"Diplomacy, Or Telling it Like it is?"

 It is October 1^st, and the government has shut down. It makes one yearn for term limits, with an elected government that really has the people’s interests.

 

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Not apropos of today’s topic, this article by Roger Lowenstein, financial journalist and author, which appeared in Monday’s WSJ, “How – and Why – U.S. Capitalism is Unlike Any Other,” should be read by everyone interested in why the United States is unique in the annals of nations.

 

https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-capitalism-differences-eaecd208?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1

 

 

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As for today’s subject, America’s politics over their 250 years have given us a long list of unique personages. While obviously liked by their Parties, all had political opponents. But collectively they served our nation well. No one Party has had a lock on national politics. Domination of the Executive branch has changed almost equally since the end of World War II. Leadership in Congress has also changed, and because the Executive and legislative branch have changed, so has the Judicial branch. Mr. Trump, to put it politely, has been controversial. But who among us would say that controversy cannot be for the good? Western Europe was shocked by Mr. Trump’s recent speech. You may well disagree with his language, tone and even his message, but I felt, regardless of the language, it was the medicine needed. 

 

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As for the two attached photos –  one I took with my iPhone at the end of August of the moon rising over Mud Swamp in Essex. The other is of a painting, inspired by my photo, done by a good friend and fellow resident here at Essex Meadows,

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Diplomacy, Or Telling it Like it is?”

October 1, 2025

 

“Diplomacy and virtue do not make easy companions.”

                                                                                                                Iain Pears (1955-)

                                                                                                                British art historian and novelist

                                                                                                                The Dream of Scipio, 2002

 

“Your countries are going to hell,” said President Donald Trump to the UN on September 23. “...you want to be politically correct and you are destroying your heritage.” While he was speaking to the General Assembly, his words were aimed at long-time allies in Western Europe. Post-war Presidents have prided themselves on their diplomacy. Even President Reagan, while demanding that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” did so without a hint of acrimony in his voice. While I suspect Mr. Trump has never read H.L. Mencken’s Prejudices: First Series, he, nevertheless, followed his admonition: “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

 

Diplomacy is the art of having people understand and accept your position. In the halls of government power, words are usually best understood when backed by strength. President Theodore Roosvelt advised American Presidents to “...speak softly and carry a big stick.” Will Rogers, American humorist and social commentator, put it differently: “Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.” The American journalist and author Isaac Goldberg wrote in 1927 that diplomacy is the art “to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest way.” At times it is more diplomatic to leave certain things unsaid. Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said: diplomacy, “is the art of restraining power.” In the end it is the ability to get people to see and do things your way.  

 

Donald Trump, for all his qualities, is not a diplomat.[1] To his acolytes that makes him a hero. On the other hand his bluntness and coarseness can be off-putting. He went beyond just Europe when he asked what the more delicate would have hesitated to ask: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” According to its Mission Statement, its core mission is to “Maintain Peace and Security – to prevent and remove threats to peace and to suppress acts of aggression through peaceful and just means.” Forty years ago Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s Ambassador to the UN, condemned the UN for the “bizarre reversal” of its founding intent to resolve conflicts. Has there been an improvement in the last four decades? In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, In February 2022, Putin’s armies invaded Ukraine. On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants slew 1,200 Israelis. Sudan’s civil war (April 2023-present) has killed 150,000 and displaced an estimated 14 million, in a country of under 50 million. Today, what in different circumstances would seem black humor, the military junta that governs Sudan is a member of the UN’s Human Rights Council. Amazing! Why are critics of Israel, including the UN, silent on Sudan?

 

In his attack on Western governments, President Trump, in his immutable way, focused on what he called a double-tailed monster: “Immigration and the high cost of so-called green energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet. Countries that cherish freedom are fading fast because of their policies on these two subjects. Both immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe.” 

 

Selective immigration and satisfying rising energy demands without depleting resources are critical to the survival of any nation that wants to be prosperous and remain free. But Europe has hewed far to the Left: open borders and demanding that all energy consumption comes from renewables within an unrealistic timeframe. They have gone beyond those two factors. Growth and the freedom that comes with a dynamic economy, have been hampered by an aging population, an unaffordable welfare system, and an emphasis on social justice and identity politics, where equal outcomes score higher than equal opportunities. One consequence is that individual creativity is curbed. They have impeded free speech by calling oppositional speech hateful. All of the above have limited GDP output and increased national debt.

 

In its February 2024 report, Freedom House noted that, while Europe remains the most-free region in the world, 14 European countries received score declines, while 6 saw score improvements. Globally, freedom declined for the 19^th year in a row. Where has the UN been? Economic growth in Europe has been hampered by expanding entitlement benefits, an aging population, and shrinking population growth. Since 1960, the TFR (total fertility rate) in Europe has been halved, while the average age has increased by eleven years to 42.8, despite a growing influx of younger Muslims. According to the World Bank, GDP growth, from 2008 to 2023, in the European Union expanded 13.%, from $16.37 trillion to $18.59 trillion. During those same fifteen years, GDP growth in the U.S. rose 87 percent, from $14.77 trillion to $27.72 trillion. A course correction in Europe is needed.

 

So, was President Trump correct in telling Europe that their countries are “going to hell?” Europe was home to the expansion of Christianity and to the Judeo-Christian heritage that produced some of the world’s greatest art, music and literature; it was the origin of the Enlightenment, of basic human rights like free speech; it was where free-market capitalism was first defined and first practiced; Europe was where many of the democratic institutions we enjoy today were founded. To forgo that heritage and history, those achievements and values, to which all Europeans are fortunate to be heirs, would be shameful.

 

President Trump is often coarse in speech and arrogant and churlish in behavior. In his search for the “art of the deal,” hyperbole has always been a well-used instrument in his elocution toolbox, with tact often absent. But he is not alone in pointing the finger at Europe. Writing in the September 26, 2025 edition of The European Conservative, Sven Larson wrote: “Europe is drifting into disintegration and demise.” In his speech, Mr. Trump also spoke of his love for Europe and its people: “I love Europe. I love the people of Europe.” Europe, especially European leaders, needed to hear his tough words. While Mr. Trump might have employed a more diplomatic tone, it is hard to disagree with his diagnosis.  

 

The irony is that Donald Trump might understand better than his elitist, and often hypocritical, critics what was meant by Iain Pears in the quote that heads this essay.

 

 

 

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[1] Having written that, I could be proven wrong. If Mr. Trump is able to convince Europe to up its game against Russia in Ukraine, and is able to gain a peace between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, as now look possible, he will have given diplomacy a new lease on life. In fact, Walter Russell Mead wrote on Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal, that if Mr. Trump is successful with these two endeavors: “If diplomacy were ballet, Mr. Trump would be a Nijinsky.”

"The Undiscovered Country," Paul Andrew Hutton

 I found it instructive, after I had finished the book, to read Frederick Jackson Turner’s nine page essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History:” 

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Undiscovered Country, Paul Andrew Hutton

September 27, 2025

 

“ ‘The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance

of American settlement westward, explain American development,’ he boldly declared.” 

                                                                                                Paul Andrew Hutton

                                                                                                The Undiscovered Country

                                                                                                Quoting Professor Frederick Jackson Turner 

 

Paul Andrew Hutton provides a sweeping history of the American story, as people moved east to west – from British General Edward Braddocks defeat in 1755 in the Battle of the Monongahela, in Pennsylvania, to the murder of Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and the subsequent Wounded Knee massacre on Porcupine Creek in South Dakota in 1890 when U.S. Army troops killed about 300 Lakota Indians.  

 

During those 135 years, the European population in what became the United States rose from roughly 1.4 million to 63 million. By the early-mid 18^th Century the Native American population had already been decimated by disease and battle, both brought by Europeans over the previous two hundred years. It is estimated that their populations had declined to about 3 million from over 10 million. 

 

The reader is introduced (or re-introduced to those of us who read stories of the west in our youth), to Indian Chiefs Red Eagle, Tecumseh, Mangas Colorados, his son-in-law Cochise, Geronimo and Sitting Bull, as well as to frontiersmen Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, John Frémont, Annie Oakley and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. We read of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the War for American Independence, the War of 1812, the Alamo in 1836, the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, the American Civil War, and innumerable wars against American Indians. We travel to western Pennsylvania and Ohio, and into Kentucky on the Wilderness Road. We climb over the Cumberland Gap into Tennessee, and across the western reaches of the country on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails, and we witness the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869. 

 

Hutton subtitles the book “Triumph, Tragedy and the Shaping of the American West.” The tragedy in the story is that these lands were “rightfully owned and still controlled by a host of Native nations.” However, the relentless emigration of Europeans kept pushing the frontier west. The results were thousands of individual tragedies, the enslavement, massacres and mutilation of Native Indians, as well as of the men, women and children who chose the open spaces – and assumed the risk – the frontier offered.

 

Mr. Hutton tempers those who revere western heroes and tones down those who condemn them. He writes of events, letting the reader draw his or her judgements. The history of mankind is one of war, of conquest and subjugation, of the rise and fall of civilizations. And there are no Queensbury Rules in war or battle, which is always brutal and unfair to the innocent. Certainly, there were none on the American frontier.

 

Professor Hutton is the heir to Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), best known for his collection of essays, The Frontier in American History (1920), which includes the seminal essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” He argued it was the availability of an undeveloped frontier that shaped American democracy and character. Hutton’s story tells of how uncovering that “undiscovered country,” through triumph and tragedy, pushed the frontier west and helped establish a great nation.

"Israel's Dilemma"

While, in my opinion, Israel’s plight against Hamas’ terrorism, along with Ukraine’s war against Russia, are the West’s most important fights – and, sadly, the West sems to be abandoning both projects (or at least not providing the tools needed to win) – conservatives in the U.S. are abandoning their fight for free speech. Brendon Carr should be fired for pushing ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel. He was losing audience and would have been fired for business reasons, but government should not have forced the issue. As I told my grandson, Kimmel, in my opinion, is an ass, but he should be allowed to bray.

 

Censorship, as conservatives wrote continuously during the Biden and Obama Presidencies, destroys democracies. To now practice it, while in power, is hypocrisy of the first order. Throughout our history, censorship has been practiced by both sides: Democrat Attorney General Mitchell Palmer in 1919 during the “Red” scare; Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s. There is nothing to prevent private companies from firing employees who they feel are hurting their business with crude or offensive comments but, apart from calling “fire” in a crowded theater when there is none or urging one’s friends to assault an individual or institution, government should allow people to speak freely. Words can be offensive to some people’s sensibilities, but that is not reason to censor what they say.

 

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Enough of that. Despite warm days, summer is at an end, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, with the arrival of the autumnal equinox this afternoon. With celebrations for Rosh Hashanah and the start of the Jewish New Year beginning this evening, it seems timely to consider Israel’s dilemma.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Israel’s Dilemma”

September 22, 2025

 

“The reality here is that public opinion is shifting

very quickly and very dramatically away from Israel.”

                                                                                                                Howard Wolfson, Democratic strategist

                                                                                                                As quoted in The Wall Street Journal

                                                                                                                September 13-14, 2025

 

In Hamlet, (Act 1, Scene 4) Marcellus, after seeing the ghost of the murdered king, says: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” In my opinion, something is rotten among Western nations – theoretically enlightened individuals and governments – in their attitude toward Israel, a country, a democracy, that is trying to survive almost continuous threats from state-sponsored terrorists and authoritarian governments. It is now involved in, as Lauren Smith wrote last week in The European Conservative, “...a war between the West and barbarism. It is a battle of truly civilizational proportions.”

 

This condemnation and abandonment by most Western democracies and the United Nations represents, in my opinion, the world’s biggest threat to Western liberal ideals and precepts. Israel stands accused of genocide in Gaza and then starving those they did not kill. That is wrong. Israel has done more to warn the citizens of Gaza of impending attacks than any other country in time of war. Unlike other nations involved in war they have helped their enemies’ civilian populations by attempting to bring in food and aid.

 

Israel – a Country of less than 10 million that sits amidst almost 500 million Middle Easterners – is engaged in an existential war, battling for its very existence. In perfect double-speak, the UN recently condemned the October 7 (2023) massacre: “We condemn the attacks committed by Hamas against civilians on the 7^th of October.” But then the document went on: “We also condemn the attacks by Israel against civilians in Gaza and civilian infrastructure, siege and starvation, which have resulted in a devastating humanitarian catastrophe and protection crisis.” 

 

“Any man’s death diminishes me,” wrote John Donne in 1624. The death of innocent civilians during war is a tragedy. It would be nice if war played out on assigned fields, with the only victims being combatants. However, that is not the way wars are fought. During three months in 1940 over 23,000 Londoners were killed in the Battle of Britain. A like number of Germans were killed in the February 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden. And more than 200,000 Japanese were killed in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It is estimated that total civilian deaths in World War II were over 50 million, almost two-thirds of the total. It is estimated that Korea saw about two million civilian deaths and Vietnam around 600,000. In both cases, civilian deaths exceeded military deaths. Unlike past more conventional wars, Hamas is using schools, temples and apartments to hide combatants, terrorists, weapons and hostages. And unlike the Allies (or the Axis) in World War II, or the combatants in Korea and Vietnam, Israel warns civilians of their intent. Too many in the West – political leaders and the media – simply accept Hamas’ reports of civilian casualties in Gaza. Responsibility for those casualties lies with Hamas, not Israel.

 

For the most part, the post-World War II order held through the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Walter Russell Mead wrote in the September 16 issue of The Wall Street Journal that the subsequent decade saw “the muddled thinking of a generation of policy elites, who foolishly supposed that geopolitical conflict had ended forever.” That thinking prompted Francis Fukuyama to write The End of History and the Last Man. What these globalists failed to understand was the nature of man and nations – that men seek power and power corrupts. While Western governments reduced defense spending over the past thirty-five years, China and Russia have grown stronger, absolutely and relatively. That naivete should have ended on 9/11 when 19 Islamic terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania, killing 2,976. 

 

But it did not. The lessons of World War I and World War II – the Armistice that ceased hostilities during the First World and the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan that ended the Second World War – seem lost on much of Western leadership. Armistices and ceasefires do not work against those intent on global domination, as we saw in the two decades following the first World War, with the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. On the other hand, the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945 allowed for the re-building of those defeated countries via the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. By 1960, a mere fifteen years after surrender, West Germany and Japan, respectively, were their region’s largest economies.

 

One does not have to be a fan of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to appreciate what the abandonment of Israel by so many in the West means. Unlike its neighbors, Israel is a democracy. Its leadership changes according to popular elections. Since its founding in 1948, fourteen individuals have served as Prime Minister (the same as the number of U.S. Presidents who served during that same time). As well, Israel is more inclusive than its neighbors. About 20% of Israel’s population is Arab, while ten of the 120-person Knesset are Arab. Can one say the same about Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia?

 

Hamas, which has with the blessing of the Palestinian Authority governed Gaza since Israel withdrew in 2005, is intent on eliminating Israel. As Fred Fleitz, vice chair of the America First Policy Institute in the Center for American Security, wrote on americangreatness.com last Friday: “...the Palestinian leadership rejected statehood offers in 1947, 2000, 2008, and 2009.” Their goal is the eradication of Israel, and the establishment of a Palestinian state, “from the river (Jordan) to the sea (Mediterranean).”

 

Yet, the truth is that the Palestinian people will only survive and thrive if the terrorists who now lead them, in Gaza and the West bank, are eliminated. In a victory for Hamas and other terrorist organizations, twenty-three European states will have recognized Palestine as a state (a concept, not a physical place) by the end of September. That marks a defeat for Israel and, importantly, a defeat for the Palestinian people. For the West, it marks a big step in the wrong direction –  another rung down the ladder that leads up to liberalism.