Donald Trump is no Bismarck or Cavour but a great failure like Napoleon III (or Charles X of Sweden to go further back) and far less substantial than the latter two. Netanyahu has his Bismarckian qualities as well as resembling certain later German Chancellors.
I re-watched most of AJP Taylor's lectures on How Wars Begin recently and strongly recommend them. He first gave them in 1978, live without a timer or autocues, something that was absolutely antediluvian then.
In brief, all the wars happened by mistake pretty much on all sides except when Cavour or Bismarck were involved. Hitler was not nearly so brilliant as them. As Norman Stone said of the fall of France in 1940, "A Bismarck or a Churchill could control success of this order, a Hitler not".
The Franco-Prussian war in particular was completely unnecessary: an elephant trap set by Bismarck against the wishes of his master William I, into which Napoleon III walked.
Some think Putin walked into a comparable American trap when he invaded Ukraine, but I do not. The State Department did not expect it till December 2021 nor expect Ukraine to withstand the invasion when it happened.
The lecture on the Second World War makes clear that America provoked Pearl Harbor.
That is a partial analogy with US policy towards Ukraine from 2008 onwards.
It does not justify Pearl Harbor or Putin's attempt to topple the Ukrainian government, but explains both.
(By the way, US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, father of John and Robert, said during a game of golf in 1945 with James Forrestal that Neville Chamberlain told him that 'America and world Jews forced England into the war'. I don't have any idea what he meant by this assertion but if Chamberlain were right about the role of the Americans that would mean Roosevelt's administration helped bring about the war on both sides of the globe, a remarkable thing for an isolationist government. Did the Americans push England into the war? How?)
The prediction with which Taylor ends the last lecture, that nuclear war will happen, seemed to have been disproved by events till the Ukrainian war began. Now it looks likely that he will be proven right.
I do not believe Russia will use nuclear weapons, though the fact that the left does not worry about this is shocking, but non-state actors may well one day. Conceivably Donald Trump will - so Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson fears.
I re-watched most of AJP Taylor's lectures on How Wars Begin recently and strongly recommend them. He first gave them in 1978, live without a timer or autocues, something that was absolutely antediluvian then.
In brief, all the wars happened by mistake pretty much on all sides except when Cavour or Bismarck were involved. Hitler was not nearly so brilliant as them. As Norman Stone said of the fall of France in 1940, "A Bismarck or a Churchill could control success of this order, a Hitler not".
The Franco-Prussian war in particular was completely unnecessary: an elephant trap set by Bismarck against the wishes of his master William I, into which Napoleon III walked.
Some think Putin walked into a comparable American trap when he invaded Ukraine, but I do not. The State Department did not expect it till December 2021 nor expect Ukraine to withstand the invasion when it happened.
The lecture on the Second World War makes clear that America provoked Pearl Harbor.
That is a partial analogy with US policy towards Ukraine from 2008 onwards.
It does not justify Pearl Harbor or Putin's attempt to topple the Ukrainian government, but explains both.
(By the way, US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, father of John and Robert, said during a game of golf in 1945 with James Forrestal that Neville Chamberlain told him that 'America and world Jews forced England into the war'. I don't have any idea what he meant by this assertion but if Chamberlain were right about the role of the Americans that would mean Roosevelt's administration helped bring about the war on both sides of the globe, a remarkable thing for an isolationist government. Did the Americans push England into the war? How?)
The prediction with which Taylor ends the last lecture, that nuclear war will happen, seemed to have been disproved by events till the Ukrainian war began. Now it looks likely that he will be proven right.
I do not believe Russia will use nuclear weapons, though the fact that the left does not worry about this is shocking, but non-state actors may well one day. Conceivably Donald Trump will - so Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson fears.
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