A Short Tale of Two Wars

WWII

The Versailles peace treaty after WWI treated Germany badly.

Hitler appealed to this sense of grievance and rose to power.

One could have been sympathetic with him at the beginning, but after he began

his military rampage (in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland...) sympathy for him dropped.

For more details see How Hitler Invaded Half of Europe (7 mins.)

Ukraine

The creation of NATO and its expansion eastward treated Russia badly.

Putin has risen to power and has appealed to Russia’s concerns about NATO.

One could have been sympathetic with him at the beginning, but after his military rampages (in Syria and Ukraine) sympathy for him has dropped.

For more details see Why Russia Wants Ukraine ( 8 mins.)

Lessons from history

Destructive foreign wars do not achieve their objectives:

Hitler in Germany
Putin in Ukraine
And USA in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

What to do with an unbalanced president?

The evidence is so overwhelming that we are becoming inured to it. President Trump’s erratic behaviour is becoming the new normal. We poor souls, bewildered by it all, hardly know how to react anymore.

He lies and he flip flops on his story about Russia. First he knew nothing about Russia. Later he knows Russia well. Then he has never met Putin. Then later he admits that he did meet him (at a beauty pageant in Russia). This behaviour is all captured on video. However, all of this recorded evidence does not seem to phase Donald Trump, nor his ardent followers.

He has made outlandish claims about himself, and he has done it so often that we hardly know how to respond.