Winston Churchill is still revered in Britain and by old-generation American conservatives and Make America Great Again (MAGA) patriots alike, as the epitome of an all-wise, brilliantly successful Warlord. The truth was the precise opposite, as the great Anglo-American biographer and historian Nigel Hamilton documents in his classic trilogy of books on President Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime leadership, “The Mantle of Command,” “Commander in Chief” and “War and Peace.”
In 1943, with the limitless energy and drive of a demented demigod, Churchill would not rest until British and American, along with large Polish, French, and British Imperial forces, were stuck in Italy for a needless, wasteful, impossibly hard long campaign over two years that cost 350,000 Allied casualties.
Churchill was so ignorant that he did not even know about the mountains in Italy. It was never the “soft underbelly” he always described it as. The weary British and American soldiers who paid for his vast folly knew it as a “tough old boot.”
But Churchill in 1943-44 was felled first by a heart attack and then by pneumonia, neither of which did much to dent his ignorance or his drive. He tirelessly opposed D-Day – the Allied invasion to liberate Europe – to the very last second. He was a millstone around FDR’s and General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s necks.
So as the war drew to a close, Churchill was indeed a Lion in Winter. He was an old fool – and recognized as such by both FDR and Josef Stalin at the fateful Tehran Conference of October 1943. Tom Hanks’ new “World War II” documentary series currently running on the History Channel recognizes and documents this reality.
By then, the Americans had had enough of Churchill’s ridiculous boasts, exaggerations, false predictions, and outright lies, which were inevitably proved wrong on every occasion.
The operation Churchill hated the most, Anvil – the Allied liberation of Southern France by the US 6th Army Group – proved an extraordinary triumph. General Jacob Devers’ forces drove further in three months and captured or killed more German troops than all of Churchill’s legions in Italy managed to do over almost two years – and with a fraction of the casualties.
Lions in Winter are gross dangers not to their enemies, but to their own warriors. At best they are farcical.
Britain’s great General Bernard Montgomery knew how to handle Churchill whenever the old fool flew over to France to impart his military wisdom. Montgomery simply gave him a full bottle of whiskey in the morning and sent him off to play in wrecked German tanks before flying him back to London, happily snoring that same night.
Now the United States is similarly blessed with its own Lion in Winter. As I write, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a sprightly young 76 himself, is flying yet again to Washington to “inspire” President Trump – yet again – with his own demented visions.
Netanyahu ought now to be as discredited in Washington as Churchill was in Washington by the fall of 1943 after his strategic “advice” was rejected by the Anglo-American Joint Chiefs of Staff at the First Quebec Conference and by FDR and Stalin at Tehran. But Trump has always been infinitely more credulous towards Netanyahu than Franklin Roosevelt ever was to the buffoonish Churchill.
Also, Trump, today, is now a decade older than the already demented and clownish Churchill was in 1944. Indeed, Trump is now the second octogenarian to serve as Chief Executive of the United States. His predecessor Joe Biden, that Titan among Leaders and Men, was the first.
So this is how the United States of America celebrated the start of its second quarter century of existence as a shining example to the whole world. Its people elected, or at least passively permitted, the succession of two very old men, almost 80 years old each.
On July 16th, with America’s 250th birthday less than two week behind him, Trump unveiled his latest strategic masterstroke to restore peace and stability to the Middle East and Southwest Asia: The United States will renew punishing military strikes on Iran, a nation of 90 million people, and after 22 years of endlessly bungled, mismanaged occupation, withdrawal and reoccupation of neighboring Iraq, the United States will withdraw its remaining military presence from Iraq.
What would the earlier Donald Trump, the Donald Trump of his 2015-16 presidential election campaign or the Donald Trump out of office as chief opposition critic to Biden from 2021 to 2024 have made of these decisions? Or, for that matter, the Trump who for so long assailed his earlier predecessor in office, Democratic President Barack Obama, as a wimp? For it was Obama who drew down the massive US military presence in Iraq in his first term, only to be forced to do a complete U-turn.
However, “that” Trump is a decade older now. He has turned 80 and will soon outstrip even the woeful, never-there, brainless Biden as the oldest man ever to sit in the Oval Office.
As I speak, the truly sinister Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev continues to despise Trump and defies him with impunity. Behind Zelensky stand the unelected and unrepresentative elites micromanaging NATO and the European Union, having usurped the democratic and national powers to make war and peace from the extinguished governments of Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
In Britain, smiling Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, is now being acclaimed by the truly formidable national state brainwashing apparatus known as the BBC – the British Broadcasting Corporation – as the latest flickering image to prop up the fantasy of democratic responsive government. Only a week into office as I write, Burnham has already made his priorities clear. He will keep public transportation fares on buses down for the poor and elderly – and he will rush headlong toward a crisis confrontation and thermonuclear war with Russia.
Pennies for the poor and the total annihilation of 75 million of his own people. Burnham’s epitaph in history is already clear.
To ensure, the second, obviously more consequential of these goals, Burnham has bizarrely appointed his former supposed rival Wes Streeting, who at a youthful 43 has no military or foreign policy experience whatsoever, as Secretary of Defense.
Streeting was previously Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. His total failure to improve the functioning of Britain’s cash guzzling and woefully incompetent National Health Service obviously gave him the experience to further undermine the health of the British people by propelling them into wars and confrontations they have not a snowflake’s chance in hell of winning.
Only days into office, Streeting has already approved prodigies of incompetence and stupidity that would astound even the French generals of 1940 or President Lyndon Johnson’s marshals in Vietnam. He has been energetically forging that fateful concept, a deep friendship and profound partnership, with his infinitely more experienced Warlord Partner, Trump’s personal favorite, square jutting, perfect-profile Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the Pentagon.
Hegseth will henceforth be identified in these columns as Hegseth von Hotzendorf, for his uncanny perfect portrayal of Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, the war chief of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the years up to 1914.
Von Hotzendorf’s idea of strategy and war-making was to charge headlong into a full-scale war against both giant Russia and tiny Serbia at the same time. The population of Austria-Hungary in 1914 was 48 million with 450,000 troops thrown against Serbia. 270,000 of them were killed, wounded, or captured within a few months. The population of Serbia at the time was 4.5 million. Serbian casualties were high too, but far less, at 170,000.
Austria-Hungary at the time could not even defeat tiny Serbia. Iran today, a rugged mountainous desert country the size of Western Europe, has 20 times Serbia’s population in 1914 and is halfway round the world from the United States, while supported by close-by Russia and China. The thought of Hegseth von Hotzendorf happily leaping into a war with Iran should terrify and enrage all Americans and bring scores of millions of them out on the streets. But of course, that isn’t happening.
London is already circulating with the first word of the precious first fruits of this new Anglo-American special relationship. The Royal Navy will send two 60,000-ton aircraft carriers – the only such ships it has – to join the US Navy in its naval operations against Iran.
No matter that those ships, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales, will not dare to operate within hundreds of miles of Iran because of their vulnerability to precision-guided missiles. No matter that they are incapable of operating independently from the US Navy because the British Royal Navy has no destroyers or frigates to spare to protect them either from air-launched missile attack or from torpedoes fired by submarines. The money was not there in the past 20 years of British military procurements to build them.
Therefore, those two aircraft carriers are helpless and undefendable unless they are protected by an American Navy anti-submarine warfare (ASW) combat screen of ships. Because Britain has no destroyers, frigates, or other anti-submarine defense systems to protect them. There was no money left to buy them or build them.
Even the aircraft operated by the two British carriers are American F-35s, the most problem-plagued, incompetent combat aircraft in the world. Those planes were taken from the US Marines because the Brits had no short take-off and landing (STOL) combat strike aircraft to operate from carriers of their own. Also, the British have no operational experience of integrating their carriers with US task forces.
This has been an insurmountable operational problem ever since Admiral Ernie King, America’s formidable Chief of Naval Operations through World War II, exploded at the farcical idea of Britain’s handful of tiny carriers with useless, obsolete aircraft, short cruising ranges and no interoperability with US refueling tanker ships, “gallantly” participating in final operations against Japan 81 years ago.
The US Navy never wanted and never needed Churchill’s typical imbecilic “offer” of the Royal Navy to carry out its final 1945 operations against Japan. But at least the US fleet was by then so enormous and so invincible that any games the British played among themselves were irrelevant to the outcome of the war.
The situation today is very different. A British carrier force in the Indian Ocean will stretch the already badly over-extended US screening forces now required to protect it. And London will assuredly seek to ensure “accidental” strikes against Ukrainian targets to heat up any flagging in hostilities by US and Iranian forces.
Meanwhile, Britain under Burnham will join Netanyahu back in Israel and Zelensky in Kiev as part of an infernal trio of hydra heads determined to beat the drums of war and accelerate the plunge into Armageddon.
Trump certainly has never wanted to risk a world war, to his great credit. But at his very overstretched best he is at most another Kaiser Wilhelm II – manipulated into catastrophe by allies and lieutenants he himself naively, and even stupidly, empowered and trusted for so long. The US President has never had any conception of appointing prudent ministers, generals, diplomats and advisers in depth to master and tame their headlong policies rather than being consumed by them.
Lions in Winter are pathetic sights. But most of all, they are a terror for those who naively trusted in their feeble roars and their futile pawing at the heavens. For they stayed in power too long.
Reprinted with permission from the Realist Review.
