Everyone likes a quick war. Politicians especially. A brisk little campaign, a few triumphant press conferences, some flags behind the podium, and everyone home in time for Christmas. It is a recurring fantasy of modern politics, rather like the belief that tax cuts always pay for themselves or that the next technological miracle will fix the electricity grid.
Donald Trump declaring he does not need Britain in a war that has already been won sits neatly in that tradition. Apparently the conflict is finished. Victory achieved. No allies required. One imagines someone somewhere is still firing things, but that is presumably just a formality.
History is full of these moments of premature triumph. In 1914 European leaders confidently assured their populations the war would be over by Christmas. They were correct in the sense that there was indeed a Christmas that year. Unfortunately the war carried on through four more of them while Europe industrialised the process of killing young men in muddy fields.
More recently Vladimir Putin appears to have thought Ukraine would be subdued in a matter of weeks. Russian units reportedly carried parade uniforms in their kit for the anticipated victory march in Kyiv. Several years on the war is still grinding away and the parade uniforms remain, one assumes, folded neatly in a warehouse somewhere next to a depressing collection of destroyed armour.
The pattern is familiar because the mistake is familiar. The first phase of a war is usually the easy bit. Armies advance, governments fall, maps get redrawn on television graphics. The hard part begins afterwards when the defeated side declines to accept the script and starts fighting back in awkward and unpredictable ways. Iraq in 2003 was “won” in about three weeks. The unpleasant business that followed lasted years and cost rather more than the original celebration suggested.
Which makes Trump’s remark less a piece of military analysis and more a familiar bit of political theatre. It sounds decisive. It sounds strong. It has the comforting simplicity of a boxing match where someone has already been knocked out.
There is also the small matter of how alliances actually work. If you genuinely want allies in a conflict, there is usually a bit of groundwork involved. Decades of it, in fact. Cooperation, shared intelligence, joint planning, bases, training exercises, and the occasional polite effort not to insult them in public. The United States has historically been extremely good at this. NATO did not appear out of thin air. Neither did the Five Eyes intelligence network or the dense web of military cooperation with countries like Britain.
Trump’s approach has tended to be rather different. Allies are freeloaders. NATO is a protection racket. Trade wars with partners are a useful negotiating tactic. The general tone is that alliances are rather like golf club memberships that should be cancelled if the annual fee looks a bit high.
Which makes the current complaint faintly comic. If you spend years telling your allies they are unnecessary, unreliable, or ripping you off, you should not be terribly shocked if they appear slightly less eager when the shooting starts. Allies are not something you summon like room service. His transactional view of diplomacy has worked against him - spectacularly.
Still, declaring victory early does have its advantages. It saves the awkward business of planning the next phase, the one where the war inconveniently refuses to behave like a press release.
And if events later suggest the war was not quite finished after all, there will always be another press conference explaining that victory had technically already happened and reality simply failed to notice.
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