Pablo Hiriart
Madrid.- A few days ago, President Donald Trump announced that “I have ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case those foolish (former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev) and inflammatory statements go any further.”
In other words, Donald Trump responded to a tweet from a second-rate politician whom no one listens to anymore by deploying nuclear submarines to attack Russia, if necessary, and unleash the nuclear Armageddon from which “only cockroaches will survive,” as the Nobel Prize winner from Aracataca said decades ago.
All because of a tweet?
Before getting to the bottom of this, there are a couple of questions: all of the United States’ submarines are nuclear.
If he was referring to the Ohio class, they do not need to move to attack Russia: their warheads have a range of more than 11,000 kilometers, with a force of around 400 kilotons.
The one that devastated Hiroshima 80 years ago was 15 kilotons.
Would he move one of those 180-meter-long giants because of a tweet from a loudmouth whom not even his friends take seriously?
Another question: submarines are just that, submersible, so they cannot be seen and can attack by surprise.
So, as The Ugly said in Sergio Leone’s unforgettable western: “If you are going to shoot, shoot, don’t warn them.”
At this point, no one can say that Donald Trump is not intelligent. Of course he is. He swept the Democrats in the last election, despite being found guilty of crimes that would have cost any other US politician his career and probably his freedom.
When former President Trump saw on television that Russia had invaded Ukraine and was advancing towards Kyiv on February 24, 2022, he exclaimed that he thought the attack was wonderful. And he praised his friend Vladimir, as he has done on so many other occasions. That day, Putin openly broke the order established at the end of World War II, in which no country could move its borders by force.
The three-quarter-century peace ended with Russia’s invasion of a sovereign, free, and democratic European country. But the US president is putting his hand on the nuclear button because the boastful Medvedev bullied him in a tweet:
“Trump is playing the ultimatum game with Russia: 50 or 10 days… He should remember two things. First: Russia is not Israel, nor even Iran. And second: every new ultimatum is another step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.”
Putin did not comment on Medvedev’s tweet. He did not even respond to Trump’s atomic threat.
Trump reached an agreement with Zelensky to keep a large part of Ukraine’s minerals – “rare earths” – vital for new technologies, but he cannot bring in a single engineer or piece of machinery because that country is at war.
What the US president wants is to do business with Russia and distance that country from its commercial enemy, China. More or less, a reverse Nixon.
But the alliance between Russia and China is invulnerable as long as Putin, his friend, remains in power in the Kremlin. Trump is now angry with Putin, but he continues to deny the Ukrainians weapons and resources to defend themselves.
A very strange president, to be honest.
He has just done a magnificent job in Iran, bloodlessly destroying, in a surgical operation, the Shiite regime’s ability to have atomic bombs for a long time.
And he is incapable of stopping Netanyahu’s genocidal action in Gaza, or of using the reinvigorated political strength of the United States in the Middle East to put forward a proposal for a settlement in that hellhole where images of Israeli hostages in the hands of Hamas terrorists transport us back to the Nazi extermination camps.
Well, there was one: that the owners of the house, i.e., the Palestinians, should leave Gaza and develop it into a tourist resort with golf courses.
Then, seeing the images of starving Gaza children and others literally dying of hunger because the Israeli government is preventing food from reaching them, Trump says he is horrified and declares that he is very upset with Netanyahu. So what?
The US president is strange.
He calls Nicolás Maduro a terrorist for being the head of a criminal cartel, and at the same time authorizes Chevron to do business with the terrorist’s government.
He had one of the greatest geniuses of the 21st century, Elon Musk, on his team. Instead of putting him in charge of a great machine of scientific and technological innovation, he wasted him in a job cutting staff.
It is impossible to imagine what could have been achieved by the virtuous alliance between the most powerful president on Earth and the most powerful genius in space.
He ended up fighting with Musk and threatened to deport him.
Deport Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa?
Musk has a large part of his Tesla production in China. Xi would welcome him with open arms. So would Putin.
What a strange president. He governs for himself, to take revenge on those who have questioned his personal greatness, to humiliate those who have placed limits on his capricious will.
But in democracies, bless them, it is possible to correct mistakes. In tyrannies, it is not.
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