Declan Hayes
Though every school child knows what happened to the armies of Hitler and Napoleon in Russia, the British and German Armed Forces are determined to ignore all of that, as they threaten to launch their own Barbarossa.
Stick close close to your desks and never go to sea,
And you all may be rulers of the Queen's Navee! ~ Gilbert and Sullivan (HMS Pinafore, 1878)
Before moving on to the contemptible case of Christoph Heusgen, let's first consider The Godfather - Johnny Fontane Scene HD , where Marlon Brando, much to the amusement of Tom Hagen, smacks Johnny Fontane around for being a cry baby and not "acting like a man". Real gangsters, you see, should not cry and nor should German lickspittles like Christoph Heusgen, when they chair major security conferences in Munich.
But that is exactly what Heusgen did, when he chaired the Munich Security Conference on how Europe should formulate a response to Trump and Putin sidelining them. Not only did this senior German diplomat Munich Summit Chairman tears up during emotional closing speech but, as recently as 2018, when he was German Ambassador to the United Nations, Germany Reacts to Trump's UNGA Speech , when the latter said Europe should get its act together. Now, as Europe faces an existential crisis, all her top diplomats can do is, to the world's great amusement, cry like babies with soiled diapers.
Though this is no laughing matter, in the interests of fairness, we should not omit mention of the guiding hand of Russian President Putin in all this. According to Heusgen, Putin is laughing himself stupid at all this. But who, in truth, could blame Putin, or anyone else for that matter, laughing when Europe's top securocrats give Heusgen a standing ovation for crying like a baby in front of these supposedly tough as nails die hard desk jockeys? Jesus wept.
The truth is that Heusgen is part of a large, and largely superfluous club that has been bleeding Europe dry for decades or, in the case of Ursula Albrecht/von der Leyen's family, for centuries. All they can do is tie Europe up in mountains of debilitating red tape and throw shapes at Russia, which has well-proven home side advantages whenever she is invaded.
And, though every school child knows what happened to the armies of Hitler and Napoleon in Russia, the British and German Armed Forces, together with whatever corner boys Estonia can rustle up, are determined to ignore all of that, as they threaten to launch their own Barbarossa. All very well, except Britain, which once ruled the waves, now has more admirals than battleships, and it has more generals than it has tanks. As the US Coast Guard has far greater firepower than the once mighty Royal Navy, Tommy Atkins better stay the hell out of any punch up with the Russkies his betters have planned.
Of course, the plan was never to go head to head with the Russkies but to bleed Russia dry by getting the draft dodging Zelensky to send Ukrainian schmucks against them. Best value for money, as Senator Lindsey Graham so vulgarly put it.
But now Donald Trump, 𝕏 Graham's golfing partner, has presented Zelensky with the $500 bn butcher's bill and, no matter what way we look at it, that is no laughing matter. Even leaving aside that most of Ukraine's rare earth minerals are now in Russian hands and that its black earth is being looted at a phenomenal rate, $500 bn, if looked at through the simplest perpetuity formula, is at least as onerous as what Germany had to repay after the Great War. The Ukrainian Reich is not only kaput but it has helped kill off all of Europe.
Instead of addressing that cancerous elephant in their drawing room, Heusgen, von der Leyen and the totally unhinged Kallas are now talking about a full scale invasion, most likely by stealth in the form of peacekeepers in Russia's western borderlands. All very well, except that would call for an invasion force of around 200 divisions with an overall total of over 3 million personnel, or some three times the amount of personnel NATO could muster with proper preparation and a sufficiently long lead in time. Real desk jockey daydreaming, in other words.
And let's not leave smirking Saudi Arabia out of this laugh fest. Not only have the Saudis scored the 2034 World Cup but they have offered their facilities for a major summit between Russia and the United States, meaning that Europe and its campaign of terror against both President Putin and Russian peace activist Maria Lvova-Belova are both not just sidelined but cast out into the wilderness where Heusgen has shown that there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Oh, how the mighty narcissists, who couldn't even put manners on Yemeni shepherds, have fallen.
And, just because the great Vera Lynn sang that there will always be an England, that does not make it a given. British people of Lynn's vintage now have to go without winter fuel to feed Zelensky's war furnace and ordinary Britons, along with most other ordinary Europeans, are none too amused about that or about the soy boys' massive money laundering operation that was Syria and that is now Ukraine.
Though the British, to their credit, are now out from under the thumb of the European Union, the same problems of being governed by self-serving soy boys like Boris Johnson, Tony Blair and Christoph Cry Baby Heusgen remain. And so do the tens of thousands of useless cry babies they put in place at all levels of European military and civil society who, no matter how thick they are at heart, must see the cold winds of Elon Musk's DOGE purges threatening them from across the Atlantic where Trump has said, in no uncertain terms, that Saudi Arabia is a much better partner and customer for American hardware than is Bankrupt Britain and America's other west European appendages.
On the positive side, as the brilliant Lion Feuchtwanger's Tis Folly to be wise explicates, Europe has been down this road before, when the collapse of the Ancien Régime and the exposure for the charlatans that they were of the likes of Rousseau led to the impoverishment of masses of Royalist sycophants and philosophical wasters and the concomitant rise, warts and all, of Napoleonic meritocracy and esprit de corps. The hope has to be that pending elections in France, Germany, Romania, Poland, Ireland and Moldova will see the demise of Europe's weeping and wailing political pygmies that Christoph Heusgen epitomises and the rise of leaders that do not always need a paid lackey's shoulder to cry on. Now that would be something to celebrate and smile broadly about.