Starmer's cheerleaders need to make up their minds once and for all whether Trump is friend or foe

When Alba HQ wonderbairn Robert Reid's dad Bob Reid made his prolonged attack on me about my views on Ukraine (although there was little doubt his real agenda was Alba-related), he asked something along the lines of "James, do you not accept that there is such a thing as a just war?"  That was a straw man on stilts, because I hadn't said anything that even remotely implied that there was no such thing as a just war.  I do have pacifist leanings, it's true, but pacifists have always grappled with the logical problem of how they would have dealt with the Nazis, who would have thought it was Christmas if they had only been faced with a display of Gandhian passive resistance, and would have just carried on conquering, enslaving and exterminating people.

Not all aspects of the Allied campaign in the Second World War can be considered just, to put it mildly.  I can't justify the mass slaughter of civilians in Dresden, for example, and I certainly can't justify the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which constituted acts of genocide.

But to the partial extent that the war against the Nazis was a just war and an unavoidable war, it's instructive to consider how this country actually went about fighting it.  Because to the best of my knowledge, individual men of conscription age always had the option to avoid taking part in direct combat by registering as conscientious objectors and doing non-military work of assistance to the war effort.  It wasn't an easy option by any means due to the likelihood of social opprobrium, but it was there for those brave enough to take it.  I recently discovered that one of my favourite actors, Alfred Burke, who went on to become a household name in the 60s and 70s, was a conscientious objector during the war.  It's heartening that it seemingly didn't affect people's perceptions of him in later life.

Contrast that to the situation in present-day Ukraine, where the right to conscientious objection has been completely abolished.  In practice draft evasion is common, but if you're a male of conscription age and you want to remain within the law, you have no option but to fight and die - and in most cases it really does mean dying, because the casualty rate is insanely high.  That's one of the reasons, one of several, why western progressives are foolish to simplistically view Ukraine as the good guys who should be egged on to fight to the last man.  Even to the extent that Ukraine is a democracy, we ought to be troubled by any notion that democracy is about the majority dictacting to individuals that they have to fight and die, irrespective of their own wishes and beliefs.  That's certainly not liberal democracy, and it's not "freedom" either.

Yes, Russia was the aggressor, and yes, it's a good thing that Ukraine has defied the odds to maintain control over 90% of its sovereign territory.  But it would be nice if there were some people left alive to actually enjoy that hard-won sovereignty, and from that point of view an early negotiated peace settlement would be a highly desirable outcome.  Human life is more important than the sort of 'sovereignty absolutism' that insists every single square inch of Ukrainian territory has to be returned before the killings can cease, or that the perfectly honourable status of neutrality can't even be considered as an acceptable compromise.  Some prices for peace might be too high, but not every price is too high.

All of that said, though, and even though Trump and Vance were posing as peace-makers in their public spat with Zelensky yesterday, my sympathy was entirely with Zelensky.  There was an obvious double-standard in branding Zelensky "disrespectful" when all he was doing was exactly the same thing that Macron and Starmer had done in exactly the same location over the last few days - politely pushing back on a small number of carefully selected points.  It seems that Britain and France still have just about high enough status that Trump feels he has to tolerate some dissent from their leaders, but the same doesn't apply to lower-status countries like Ukraine.  Treating a country and its leader as being of lower value is in itself wildly disrespectful.  Trump would doubtless argue that he gets to do that because of all the money America has poured into Ukraine, but the flipside of the coin is that Ukrainians have been fighting and dying as American proxies in a war against Russia.  OK, that proxy war was being fought on behalf of the former US administration rather than the current one, and the US has every right to elect new leaders and dramatically change course whenever it wishes.  But there is no right to forget decisions taken in the past by the former duly-elected US president and the debts of honour, or at least of courtesy, that are owed as a result.  The human price Ukraine has paid over the last three years far exceeds the monetary price paid by the US.

Vance asked Zelensky a series of questions and Trump refused to let Zelensky answer.  That was disrespectful.  And it was particularly boorish of Vance to attack Zelensky for his alignment with Biden.  If all foreigners are required to show respect to the US because "it's an American world and we run it" as a delightful Fox News contributor put it last night, wasn't respect owed to Biden as US President until last month every bit as much as it's owed to Trump as US President now?  Maybe Vance thinks Zelensky should have played along with the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump remained the 'real' President afterwards.  But if that's the case, why should Zelensky pay respect to Trump now that he's in a constitutionally-illegitimate third term?  Shouldn't Zelensky be paying respect to the sacred US CONSTITUTION above all else, JD?

I was in Glasgow yesterday and my eyes rolled to the heavens when I saw the front page of the Mirror, praising Starmer for fawning all over Trump and supposedly building an alliance with the King of the World.  24 hours later the same cheerleaders are denouncing Trump and urging Starmer and other European leaders to fill the void left by American leadership.  At some point these people are going to have to get the story straight and work out whether Trump is friend or foe.  You can't insist on breaking the bank to build up the military capacity needed to take on Russia without American help, while still demanding that we all genuflect to Trump on the logic that nothing can be achieved without him. 

The state religion of Atlanticism is hard to give up, we know, but for the love of God make up your minds, chaps.

The US didn't so much elect a president as a personality disorder.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) February 28, 2025