I've highlighted in bold the paragraph that crystallises the writer's contempt for American people and Russia...

The Transatlantic Rift
In a preview of the latest print edition of Byline Times, Peter Jukes looks at the consistency behind the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump 2.0's first 50 days in office
PETER JUKES, Byline Times, MAR 14

Writing any kind of definitive editorial for Byline Times in the tumultuous first 50 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency is a hiding to nothing and a hostage to fortune.

In the hours before this edition went to press, we had to reformat our front page several times as the story kept changing: from the US President’s obvious gangsterism to his failed opportunism: from a definitive though extortionate deal for Ukraine’s rare earths to abjuring Volodymyr Zelensky and his leadership entirely: from taking Vladimir Putin’s side and withdrawing aid and intelligence from Kyiv to reportedly returning it and putting pressure on Russia in a ‘remarkable breakthrough’.

How long this new phase will last is completely unpredictable.

Trump shape-shifts from deal-maker to deal-breaker; from ingenuity to ingenue; on a dime – or at least someone’s dime. It is exhausting and disorientating, and probably designed to be that way.

The only thing that doesn’t change is America’s new orientation towards the rest of the world. Whether it’s switching sides in real kinetic wars or launching and then withdrawing tariffs in trade wars, the attitude is self-serving and reckless.

The one consistent thread so far in Trump’s second administration, beyond his self aggrandisement, appears to be his desire to reward his billionaire oligarch backers, including the kleptocrat in the Kremlin, at the expense of all his other allies.

Amid these treacherous variables, credit must be paid to the Ukrainian President and his people, who have withstood a barrage of abuse and intimidation. Though, in Trump’s words, they “don’t have the cards”, the Ukrainians have played a blinder by staying at the table when the chips were down.

As I write this editorial, the future of Ukraine in terms of US support appears to be in a quantum state a bit like Schrodinger’s cat – in which the reality is only real when you open the box, and the cat inside is alive or dead, depending on how you view it.

Whatever the new world disorder this reflects, there is nothing certain about the outcome. But in that very uncertainty lies an opportunity to finally end the largest land war in Europe in 80 years (though, if the past is prelude to the future, a false peace just stores up another round of conflict).

Who knows? We don’t. We hang upon the moment with bated breaths, just like you do. Nevertheless, for all the disruption, Byline Times applauds the continued dialogue in Riyadh and the manoeuvres in Moscow, Kyiv, Washington, and Brussels. The logic of jaw-jaw, as Churchill put it, is better than war-war.

But we are also not naive to the fact that the jaw of the American President is made of glass, and any perceived slight could shatter it into a thousand narcissistic shards.

That is the new reality we cannot avoid.

There is a pattern. When we look at the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions depicted in the news, this newspaper has always sought to illuminate the underlying structural and historic shifts – the underlying plate tectonics of history.

The metaphor of continental drift is even more appropriate to the North Atlantic Alliance. Just as the Mid-Atlantic ridge is pushing the American plate away from the Eurasian plate at about 6cm a year – the same pace as our fingernails – the cultural drift between Europe and America continues to ineluctably move us apart in terms of values and beliefs.

Though the technological and cultural output of California and the East Coast may still resonate with many Europeans, the attitudes of the ‘MAGA’ heartland – the emphasis on gun ownership, religion, and capital punishment: the America First ‘might is right’ belligerence revealed in its attitudes to its allies in NATO, or its imperial ambitions over Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Mexico – are a world away from the post-imperial accommodation of most of mainland Europe (with the exception of Russia).

So, in the long run, whatever happens after the next tantrum in the White House, Europe must prepare to defend the pluralist principles of rules-based democracy on its own, unreliant on unreliable allies.

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