by Marie-Therese Belisle Nweke

Sunday, April 13, 2025

“Finland has a 1,340-kilometer-long border with Russia, and we have coexisted with Russia and the Soviet Union since the 1300s. We have had roughly 30 wars and skirmishes.”

This is coming from Finland’s president. Finland is a nation that KNOWS Russia, its next-door neighbour!

After all this time, America behaves like a bungling novice in the world of realpolitik. Therefore, it must cease its constant and disastrous meddling in foreign affairs and look to its own domestic issues, as it has plenty. And these are indeed grave!

See the unmitigated nonsense Trump’s man, Steve Witkoff, is spewing about the Ukrainians wanting to come under Russian rule! Does he understand why, when and how the relatively small ethnic Russian population was sent to occupy parts of Ukraine?

If the US is so ignorant about its own neighbours, viz. Canada and Mexico, from all that we have seen, heard and known, what is its business poking its nose all the way to Russia and ignoring key players like the Europeans in its so-called peace plan? And, if the US doesn’t even know and understand its own neighbours, why should we expect it to know and understand distant nations, let alone be “putting mouth” in their business. These are nations it neither knows, nor has the tactical ability and humility to understand; but who can and will run rings around the US, as every foreign adventure the US has undertaken since 1945 has tragically shown.

Trump calculated that by goading the Europeans to come out of their relaxed mode and re-arm themselves, the US would profit massively, as those nations would be procuring their military hardware from it. So, he clearly told them that the US was no longer going to perpetuate the kind of relationship characterizing the post-WWII world (and even after the end of the Cold War), in which the US, being far more militarized, could be relied upon to safeguard the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, via NATO. To all but the most obtuse, a Trumpian America does not regard Europe as allies, Hungary excepted, with Britain on reserve (Trump desires a knighthood from King Charles), as demonstrated via tariff wars deliberately ignited by Trump.

The canny Europeans, who have centuries of concerted warfare behind them, both against each other, as well as in the far-flung reaches of the globe, will neither patronize Trump nor Putin, who has far more nuclear war heads than Trump, in procuring their military hardware. Nor will they go to Zi of China, or his sidekick in North Korea.

Already, Germany has declared that Europe has to become ultra self-reliant in manufacturing its own military hardware.

And Europe would do well not to trust anything coming out of Trump’s America, especially after hearing, seeing and understanding the implications of the recent grave and major American security breach in respect of the Yemen bombing. That was when 18 of the highest level Americans in government, including the VP, were on a mobile chat, which inadvertently included the editor-in-chief of an adversarial US publication.

The chat discussed in detail the plans to bomb Yemen—the poorest nation in the Middle East—even when the actions of Yemen’s Houthis in their region’s shipping lanes affects only 3 percent of US shipping, but 40 percent of Europe’s. The US, whom nobody asked to do this, was insisting during this chat (which occurred two days before the bombs fell on Yemen) that the “freeloading” Europeans must pay for the US military action! 

To the consternation of the rest of the world, both Trump and his minions have made light of the entire cock-up, while unashamedly lying through their teeth. Little do they know, that to discerning observers, they appear careless, incompetent and stupid.

Lest we forget!  The people who after WWII created the space exploration industry and made both the US and the Soviet Union the military behemoths they are today, were German scientists — not homegrown Americans or Russians!

Up to today, the US, more than any other nation on Planet Earth, chiefly relies on people whose education, skill-sets and cultural foundational architecture were actually created in places like little Belize, Britain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Russia, India, Taiwan, South Africa, Nigeria, Jamaica, Chile, Argentina, France, South Korea, Israel, and on and on—not its “born,” homegrown, second, third, and fourth generation Americans.

Henry Kissinger, a German Jew (born Heinz Alfred Kissinger) immigrated to the US from Germany in 1938. Despite his long residence in the US, dying at the age of 100, he still retained not only the guttural Germanic sound in his American English, but also the realpolitik and sophistication of his European background.

That is why third-generation Americans like Trump and Witkoff (Witkoff’s grandparents were Russian Jews who emigrated to America from Russia) just do not “understand” the world. Then there is “Little Marco” Rubio (to quote Trump), now his Secretary of State, a second-generation Cuban, whose parents fled Batista’s dictatorial misrule in 1950s Cuba to the US—not from Castro’s nationalist-Marxism. Rubio simply perceives Latin America as clientele, subaltern states through the lens of American imperialist ideology. Thus, Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil are the region’s misfits or outliers.