Will Trump return and would this be a good thing?

George Kennan had a very great mind. He was one of the very, very few genuine conservatives that America ever produced. He was the American diplomat who invented the doctrine that the Soviet Union had to be contained when in February 1946 he sent an 8,000-word telegram to the State Department known as the Long Telegram. Soviet policy, Kennan argued, was “neurotic,” rooted in Russian insecurity, Communist ideology, and the need to sustain “dictatorship.” Because of their “Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy,” the Russians would manufacture enemies and act aggressively. That's still true. Resisting Russian“expansion” and “aggression” was a necessity, he said - that was true then and now.

But he did not support the cold war, as it was waged at least, opposed the arms race, opposed the Vietnam war and vehemently opposed extending Nato in the 1990s, predicting that it would lead to war which would make people say we were right to expand Nato when in fact the reverse would be true.

The three most important things now in world politics are to end the war in Ukraine as fast as possible before Ukraine is wrecked, to contain Russia without a cold war or arms race and to avoid a cold war with China.

For all his great faults and failures. Donald Trump is the only candidate for the American presidency I can imagine achieving these three.

Some will say Ron DeSantis might - I think he is a 'movement conservative', meaning a fiscal and patriotic conservative, not much of a conservative at all really, part of what Donald Trump calls the Swamp. 

He was, after all, a protege of Paul Ryan, the classic establishment Republican.

Will Mr. Trump be the Republican candidate? I'd imagine so, probably. Will the bipartisan establishment let him win again? They'll try very hard indeed to stop him and use a lot of dirty tricks. The suppression of the Hunter Biden story will seem like nothing.

British historian Niall Ferguson thinks he will win. He wrote in the Spectator just a day ago,

'Everyone knows F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line from the end of his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon: ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ But Fitzgerald wasn’t talking about second chances. He meant that, unlike in a traditional play – where Act I presents a problem, Act II reveals the complications and Act III resolves it all – Americans want to skip Act II and go straight to the resolution.

'The more I think about it, the more I think the Joe Biden presidency is Act II – and Donald Trump is not the last tycoon. He’s Act III. He’s the next president.'

Niall Ferguson is not necessarily reliable. I am told by another historian, James Palmer, that everything he wrote about Chinese history is wrong. I think the return of President Trump is possible and depends on whether the woefully incompetent current US administration can broker a peace in Ukraine. In other words, dish the war party, the Neo-cons and the Atlantic Council types who want a worldwide crusade against autocracies, except autocracies they like.