0
WARS should be stillborn. They enter the world and, like delinquents, they cause disruption, chaos, and mayhem. And when wars end, as they do so abruptly and painfully, survivors lament that such wars should never have been born.
Throughout the history of mankind — and man has fought more damaging conflicts than any other species on earth — wars have shown that they are inherently barren. They cannot birth peace. Peace is conceived artificially, through intellectual insemination. The Unesco constitution opens with this homily: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” With President Donald Trump, peace on earth, especially its rewards, have preoccupied his mind.
Trump is far removed from the orthodoxy of his mother, a Scottish Presbyterian. He describes himself as a “nondenominational Christian”. His is a milder version of “charismatic Christianity’, tempered by Norman Vincent Peale’s credo of “positive thinking”. Trump’s followers view him in Biblical terms: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” [Matthew 5:9]. Trump’s detractors however prefer the verse which warns: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them” [Matthew 6:1].
In T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), Archbishop Thomas Becket is tempted repeatedly — first with temporal comfort, then temporal power, and the third time with militant power. It is the fourth temptation — martyrdom for the sake of eternal glory — that Becket regards as the most insidious. He rejects this because he realises “the last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason”.
One wonders whether Trump has seen ‘Dr Strangelove’.
President Trump is not distracted by such moral dilemmas. He lost the 2020 election, and then returned in 2024 with an even greater majority. No matter that he lost this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. He could not have won it anyway. The closing date for nominations for the Peace Prize is Jan 31 each year.
Trump will not give up. The five-member Nobel Peace Prize Committee should prepare themselves for a second, third or even fourth assault from Trump whose presidential term expires in 2029 — unless he bends the US constitution and secures an unprecedented third term.
Ironically, while Trump is extinguishing fires abroad, he is fanning them within his own country. During the last few months, Trump has ordered National Guard units which belong to the states to quell ‘disorder’ in cities, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, Portland, even Washington, D.C.
His excuse is that the security situation in these cities is “out of control”. A more sinister reason is that he wants the US armed forces to use these cities as “training grounds”, to prepare them for conflicts abroad.
Apart from the US itself (which is often its own worst enemy), who are the foreign enemies threatening its homeland? Clearly, Putin’s Russia is one. It is already embroiled in an open-ended conflict in Ukraine with US-fed Nato forces.
Iran? Now that Israel has done with Hamas in Gaza, it will lengthen its sights and target Tehran. Any future attack on Iran by Israel egged on by its Muslim ‘friends’ would be nothing less than a Caucasian miscalculation.
Is it the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? At its military parade in Beijing in September, the PRC revealed its latest, lethal Dongfeng-61 super missile. Ac-cording to Victor Gao (the Chinese specialist whose voice echoes Beijing), the DF-61 ICBM can carry 60 nuclear warheads plus one hydrogen bomb. Its estimated range is between 12,000 and 15,000 kilometres, sufficient to reach Washington, D.C. Or is the enemy also the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)? In October, the DPRK showcased its latest “next-generation” Hwasong-20 ICBM. Kim Jong Un has touted it as the “most powerful nuclear strategic weapon system”. Like China’s doomsday DF-61, the Hwasong-20 can fly over continents and, if uninterrupted, reach any part of the US.
Two isolationist states — the PRC (once a backward nation of bicyclists) and the DPRK (once the secretive Tibet of East Asia) — have within 80 years of their independence reached a level of nuclear relevance that discomfits the West.
One wonders whether President Trump has seen Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war satire Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). In it, a renegade general Jack Ripper adapts Clemenceau’s famous aphorism, saying that “war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought”.
Trump, a civilian, obviously does not agree with Gen Ripper. In Trump’s lexicon, war is the necessary cost of a lasting peace on earth — or what may be left of earth.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, October 16th, 2025
