Tag Archives: Trump

NATO and the USA by Edward Horgan

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Introduction: Edward Horgan is an inveterate letter writer and part of the art of letter writing is being succinct and on the ball. We carry here a letter written, and published, in early April concerning NATO:

“It would benefit humanity if Trump were to pull out of NATO.

US President Trump has threatened to pull the US out of NATO. If he does so, this will be one of his very few actions as President that would benefit humanity. However, he is unlikely to follow through on this threat, and his successor would likely reverse any such decision. NATO should have been disbanded shortly after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. NATO was founded in 1949 the same year that the USSR developed its first nuclear weapon, and it claims that it defended western Europe during the Cold War. Nuclear weapons have terrorised all of humanity since the US first used them in its double-tap war crime nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the increasing proliferation of nuclear weapons, humanity has never been more threatened with extinction.

In the meantime, the US has misused NATO as the equivalent of a global criminal protection racket in its series of resource wars of aggression, beginning with the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 in contravention of the UN Charter and of NATO’s own Charter. These wars have killed millions of people, especially women and children, wreaked havoc with the environment and left multiple countries in chaos.

Trump is now accusing his erstwhile ‘allies’ of failing to support the illegal US/Israeli attacks on Iran and elsewhere, while at the same time threatening to annex NATO member Canada and Denmark’s Greenland territory. Trump is annoyed because three large NATO members, France, Spain and Italy have imposed severe restrictions on US military use of their airports or overfly their territories. Neutral Switzerland and Austria have done likewise.

Our Irish Government, while claiming to be neutral, is recklessly allowing aircraft associated with the US military to use Shannon airport and fly through Irish airspace, thereby being complicit in genocide and war crimes. It is failing to support the UN and the proper rule of international laws. Basic morality should ensure that preventing the killing of hundreds of thousands of children is prioritised over Irish economic interests.”

Billy King: Rites Again, 339

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Billy King shares his monthly thoughts

As more and more US citizens try to acquire European citizenship, with Ireland certainly well up in the list, isn’t it heartening to know that for the 250th anniversary of the USA if you are a citizen you will be able to purchase a commemorative passport which includes a page with a picture of President Trump. In other words on the cover the eagle has landed whereas inside the ego has landed. And Ireland, Republic and North, in the shape of Shannon and Aldergrove airports, continues to facilitate the US military machine and its warmaking. Blessed be the US$. Speaking of which, the Iran war has reputedly cost the US state $25 billion to date; what an obscene and abhorrent use of such a sum of money..

On another matter, it is good to see Ireland will be co-hosting, with Tuvalu, the second meeting of the ‘coalition of the willing’ 60 or so countries working apart from the COP process on fossil fuel phasing out. This will be early next year and a follow up to the first meeting, with petrostates absent, in Colombia which has just finished. Ireland has talked the talk all right but it hasn’t yet walked the walk; let’s see some serious action that the government can brag about at the start of next year.

Don’t mess with messiahs

OK, OK, a million and one people have already reflected in all sorts of media on D Trump’s brush with messiahdom in the shape of a traditional-image picture of him as Jesus healing the sick …with various other things going down in the background. When the reaction to that got too much he then shared a best buddy picture of Jesus giving him a cuddle; more than the best of mates then. His excuse for the first, that he thought it made him look like a doctor, was so lame that that in turn caused all sorts of cartoons and other comparisons or memes of doctors and messiahs. There is of course a 0.01% chance that he believed it made him look like a doctor, that is if he is the most visually illiterate person in the western hemisphere….oh, on second thoughts, given his extreme kitschy tastes, increase the chances there incrementally…

But, while I am not a psychologist [You don’t need to tell us, it’s pretty obvious but that won’t stop you going on to psychologise – Ed] I did want to explore messiahdom a bit. There are many kinds of messiahs. You don’t have to think you are Jesus to ‘be’ a messiah and other religious backgrounds than Christian get it too. I don’t think Trump thought he was Jesus, rather ‘just’ (!) like Jesus in being divinely appointed and infallible despite continuous failures. The second picture he posted, of Jesus giving him a cuddle, is probably closer to his thinking even though he may see himself as a healer of the sick – and how ironic is that when he is busy cutting rights to medical care and funding for medical research. In my barometer for measuring D Trump’s compatibility with Christian thinking he gets approximately 0 out of 10.

Messiahdom is probably more common than you think. I have talked before [Often – Ed] about meeting three people in Norn Iron, from outside, who thought they were ‘a’ messiah – though one of these saw himself as the father of the messiah…… However feeling you are a ‘chosen people’ has a messianic aspect to it, and the ‘manifest destiny’ beliefs of the USA, and the puritan founding fathers (sic) approach to things has led to the USA seeing itself as ‘chosen’ – e.g. as the world’s ‘policeman’ (= military bully in other people’s thinking). So the USA and Israel under a right-wing government, where the leaders of the latter believe they have a divine right to take all the territory around them that they want, are a perfect match – a perfect match made in hell that is.

While ‘Manifest Destiny’ is thought of as a 19th century US expansionist ideology, it has never gone away. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 – opposing European intervention in the Americas – was an anti-imperialist statement but it was also part of an imperialist statement that ‘the Americas’ essentially belong to the USA, and of course the USA’s westward and southward expansion was itself imperialist. The term ‘manifest destiny’ may not have been used in the 20th century but US official thinking largely remained the same despite some variations. Amazingly – or not considering his outspokenness – Donald Trump used the term in his inaugural address in 2025. US imperialism is not just living it is, tragically, thriving even if the result of US intervention in Iran has been to make the situation far worse for Iran, the USA itself and the world.

So when you have a narcissistic megalomanic like Trump as president of the USA it is a lethal combination of a fatally flawed individual and a fatally flawed national consciousness (there are of course many people in the USA who totally and actively reject this thinking and are working away for peace and justice so it is not a ‘national’ national consciousness) with the two reinforcing each other. And we are all suffering from that but the real victims have been the Palestinians, especially Gazans, and the peoples of Iran and Lebanon. Yes, the attacks on Lebanon have been the doing of Israel but one word from the USA could have stopped them before they started (that word was ‘no’ – “No more support of any kind if you attack Lebanon”).

Nuke them

Numerous commentators have pointed out that if Iran hadn’t been trying too hard to get nuclear weapons before the current USA-Israeli onslaught that they sure as hell (sic) would in future, this would be on the same basis that the North Korean regime has nukes as an insurance policy against attack. Moving beyond the MADness of nuclear weapons has become much more difficult in our current belligerent world.

But a balance of terror is no way to run a world. It is not just a question of living in fear and wasteful expense it is is also a question of when something will go wrong. Gradually, gradually, more countries will seek to join the nuclear club and that increases the risks which are already astronomical. It is only through a combination of good luck and occasional humanity that we have not already faced nuclear armageddon and a possible (in that case probable) nuclear winter. How ironic that would be! A world facing global heating meltdown and food shortages due to lack of water through humanity’s stupidity instead freezes and most people die of starvation through cold and an inability to grow crops.

There are those who say the nuclear standoff in the Cold War prevented war. That is nonsense; there were lots of wars and proxy wars but they weren’t in Europe. We now have war in Europe again, currently in Ukraine, occasioned partly by the expansion of that western military alliance, NATO, and nuclear weapons did nothing to prevent that. Far from preventing war, NATO’s policy contributed significantly to the Russian invasion. It has been pointed out numerous times in these pages that the USA and NATO were expecting Russia to accept a situation which was intolerable for the USA. The USA threatened nuclear war in 1962 over Russian missiles in its neighbouring island, Cuba. Yet the USA and NATO expected Russia to accept NATO weapons and missiles in Ukraine, an immediate Russian neighbour with historically extremely close links. This was crass stupidity and there is ongoing crass stupidity in the USA and European countries not acknowledging their role in the tragic debacle that has led to the Ukraine war.

It is not long ago, 2017, that ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, https://www.icanw.org/ received the Nobel Peace Prize. But psychologically, and very sadly, it feels a long, long time ago given the direction things have taken since then. Even the January 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), making nuclear weapons illegal, feels a long time ago.

Not for the first time I have spoken about valuable coverage of issues by the New Internationalist. https://newint.org/ The main feature in their January-February 2026 issue is on ‘The new nuclear arms race’ and there is a good run down on the situation regarding this both globally and in relation to individual situations. It covers South Africa being the only country to develop its own nuclear weapons and then dismantle them; “Under Mandela, Pretoria championed non-proliferation and the once pariah state became viewed by many as a pillar of peace.” Regarding British surveillance of activists, the CND solicitor to the ‘Spycops’ tribunal, Paul Heron, makes the cutting point that “…we are told we live in a democracy, and the people shape how society should be. [But] when people build mass movements the state treats them as a threat.”

Getting rid of nuclear weapons is an essential part of building a peaceful world – indeed this is impossible without their removal. Building collective peaceful security is possible but the lack of imagination involved in politicians’ militarist thinking makes it brutally hard to imagine let alone bring it about. And that is where those mass, popular movements are essential – and mass movements grow from the work and actions of concerned individuals building and building on the zeitgeist.

Arms trade ding dong in the North

The ‘agin-us’ nature of politics in the North (nothing to do with going for a pint of a well known brew…) is nowhere better illustrated than by recent ding-dongs about developing the arms trade in Norn Iron. Oh, if we could make money from irony, the people of the North would be all millionaires; going from a society where people were killing one another, well some people were killing some other people, to making money from weapons to kill people elsewhere, you couldn’t make it up.

Anyway, just one aspect of this is that the British government wants to develop the arms industry in the North – in a similar but different way to what the Irish government wants to do in the Republic – in the Northern case with a well funded ‘Defence Growth Deal’, which I would consider sick and obscene. I have no proof but I suspect that for the British government, investing in and promoting the arms industry in Northern Ireland has the perceived bonus of helping to keep unionists sweet (and binding it tighter to the British economy). If the total pot for this deal is, as reported, £250 million for the whole UK, Northern Ireland‘s take of £50 million is 20% of the total for a Norn Iron population my calculations say is 2.7% of the total UK population. Something strange there.

And unionists welcomed this deal, e.g. Emma Little-Pengelly, the Deputy First Minister who proudly said “Sector turnover has more than doubled over the past decade, rising from £1 billion in 2013 to £2.2 billion in 2023.” Sinn Féin ministers did not attend the launch, however, which omission was then criticised by unionists. Michelle O’Neill then came out saying she did not support the militarisation agenda and the money could have been better used in areas that really needed it. And that in turn led to further criticism of the Sinners by unionists. The fact that Sinn Féin can be considered the ‘peace party’ in this might be considered ironic in relation to the history of the second half of the 20th century – but realities change.

Unionists seldom miss a chance to castigate Irish neutrality and the broken CD from there and many sources on the right in Europe about Ireland not doing its bit for ‘European’ defence is grating. It could be countered that the UK and EU are not doing their bit for demilitarisation…..but then M Martin’s Fianna Fáil is not doing very much for that either. DUP leader Gavin Robinson said “that the sector in 2026 “isn’t all about bullets and tanks” but also about advanced manufacturing and cyber-security, which he said will “undoubtedly help cover the gaping hole in Europe’s defence that is the Republic of Ireland”. (News Letter 25/4/26) Norn Iron Secretary of State Hilary Benn weighed in on the militarist side – it is his government’s spending – speaking about the first duty of the government being to secure the safety of the nation. Of course such funding does no such thing.

However in this ding dong there is the danger that it is seen simply as a case of unionists-for-arms-production and republicans-against-arms-production. There are other kinds of people too and some of us others are appalled. The term ‘making a killing’ has never been so apt.

Consensus….against consensus

An article by Peter Emerson of the de Borda institute www.deborda.org in the April issue of the CRC/Community Relations Council monthly publication https://mailchi.mp/nicrc.org.uk/crc-ebulletin-april-2026?e=dc08e218e6 ends with a nice or not-so-nice story about Belfast City Council: “Well, in 2004, I managed to get a consensus in Belfast City Council. The question was, would these’uns like to adopt a methodology which would facilitate consensus decision-making with those’uns. And, yes, I achieved what some might have thought was impossible, a consensus. Neither side wanted to be in consensus with the other side, so there was a consensus… against consensus.” Oh well….

You can sign up to receive the CRC digital monthly news bulletin at https://www.community-relations.org.uk/publications/e-bulletin-e-news

McKeown and I

I sometimes wonder what makes a ‘good song’ and why some amazing songs, and others that are not so amazing, take off while others are left in the shadows. In terms of the construction of songs, one Irish song that stands out for me is McKeown and I by Mickey and Cormac MacConnell. Mickey MacConnell is best known for his song ‘Only our rivers run free’ which was written when he was 17 and he said about it that “It was never a republican song per se but a song about the love of one’s country.” McKeown and I is on an oul CD I have of Mickey MacConnell’s, ‘Peter Pan and me’ (Spring Records) and you can find different versions online. Mickey MacConnell died in July 2025.

The chorus is fascinating in that it has in summary form the story told in the three verses:

We’re men of straw

We’re men of sand,

Our castles crumble,

Never meant to stand

We’re two born losers,

Sure to failure we’ve begun,

We’re snowmen built

For melting in the sun.

The ‘I’ of the story is accompanied by McKeown in the first and third verses but ‘O’Neill’ in the second. Kids from a deprived urban environment, in the first verse they build a sandcastle on a day at the beach – this is then washed away by the tide. In the second verse they build a scarecrow in the farm of the reformatory where they are incarcerated which the wind then blows away. In the final verse they build a snowman in the prison yard where the year before the judge has told them “Rot in a cell / Until you’re dead” – and they dread seeing the snowman melt away.

We don’t know what ‘I’, McKeown and O’Neill have got up to apart from where they are placed and the judge’s sentence. But the power of the song is in the imagery and the contrast between ‘society’ judging they should be locked up (and the key thrown away) and the innocence of them building a sandcastle, a scarecrow and a snowman. Very affective and effective imagery I think and an amazingly well constructed song.

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I was in the wrong part of the country to join in with Lelia Doolan’s walk at 91 years young (News, NN 338) but it was demonstrably a great occasion and joyous arrival in Dublin at the end of the long traipse from Shannon for peace. See e.g. https://www.instagram.com/walkwithlelia?igsh=eGlveXczdGFnYWVx It just shows you are never too old – or too young – to do something meaningful. That meaningful act might not be getting your walking boots on, it might be something else entirely. Anyway, for now, I remain, Billy (the kid, I am not quite 91 yet….).

Editorial: USA, rogue state extraordinaire

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We have previously disputed and tried to debunk the common western idea that, prior to Donald Trump becoming president of the USA that there was such a thing as a just, liberal post-World War II ‘world order’. This was a US and western fiction. Biden and Obama used drone or other attacks to kill who they wanted. The USA – and others such as the UK – helped destabilise Asia, the Middle East, and Africa through their attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Going back a generation or two, the USA killed many millions in Vietnam and Cambodia for absolutely no logical purpose and with no positive result except its own perceived interests.

Any analysis of the history of the USA has to conclude that while its foundation was ‘anti-colonialist’, its establishment in pushing aside and often exterminating the first nations, and its actions against Mexico, when expanding its boundaries was undoubtedly imperialist. Now we are again told, by the US State Department, that “This is OUR hemisphere” after the attack on Venezuela and the abduction of Nicolás Maduro. This was not the way to bring human rights to Venezuela. And the USA is not ‘America’.

While the attack on Venezuela was limited, with perhaps forty people killed, the idea that one country can intervene where it likes in its own interests and force a country to act as dictated to is extremely dangerous – the idea that it was to control drugs supply if a fictional fig leaf and there were many other ways to do that. The question is of course – who will be next? If the cowardly western nations with their supposed high minded ideals fail to condemn Trump then the Donald will conclude that he can act with impunity, certainly in his ‘own’ hemisphere but elsewhere as well – Africa, the Middle East, who knows.

It is ironic, though partly based on his own musings, that Trump was seen initially as an ‘isolationist’ president. With failures at home on the cost of living, for example, he may have turned to foreign military ventures as a way to distract and show his power. The problem is not just what he has done and may do but what Putin and Xi may conclude from such events. If one military superpower, admittedly the pre-eminent one, can act like this, why should Russia and China restrain themselves from acting accordingly? The USA is not the only rogue superpower, it seems to go with the territory. The fact the world is looking at a possible military takeover of Greenland by the USA is evidence of current international lawlessness and dangers.

Imperialism always has its self justifications and often there is some truth in them. The British Raj brought a railway system to India, essential for movement of goods and people, but it did so to enable control and its economic gain. Maduro has been a brutal tyrant who needed replaced along with his regime – but do we really think the USA was acting out of the goodness of its heart to control drugs and liberate the people of Venezuela? The USA likes to think of itself as the world’s policeman but it is a world bully. And what the outcome will be in Venezuela is far from certain beyond suborning itself to the demands of the US president; will the people be any freer or less poor and the country more democratic? The answer to these questions is ‘currently unlikely’.

Ireland is heavily dependent economically on US multinationals and investment. That does not mean it should not take action – it means it is morally obliged to do so. The least it can do is express strong disagreement with the US action as well as ban the US military from the use of Shannon Airport (or anywhere else in the Republic) to avoid actively facilitating US military control and further rogue actions around the world. Moral cowardice is too weak a term to apply to Irish governments over the last few decades in regard to Shannon; it is reprehensible political failure of the worst kind to support such a violent, rogue state as the USA. Irish inaction on this is woefully shameful especially when most citizens want to see Ireland playing a positive, neutral role in world affairs rather than supporting militaristic ventures by a country which acts in such a destructive way.

However there is another way in which governments and often people in Ireland and Europe are avoiding what is really happening in the world and especially in Europe itself. The drift to armed conflict with Russia is like the drift into the First World War. There is a massive lack of understanding of conflict and how it develops – and a massive lack of understanding of how conflict can be de-escalated without perpetuating injustice or simply acquiescing to might-is-right approaches. Western Europe seems intent on continually adding fuel to the fire – and the Irish government is now a fellow traveller with that approach.

Of course there are dangers emanating from Russia but many of those dangers come from western European approaches and responses to that country and its brutal and autocratic leader – whose personal emergence came not only through the re-emergence of political patterns in Russia but also western approaches to that country at and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is cruelly ironic that with all our 21st century knowledge of science, technology, and some human sciences, we as a world know so little about creating a peaceful world through creative means of dealing with conflict. As with global heating, closing our eyes and hoping the issue will go away can be, literally, fatal. We have the ready means to destroy what civilisation we have and yet we seem content to tread the same weary path to self-destruction. Homo ‘sapiens’ may be a misnomer.

The greeting to wish people a ‘peaceful New Year’ seems both wildly appropriate and inappropriate when we find ourselves where are are now. We do have the means, through nonviolence and creative approaches to conflict and global heating, to deal with the big issues but what we need are the political will and direction to take the path to peace and not the path to oblivion. As peace, green and human rights activists we can do what we can but we need to have a larger, wider movement with national-cultural support and governments that look, listen and learn. l

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Trump and not joining the dots

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The economic power and cultural influence of the United States gives it global reach which means that the outcome of the country’s presidential elections affect people across the world including everyone on this small island. While the polls suggested there would be a close outcome in this year’s election the scale of Donald Trump’s win astounded many. He secured more votes than his contender Kamala Harris in almost every demographic and received a sizeable number of votes in constituencies he offended. One such was the Puerto Rican community whose country a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square rally described as a “floating island of garbage”.

What accounts for Trump’s clear win? The polls indicate that the majority of people who voted for him did so because they thought that the economy was not serving them well in terms of the price of groceries and other day-to-day items. The intriguing thing is why did his supporters not realize that to put up tariffs on imported goods, as Trump has pledged he will, can only but lead to a steep rise in the cost of living. (*1)

Why did so many people from Central and South America vote for Trump when he was adamant that he was going to summarily deport undocumented immigrants who he said are not people but “animals” who were “poisoning the blood” of the country. (*2) Most of the undocumented he was referring to come from south of the US border which means that people originating from there will be continually asked by government officials and law enforcement officers to verify their status. This can only mean a life of anxiety and harassment and grief when family and friends are deported.

Voters troubled about the cost of living should not only have been concerned about Trump’s pledge to raise tariffs but his intention to deport undocumented immigrants as it is these people, thought to number between 11 and 20 million, who make up more than half the workforce in agriculture and food processing. (*3) Their removal will lead to deprivations and higher prices.

In other words, whatever the demographic, including millionaires, to vote for Trump was to vote against one’s interests which is a form of self-harm. This is counter to one of the cardinal views held about humans since the Age of the Enlightenment and is central to the capitalist construct which is that we are primarily creatures of self-interest. The reason why the wealthy won’t, in the long term, benefit from the triumph of Trumpism is because they, like every living entity on the planet, are dependent on the climatic conditions we have enjoyed since the end of the last ice age.

A reliable indicator of what Donald Trump’s second presidential term will be like can be gauged from his first term when he annulled over 100 rules and regulations that had been enacted to protect the country’s web of ecosystems from coast to coast, desert to forest. The rules and regulations included ones governing clear air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals all critical to the health and wellbeing not only of people in the United States but the entire planet as global warming emissions affect us all. A special report by the New York School of Law, March 2019, found that annulling these rules and regulations caused thousands of premature deaths in the United States and a significant increase in chronic illnesses, the majority occurring among those on low incomes.

Akin to the double-think of the ruling elite in George Orwell’s novel 1984 this roll back of rules designed to protect nonhuman life, the integrity of ecosystems and the health of the nation was carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The evidence suggests that during his second presidential term Trump will wage war against nonhuman nature with a vengeance as the person he has nominated as Administrator of the EPA is former New York Republican congressman Lee Zeldin. It is expected that top of Zeldin’s to do list will be to rescind the EPA’s most effective measures to reduce global warming emissions from vehicle exhaust pipes, power stations, oil and gas wells. Further, he will likely make many of the agency’s scientific advisors and researchers redundant.

As to be expected other Trump nominations share his worldview. Notable among these is Chris Wright who has been nominated as Energy Secretary. Wright is a fossil fuel executive who is an evangelist for the oil and gas industry and a vocal critic of efforts to reduce global warming emissions.

Given that Trump regards the United States as an extension of himself and made it clear that he would align the country with his imperialist paradigm if elected why did he receive the broad mandate he did? The answer, to quote William Shakespeare in his play Julius Caesar, is that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves ..”

Simply put Trump is not the problem as his second term as president is the will of the electorate. The fault, as in many countries including this archipelago, is that those who voted for him passively ingested what they were told by someone who presented themselves as their Saviour who could create Heaven on Earth, or in secular terms, Make America Great Again. As Trump told his audience and the world in his victory speech:

“Many people have told me that God saved my life for a reason. The reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.” (*4)

Leaving aside the question of when the United States could be said to have been great the fact that neither the electorate or media questioned the meaning of the term underscores the body politics’ unwillingness or inability to analyse competing paradigms. A plausible reason is that many peoples’ beliefs are enmeshed in their sense of identity and intuitively know that if the former is undermined or invalidated so is the latter. I suspect that for many of Trump’s fervent supporters invalidation would result in them feeling existentially lost and/or socially ostracised and that their dread of both is on a par with their dread of their or a loved one’s death. Sadly, this means that for this cohort of supporters arguments about the folly of voting for Trump are likely to result in reinforcing their support for him in an attempt to prevent themselves being lost in an existential wilderness.

This defensive if not passive disposition likely originates in educational, media and ecclesiastic cultures that discourage people from critically examining ideas, scrutinising orthodoxy and questioning taboos. Clearly those who voted for Trump never joined the dots and were not cognisant that we live in an interconnected, interdependent, consequential world in which it is healthy and astute to continually review one’s ideas towards the end of being a thoughtful neighbour and a good ancestor.

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References:

(*1) Trumponomics tees off, The Economist, 16th-22nd November 2024

(*2) Maggie Astor, New York Times, 17 March 2024.

(*3) Trumponomics tees off, The Economist, 16th-22nd November 2024.

(*4) Harvest Prude, Donald Trump Takes the White House Again, Christianity Today, 6 November 2024.

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