BY JOE CLAUSWITZ-TZU OUR WE TOLD YOU SO CORRESPONDENT

IDEOLOGIES TRY TO DESTROY each other; states are happy to steal riches and territory. Ideological warfare is total; state warfare is limited. We’ve spent one hundred years fighting ideologies; they are gone and we are back to where we started.

“This has happened before and may well happen again,” says Professor Trotsky Mao of the University of Pitiless Revolution based in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre. One of 40,000 prisoners, he decided that since they had nothing to do all day he would start a university among the gang members incarcerated there, to discuss how many of them had found their way to where they were.

“This led me to study extreme politics, and I discovered that the world is something of a lunatic asylum, mostly with a population sedated by structure and law; but that once the lunatics take over the asylum, the temperature of politics hits boiling point very quickly and all bets are off. The religious wars of the 16th and 17th Century are a good example of this. Then the French Revolutionary struggles. Then the 20th Century, a battle between extremists of the secular far right and left, which neither won in the end. “Fascism and Communism, two sides of the same coin, could not endure for any length of time. One was just too violent, the other too violent and too stupid for words. You work out which was which. So, we return to warfare as a chess board; with leaders entering and exiting conflicts as they see fit. Trump is doing no more than that. He sees no existential threat from Russia. Those who do are left-over ideologues who don’t know the world has changed. Trump has no ideological attachment, either to Ukraine or anywhere else – save Israel maybe. And he wants to take Greenland and the Panama Canal himself. And perhaps Canada. To him the Ukraine business is no more than a school yard fight, and he wants it stopped in case someone gets really hurt. If that means giving the big kid what he wants, then so be it. Ukraine can lick its wounds and go figure out how to win the next fight.”