World

Although seldom noticed by anyone west of Warsaw, there has been a war going on in Europe for almost five years now. It began in early 2014 with a Russian secret operation in mid-February that annexed Crimea and soon spread to overt Kremlin military intervention in eastern Ukraine as well. Serious fighting followed, and that conflict remains unfrozen and deadly. While there has been no sustained combat in eastern Ukraine in years, neither is that front quiet. Kiev has never accepted the Russian theft of Crimea and the ‘people’s republics’ in Donetsk and Luhansk, Kremlin-run pseudo-states that serve as bases for Russian military units on Ukrainian soil. Those units regularly shell Ukrainian positions, because they can.

The roundabout on the departmental highway, at the exit for the Super U supermarket and gas station, the closest place to buy fresh milk, has been occupied by the Gilets Jaunes, demanding cheaper diesel. They wear the emblematic yellow safety jackets of their movement, although some are orange. Passing motorists sound their horns and display their own yellow gilets on the dashboard, to show solidarity. There is no barricade, traffic flows rather freely. It is all rather jolly. One man is cooking sausages on a barbecue. I slow down, as seems to be protocol, wind down my window to smile, shake a few hands, say a few bonjours. Hearing my accent, I got a chorus of ‘haffanicedays.’ I smile some more. A lady sends me on my way with a madeleine.

The centennial of the armistice ending World War One has received much attention, and deservedly so, and yet there’s another centennial, closely related, that also deserves to be remembered. On November 23, 1918, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, campaigning in Wolverhampton, declared, ‘What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.’ Lloyd George thus put forth a vision of post-war solidarity, in keeping with the sacrifices made in wartime. National solidarity was made inevitable by mass-mobilization. That is, since the success of the levée en masse in revolutionary France, nations had come to understand that they needed the whole of their population motivated enough — and robust enough — to support the fight.

Donald Trump’s tweet today, au dessous will annoy many people, including me, who are forced to admit he is right. France and the rest of the EU do make it hard to sell American wines in France, and it’s easy for the French to sell wine to the Americans. I’ve a mate here who sells two million bottles a year in the USA and he drives a smart car and lives in a very big house. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1062331024426913792 Mr Trump is famously a teetotaler, yet he can in this instance be said to speak with some authority since he is the proud owner of the Trump Winery, near Charlottesville, Virginia.

Donald J. Trump is home from his whirlwind weekend trip to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War’s end. Even by The Donald’s formidable china-breaking standards, this was a doozy which will be discussed with opprobrium by the Transatlantic smart set for some time. President Trump seemed to go out of his way to upset his French counterpart and host Emmanuel Macron, who’s hit a political rough patch and needed some brotherly love. That bromance is dead and buried, however, and Trump fired off a mocking tweet at Macron as he boarded Air Force One for Paris that denounced the French president’s backing of a European army as ‘very insulting.

Are you enjoying the latest episode of the Trump-Macron show? It’s the most intriguing bromance in modern politics: two leaders from different and opposing political worlds who nonetheless fell for each other. It was self-love-à-deux from the moment they met. And they consummated their love by bombing Syria last year. They even bicker and make up like a passionate couple. Today they are in Paris to mark Armistice Day, and Trump may be pleased to have left behind the Washington brouhaha following the midterms and his firing of Jeff Sessions. Yet the broader and more remarkable point is the extent to which Trump and Macron’s fortunes have reversed.

In a speech richly deserving adaption as a Saturday Night Live skit, US national security adviser John Bolton has unveiled the latest extension of America’s enemies list. Eclipsing the post-9/11 ‘Axis of Evil’ we now have a ‘Troika of Tyranny,’ consisting of those powerhouse troublemakers Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. According to Bolton, ‘this triangle of terror stretching from Havana to Caracas to Managua is the cause of immense human suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability, and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the Western Hemisphere.’ But fear not. Under the leadership of President Trump, the United States is now ‘taking direct action against all three regimes to defend the rule of law, liberty, and basic human decency in our region.

I happen to be in the Old Country this week, and am glad to report that everything in England is just as I left it. It’s raining constantly, except when it isn’t. No one speaks English in London, except the American tourists. And everyone, regardless of whether they want Britain to stay in the European Union or leave that undemocratic shambles of a superstate, wants to get Brexit over and done with, so they can get back to traditional pursuits like soccer, gardening and smoking crack. Imagine my surprise this morning as, scrolling through today’s New York Times as I mopped up the grease from my cooked breakfast, I saw the headline ‘British Hoarders Stock Up on Supplies, Preparing for Brexit’.

The news that Duchess Meghan of Markle, Britain’s favourite American, has a right royal bun in the oven by dashing sex maniac Prince Harry brings a smile to the faces of all patriotic Britons. An absent-minded smile, the quiet smile of a polite, proud people as it visualises the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, butt naked in various positions, and tries to guess which one it was that resulted in conception. It’s a national game of Clue. This may seem intrusive, but the royals have never had their sex so privately. In the good old days, royalty mated like pandas, with difficulty and before an approving audience. A royal wedding was a diplomatic union, not a love match.

I made no time for the Blasey Ford testimony, and never do for the NFL, but the TV will be on for Ryder Cup this weekend, the greatest show in golf. The bi-annual Europe v. America spectacle is being held at Le Golf National, a relatively new course outside of Paris this year, which seems odd because golf has few roots in France. But tens of thousands of French people will be going, and tens thousands more will journey from Britain and Ireland and the continent. Since 1979, when our Ryder Cup opponents became European (because postwar, the US was beating the British-Irish team too consistently) the Euro team has become one of the few well-regarded symbols of a united Europe, in counterpoint to the sovereignty threatening bureaucrats of Brussels.