Success or failure are two bedfellows

 Subject: Success or failure are two bedfellows

This morning I woke up to the news of the attempt to shoot Donald Trump.

In a land where shooting people is endemic, it’s surprising only 4 presidents have been successfully assassinated given the public exposure they offer a sniper. John F Kennedy is the most famous of course, in broad daylight shot from a distance with a high powered rifle we see the tragic end to a young man in the prime of his presidency with the hope of much of the western word on his shoulders. He wasn’t without blame and his private life was risky to say the least,  in at least this one aspect Donald Trump emulated him in growing up under the tutelage of a rich powerful father.

Trumps natural chutzpah was to raise his fist in defiance, a show of resilience  which his followers will cherish and their harsh assessment of the world outside the USA makes me worry as Trump supporters show no sense of unifying with anyone other than themselves.

The American mindset crafted by Trumps messaging is quite crude in the concept of any future role America should play. There are few diplomatic niceties, little apparent reflection of the power of a coalition which came into being since Russia invaded Ukraine. The Chinese, already a super power tooling itself up as a nuclear state, Russia with a stockpile of warheads which exceeds even Americas, and now the belligerent kid on the block, North Korea who psychology is so extreme, who knows what they may or may not do. Europe is a collection of disparate states each with different philosophies, tied in to their European experience by a troubled historical past. They could easily fragment if their corporate affairs are threatened.

All this within four years when Russia started to turn the screw. Firstly in Syria and their support of Bashar al- Assad, then the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine,  the west (we mean America) started to rationalise its position, to weigh the odds of the cost of war rather than its strategic importance. The odds have swung towards the totalitarian state,  their collective will unfettered by electoral responsibility they determined the cost in terms of power and the future rewards power will bring.

We never believed, after World War Two and the efforts made towards active collective security through the realisation of NATO that financial backsliding amongst member nations with America baring the brunt of the cost that they would eventually balk at continuing. Amongst the individual nations who benefit from NATO, as with any payment, if you fall into arrears it’s almost impossible to catch up and with so many social commitments promised, without defence spending ring fenced and populations within NATO not educated that the world is still fragile place (just as it always was) and that we can’t take our defence for granted.

The travesty of 14 years of conservative government has meant our armed forces are down 2010 levels and, as with education, health, public infrastructure, social welfare , police, sewerage control etc,etc,etc, the villains in the piece are the Tory party manipulators who stood to gain financially from the marketisation of UK plc. Nowhere, be it the trains, the prisons, the post office, the water companies, the environment agencies and agencies across the board who seemed more in bed with with the business they were supposed to control than the public they were set up to protect.

It’s been a massive failure, this mantra of privatisation but perhaps we as a nation are destined to fail because of the ‘lack of will to succeed’. In some ways mollycoddled by the concept of human rights and the integrity of human action we inflated our worth.

Perhaps we haven’t progressed that far and need to pull our tails in.