Letter from London: When You’re a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail
Photo by iMattSmart
I watched the close protection team empty their weapons at the gate of what was the largest US military base in Afghanistan. This was just under 17 years ago. It was a hot day and I had spent three hours of it filming inside a literal minefield. Later, as I sat down in the shade to eat, I wasn’t even hungry. In fact, I was feeling nauseous—my usual response to the company of trained killers. Just then, an American soldier—someone I had never met before—slapped me hard on the back, commenting first on my accent, then telling me how much he loved the Brits.
Who knows the situation by the time this goes out but watching Zelenskyy’s plane touch down at Stansted Airport—and the subsequent cavalcade of black and grey 4×4 vehicles speeding down the tidy three-lane motorway to London and Downing Street—was like eyeballing the future, not tending to the present. A future where the US may no longer be the go-to place for every democratic leader defending freedom.
As the motorbike dispatch riders weaved in and out of the traffic, speeding up and slowing down, like a performative dance, many softer-hearted viewers were feeling relief that our embattled guest would at least be predator-free for a couple of days. In addition, so many European leaders had offered carefully unified support for Zelenskyy after what had looked to the casual observer like a Vance-led mugging—already mischaracterised as the other way round by some Trump supporters—in the evidently coveted Oval Office.
Meanwhile, though Ukrainian forces had now advanced close to the major eastern cities of Pokrovsk and Toretsk, Moscow continued its own larger push with Russian and North Korean conscripts into a country which not so long ago had been the third-largest nuclear power in the world (before it surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for long-forgotten US, UK and Russian security guarantees in the equally unrecalled 1994 Budapest Memorandum). ‘The point is,’ as comedian Chris Farley once said, ‘how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn’t a crazy glue sniffer.’
Unfairly or otherwise, a mixture of horror and despair now greeted one or two Americans in London. I had seen it in the park with my own eyes. However, even the most pro-Trump of social media sites had been showing overwhelming support for Zelenskyy. Only the most conspiracy theorist of Americans—and there are many—could honestly call it otherwise. To have attacked and berated a punch-drunk, bloodied ally in the middle of a war felt repulsive to many. Why do so many Americans hate the aggressed so much, people were left wondering? Is it a general hatred of ‘losers’? We Europreans already knew Ukraine couldn’t ‘win’ this war. Was the fall-out a set-up? Not by Zelenskyy, I didn’t believe. The stakes were too high.
What we did know was that Vance didn’t care what happened in Ukraine because he had said as much. Trump at the same time played a weird game of poker. ‘You don’t have the cards,’ he said. ‘I’m not playing cards,’ replied Zelenskyy. (‘His people are the cards!’ Christiane Amanpour told the BBC.) I just could not see this ending well. But it was not to me the complicated web of deliberately stage-managed Ukrainian triple-bluffing as some Americans would have it.
Besides, Ukraine, as military historian Lawrence Freedman reminded us at the weekend, will fight to defend its dignity just as much as its sovereignty. Not that this ‘appeared’ to matter. Regrettably it had looked at times like Trump and Vance were calling for Zelenskyy’s surrender, when I am sure Trump was not. Similarly, the same people saying Team Obama was behind the contretemps were devaluing the validity of their point by describing Trump as ‘statesmanlike’ throughout. Susan Rice was implicated. Mollie Hemingway was irate. Yes, Trump must keep Putin sufficiently on board to come to the table. Yes, we Europeans get that. But this is our security too.
Which made Starmer’s firm embrace of Zelenskyy on the Downing Street pavement late Saturday afternoon quite frankly a pretty moving experience for some Londoners on what had been one of the first truly sunny days of the year. ‘What Zelensky wants is for NATO, Europe and the US to fight Russia, risks and all,’ blasted one American at me last week, as if by defending Zelenskyy Europe was showing a lust for war. This was not the case at all.
‘The absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,’ announced German Chancellor-designate Friedrich Merz earlier last week. Though this was unhelpful, he meant it. It was presumably not quite clear how long the many working US military facilities parked on German soil would remain. Meanwhile, increasingly separatist Moscow-facing East Germans and their AfD party were still licking their wounds after coming in only second in the German elections. (They had little support in the former West Germany.) The truth was, by supporting AfD, Vance and the salutist South African may well have helped the Die Linke party instead.
Of course, we should have seen all this coming. Before the Starmer love-in at the White House, followed by a measured display on Sunday with Macron and other European leaders at Lancaster House here on the Mall, it was like Brexit all over again—though the additional Russian sandbags and razor wire tossed into the mix had been unexpected. Everyone had already split into two camps, it seemed. On the one side we had the people deprioritising investigations into far-right terrorist groups while over-rehearsing battle cries for more mirrors, more make-up, a fatter wallet (good luck with that), and an abiding disregard for anyone in the way. (Not forgetting a truly weird appreciation of Andrew Tate.) On the other, though less contentious, we had the freedom-loving Vulnerablists, wary of people being press-ganged by social media sites, later enjoying an allusion of civility as if the blows in the Oval Office which had derailed the peace train were now firing up updated European pistons. Starmer and Macron would come up with something themselves, along with a few others, it was declared, and report back to Trump. ‘I am clear in my mind that he [Trump] wants lasting peace,’ said Starmer.
Just as henchmen Vance and Musk regularly display a kind of weird complex about the Brits, the US looks so bad to some Brits when even the young French far-right leader Jordan Bardella chose to cancel his CPAC speech after Bannon’s dodgy hand salute. (Tellingly, the likes of the UK’s Liz Truss and Nigel Farage stayed put.) Someone close said the US was such a turn-off to them now, they couldn’t believe anyone would ever want to go there. A learned friend said Americans didn’t give a damn about us anymore, anyway, encouraging the view that certainly one wing of the United States of America may want to torpedo the United States of Europe. (Interestingly, China has already begun equating Europe with greater stability.)
So is this love of the ogre thing a phase or full-on ripping out of trees? ‘I’ve been very critical of the liberal left, woke—yes, it exists—agenda,’ posted neighbour and journalist Dan Hodges last week. ‘But Trump’s victory has pushed people over a line. Overt 1970’s racism is now perceived to be acceptable again. And good people on all sides of the political spectrum are going to have to take a stand.’ On Kier Starmer, people were already growing more upbeat. Podcaster and ex-BBC man Jon Sopel said after the London Summit: ‘Thought Starmer came across today as serious, thoughtful, calm, pragmatic and a leader. Yes, there have been missteps aplenty by him since becoming PM. But on this most critical issue he looks sure-footed.’
In 1987 I painted a house in Atlantic City to help towards rehearsal costs for a play I still had to find a theatre for. On the shelf was a row of Mark Twain books and with them a direct link to my childhood. After work I’d make myself an omelette and after nostalgically leafing through a few of these—they even had the baffling A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—would spend hours reading through my notes on the play. The apartment, I remember, creaked like a ship.
If I couldn’t sleep, which was often, I would walk past the flashing casinos on the Boardwalk—Donald Trump owned one but was away in the Soviet Union at the time, according to the owner of the house I was painting. Anyway, some nights I would sit alone on an outside bench smoking a Lucky Strike. Shortly after Trump returned from Moscow and St Petersburg, maybe even coming to Atlantic City, he famously splashed out nearly $100,000 on full-page newspaper ads criticising US foreign policy and pleading for the US to stop defending its allies. It seemed out of character at the time, unless he was running for President.
The point is, if any of his Russian ties can help now lead to peace, I am all for them. I painted the house in the end. This included its entire white exterior and the unreasonably long white picket fence. Thanks to producer Tarquin Callen, I put on my play—largely about invasive men—in a popular East 13th Street New York theatre. Before leaving Atlantic City, though, as I may have written once before, I clocked a man using a public telephone who was shouting down the line, perhaps to his wife, that he had lost everything, including the family home.
What type of person would ever own a casino, I remember thinking?
‘You know,’ said the American soldier at the US air base at the beginning of the piece, ‘you Brits are always fucking there for us!’ Some of his pizza had travelled across his face. ‘And you for us,’ I said, handing him a paper napkin. Always there, I think now? Are we, both? Er, um, ah, right, okay, ouch, oh dear, righty-ho, I am left thinking. Then: okay. Let’s do it then. For peace this time.
The post Letter from London: When You’re a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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