Us politics

On Donald Trump’s orders, US forces have struck the airfield from which the Syrian military launched Tuesday’s chemical weapons attack. The strikes were limited, only 59 Tomahawk missiles were involved, and the US says that ‘every precaution was taken to execute this strike with minimal risk to personnel at the airfield’. So, what was Trump up to? Well, it was clear that he wanted to send a message that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable and will have consequences. He was, ironically, enforcing the red line that the Obama administration drew and then refused to enforce.

On this week's edition of The Spectator Podcast, we consider President Trump’s growing military ambitions, dissect the problem of radical Islam in our prisons, and judge what makes a perfect marmalade. First, this week's magazine cover depicts Donald Trump in full Kaiser Wilhelm II costume. The reason for that image is Andrew J. Bacevich's assertion that far from being a modern-day Hitler, a better analogue for the new American supremo is the last German emperor. The isolationist image that Trump cultivated during the campaign is beginning to melt away, leaving the possibility of war with North Korea, and even China. Professor Bacevich joins the podcast to discuss the complex military situation, along with General Sir Richard Barrons and Dr Heather Williams.

Perhaps Steve Bannon isn’t quite as all-powerful within the Trump administration as everybody believed. He’s just been removed from the principals committee of the National Security Council. This news has been understood as a sign that Trump’s new National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster is now calling the shots on foreign policy. The spin in Washington is that Bannon’s role on the NSC had been to act as a ‘check’ on the now disgraced former advisor Mike Flynn, who resigned in February, and with the more level-headed McMaster in charge he's no longer needed. It’s also emerged that Bannon has kept full level national security clearance. So what’s changed? Something, clearly, for all the naysaying of White House insiders.

Donald Trump once said that he wanted to share a hamburger with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. Now that he’s President, fast food diplomacy looks to be off the menu. Instead, the tough talk has started and Trump has used an interview with the FT today to warn that America will act against North Korea unless China clamps down on the regime in Pyongyang. He said: ‘Well, if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you’ That Trump has singled out North Korea is no accident, nor is it much of a surprise. In the weeks after the election, the outgoing Obama administration warned Trump's team that it considered the threat posed by Kim Jong Un to be America’s top national security priority.

Michael Howard (the good one, OM, CH, MC) is 94 and still razor-sharp, but depressed by echoes of the 1930s on both sides of the Atlantic — ‘and I am one of the few people still alive who watched it all happen’. At Wellington he learned, and recites to me from memory, lines from Auden’s 1937 ‘Danse Macabre’: It’s farewell to the drawing-room’s civilised cry, The professor’s sensible whereto and why For the Devil has broken parole and arisen, He has dynamited his way out of prison. Michael believes that President Trump will get his country into a war, and I hear that some of America’s top soldiers share this expectation.

Well, that was quick. Along with President Donald Trump’s preliminary budget proposal, Trumpism as a radical new governing philosophy is dead on arrival. Trump was elected in part by voters who preferred Obama to Romney in 2012. They saw in Trump a different kind of Republican from the green-eyeshades accountants whose passion is cutting government spending on the middle class and the poor. During the campaign, Trump sounded more like a New Deal Democrat, promising a trillion dollars in infrastructure investment, the revitalization of manufacturing, and a less aggressive foreign policy. That Trump, it seems, is being held hostage in Mar-a-Lago, while the Trump impersonator who used to pose with photographers in front of Washington, D.C.

The irresistible force meets the immovable object in Washington tomorrow, as Donald Trump finally comes face to face with Angela Merkel. It seems highly unlikely that they’ll emerge from this meeting holding hands. Not only do these two world leaders disagree about (almost) everything, their personalities could hardly be less compatible. Mrs May may simper that ‘opposites attract’ but Merkel, not May, is Trump’s polar opposite. There’s little prospect of any personal chemistry at the White House this time around. But does this antipathy matter? Of course not. If anything, it’s a plus.

 Washington DC   Roger Stone — political consultant, agent provocateur, friend and confidant of Donald Trump — arrives for lunch with a bodyguard in tow. ‘I’ve had way too many death threats,’ he explains. He says he’s recovering from poisoning by polonium, a radioactive substance used to kill the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko in London. Litvinenko, he says, had ‘a much larger dose, probably done by British intelligence’. But the British government named the Russian agents responsible, I reply. ‘What was the proof?’ he asks. ‘It’s all mirrors. You know that.’ Stone blames his ‘poisoning’ on ‘the deep state’, a term that in Trumpworld means the intelligence community.

Am I the only one who was hoping Donald Trump would skip the State of the Union address? The annual harangue to Congress, vernal solstice on America’s civic calendar, is provided for in Article II of our Constitution, which requires the president 'from time to time' to 'give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union'. That briefly meant a presidential speech, until the gloriously terse Thomas Jefferson dismissed it as too monarchical and began submitting a written update instead. This tradition, admirably low-key, persisted for more than a century until Woodrow Wilson revived the verbal address in 1913, one of the many reasons to curse his presidency.