fordow, it would cement Trump’s stature as a momentous historical figure.

I submit that other factors would mitigate such a christening.

The most obvious is the other hot spot currently raging with peak intensity.

Yes, the US Embassy in Ukraine issued a statement condemning the massive Russian attack on Kiev two days ago, but made sure to couch it in morally murky rhetoric: “This senseless attack runs counter to President Trump's call to stop the killing and end the war."

Well, it’s not senseless for Putin’s viewpoint. It’s yet his latest display of utter disregard for the Very Stable Genius’s “stance.” If he can keep grinding Ukraine down with no effective pushback, it matters not what the US officially pronounces.

Consider that, while Trump was at the G7 summit, he took the occasion to spew his now-familiar self-glorifying crap about how there wouldn’t be a war in Ukraine had he been president circa 2014 when Russia’s removal from the then-G8 occurred. The reason for kicking Russia out was its annexation of Crimea.

In a late-May post here I said, “Let’s have no talk of taking him seriously but not literally. Let’s have no more opinion pieces keeping track of ‘good Trump-bad Trump’ moves.”

I’m full aware of the rejoinder to this. He’s all we - the inhabitants of Earth who want to avoid Armageddon and who continue to hope for a world where Western principles and a shared notion of decency can hold sway in international relations - have to go with. To want some beacon of clarity to do all the right things at this moment is to deny reality.

But there’s something awfully unseemly about the eggshell-treading with which the G7 carried on after Trump’s departure, as well as the hopeful tone on the part of well-meaning Israel supporters about Trump’s doing the right thing - whether for the right reasons or not - with regard to Iran. It all reeks of desperation.

If he were an actual towering statesman, along the lines of Alexander the Great or Charlemagne, we could look to accomplishments like the library at Alexandria or the layering of Christendom onto Western civilization to temper the rough ways in which those figures achieved what they did. But, in Trump’s case, all we have is a small and petty man who doesn’t give a flying flip about what the West is.

I know the hour is late and events are still moving very quickly. But somewhere, someone has to keep alive a discussion of what kind of world we ought to dare envision.