Opinion
By Paschos Mandravelis
The American president was right to say that Britain’s current prime minister, Keir Starmer, is not Winston Churchill. But is Donald Trump Franklin Roosevelt? These are different figures from a different era, a time when a prime minister drank heavily, smoked one cigar after another, and struggled with severe depression.
Keir Starmer is not Winston Churchill for another reason. In the reckless war with Iran launched by the American president, it is not the British prime minister pleading for U.S. help. On the contrary, Donald Trump is asking Europeans for assistance.
During World War II, Britain, Europe, and the entire world faced an existential threat from the Nazis. Today, the United States may continue bombing “for fun,” as the president himself put it. The regime in Tehran is brutal, repressive, and deeply flawed, but it cannot truly threaten Israel’s existence. It managed once, through proxies, to carry out a major terrorist attack in 2023. But the scale of destruction and the heavy loss of life were not the result of Hamas’s strength. They were the result of an unforgivable failure by Israel’s security forces. Islamist terrorists killed, raped, and destroyed with little resistance for an entire day.
The Israeli response is understandable given the deep trauma of October 7. Even before that tragic day, no country can easily endure near-daily missiles, rockets, and shelling. Before 2001, however, the United States consistently tried to stabilize the region. It did not always succeed, but it did help achieve the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995, which were later undermined by extremists on both sides. The United States, even when acting clumsily, pushed the world forward. It defeated two totalitarian regimes, established democracy in two deeply militarized nations, Germany and Japan, and became a model of political organization for supporters of freedom around the world.
After September 11, 2001, various far-right factions within the Republican Party, whether neoconservatives or MAGA, exploited the national trauma. They weakened their own democracy and eroded the global order the United States had helped build, despite its imperfections. Now they have elected an erratic president who has led the country into a pointless war, or at best a war with no clear and consistent objective. The only beneficiaries will be authoritarian regimes that oppose the United States and democracy.
