If things were not already bad enough with Dementia Donny’s war on Iran, as a report on Sky News suggests, we’re on the brink of World War Three. It is bad enough that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz could prevent fuel reaching the UK, in which case I’ll be confined to home for the foreseeable future and unable to go on our summer holiday. It will be just like Covid-19 all over again, but without the virus.
Sky News says this: “Dr Rob Johnson, director of the Changing Character of Conflict Centre at Oxford University, said China is taking the steps that would be expected to have the ability to attack Taiwan, while Russia could well be readying to launch military operations against a NATO country.” The last bit is the thing we should bear in mind. While Taiwan is not part of NATO, would the world simply stand to one side as the country was invaded? If fascist Russia did attack a fellow NATO country, the west, including us, would be obliged to respond. I have never heard of the Changing Character of Conflict Centre – it hardly rolls off the tongue, does it? – but one would assume Dr Johnson and his pals know what they’re talking about.
The assertion that the UK is not prepared for another world war does not surprise me. Successive Conservative governments hollowed out the armed services so much, slashing the number of armed services while replacing them with bean-counting civil servants, and leaving us with just about sufficient equipment to hold off an invasion from, I don’t know, the Isle of Man.
My pessimism is reinforced by the fact that we have a mentally unstable idiot in the White House. It is because of Donald Trump following the genocidal Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to war with Iran, despite a complete absence of aims and objectives and, worse still, no exit strategy and no means of telling whether America “won’ or not that we are in this mess. Things were not great for the people of Iran living under the tyranny of Islamic fascism (there’s the F word again) and all Trump has done is to kill the regime leader and have him replaced by his son who is an even more extreme islamist maniac. Thanks, Donald.
Speaking as a layman, I am not surprised that we are not prepared for another world war. Certainly my generation came along some time after the last war and while there have been a few scares along the way we have assumed that world wars were a thing of the past. My generation wasn’t conscripted to joined the armed forces, leaving things to actual professionals who knew what they were doing. One of the few positives about being a doddery old pensioner is that I am unlikely to be called up for this war. The nearest I might find myself to war could be as part of a South Gloucestershire Dad’s Army, although if Russia launched a few nuclear missiles it is likely that my time as a kind of Private Godfrey might not last very long. My adult children might not be so lucky in avoiding the draft. A part of me does worry about that and if I was them, I’d be having my bone spurs checked out. They helped Trump avoid the draft in the Vietnam war.
What’s happening in Iran seems so far away. All we see is television pictures and insane petrol prices, which will soon be insane prices for everything else. What could happen in Taiwan seems even further away, yet the consequences are unavoidable.
I can hardly believe I am writing this. At the very least, it appears we are on the verge of major regional conflicts. At the very worst, it could be the end of the world as we know it. Frankly, this is not the retirement I was planning for.
Perhaps, wiser voices will prevail? US politicians could show some cojones and have their demented and unstable president removed from office and maybe those wiser heads will negotiate some kind of peace deal. We can’t go on like this, can we?
