The Guns of April: Trump has Made the World a Dangerous Place

When T.S. Eliot set the tone for his masterpiece, “The Wasteland”, he chose to subvert the optimistic “April showers bring May flowers” and say “April is the cruelest month.” The world has seen much devastation in different parts of the world in the month of April in different years, but this April has seen more devastation and a regional war, which threatens to trap more and more countries. On Easter Day this year, the world was in the grip of fear of a great crisis rather than the hope of a resurrection.

As the spring flowers bloom around the world, unaware of the emergence of cruelty all around, we hear of ultimatums, defiance and wrong calculations of balance of power. The war had no apparent reason as it started after an agreement was reached on the crucial question of Iran’s nuclear capability. “Wars begin in the minds of men”, declares UNESCO, but this is the case of a war beginning in the mind of one man, whose conditions for ending it keeps shifting from preventing the manufacture of a nuclear weapon to opening of the Hormus strait. But the aim is one of obliterating of something or another        or decapitating regimes. In other words, there are no attainable objectives as actions are blinded by ideology and religion. The situation reflects the global realization that political and economic agreements alone are not enough to prevent war.

 The 9/11 massacre showed that the power to destroy the world many times over with weapons of mass destruction does not ensure success. Unarmed men with nothing but forks and knives picked up from passenger planes brought the most powerful country in the world to its knees. The US-Israel combine not being able to defeat Iran after more than a month of bombing has exploded the belief that Goliath will always win over David. Stealth, secret weapons and determination may determine the result and not power measured by possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The unending threats to rain terror on Iran if the ultimatums to open the Hormus Strait are ignored by Iran repeatedly, making such threats unreal because even the US cannot afford to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The Aesop Fable serves as a timeless warning against short-sighted greed at the expense of long- term sustainability. Perhaps, the latest threats being laced with expletives expresses frustration rather than determination.

The twenty first century wars have a tendency to last longer, as seen from the number of active state- based conflicts across 36 countries as the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme has recorded. This is perhaps on account of the United Nations having failed to use the scheme for maintaining International peace like Preventive Diplomacy, Ceasefire, Peacekeeping and Peace building outlined in the Charter. Setting of the sun over the UN has been anticipated by the formation of a Board of Peace with Donald Trump as its permanent Chairman. His quest for the Nobel Peace Prize has now turned to creating more conflicts so that he can resolve them one by one and claim more Nobel Prizes!

The April cruelty is not confined to West Asia. The Russia-Ukraine war is raging in its fourth  year and may prevent any celebration of the arrival of the spring. Donald Trump’s list of things to be done keeps getting longer. He appears to have a vision of the whole region from Greenland to Panama forming a new geographical and political entity dominated by the United States. That will mean turning many springs into winters, back to T.S.Eliot, who concluded his poem, “The Hollow Men” with the following words, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.” A silver lining on the dark horizon this April, however, is that Artemis II has officially entered the sphere of influence of the moon, a singular achievement. For the moment, he has shifted the ultimatum given to Iran to open Hormuz to April 7, 2026.