They were lucky in 1914: They only had the Guns of August to worry about. Here in 2026, we are facing thermonuclear weapons.
However, now Prince Prospero himself - in the guise of US President Donald Trump - has just presided over the latest NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. Far more than the ghastly, doomed revelry in Roger Corman’s classic 1964 schlock horror movie starring Vincent Price and Hazel Court, it has been the last and greatest “Masque of the Red Death.”
At Ankara, Trump abandoned his repeatedly proclaimed goal of being “the greatest peacemaker of all time.” As his most hostile critics have for so long predicted, the now 80-year-old president simply did not have the patience, the stamina, or the consistency to recognize that establishing any kind of lasting peace between great powers - especially any effort to end a war as long and bloodstained as that between Russia and Ukraine - requires grit, perseverance and dogged commitment to staying the course. Trump has been unable to sustain any of that.
Instead, in Ankara, the US leader folded yet again to the farcical but deeply sinister mini-tyrant Volodymyr Zelensky, just as he had previously done to that executioner of Israeli democracy, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) may have flapped his wings and clucked for the last time.
For at this latest, most fateful NATO summit, Trump folded and backed down yet again to his far mightier European allies. (I am writing tongue in cheek, for modern Americans, deaf to the memories of Twain, Mencken, and Vidal, have lost all capacity to appreciate irony).
Once again, a delighted Zelensky got everything he wanted. He left Ankara beaming, for he had just choreographed his Western European and American dupes a giant leap closer towards the total annihilation of their nations in thermonuclear war.
The NATO declaration that came out of Ankara dashed the last fading hopes of Russian President Vladimir Putin that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s own Laurel and Hardy, might provide some genuine and substantial satisfaction for Russia’s security concerns and finally propose realistic terms to end the war.
Clearly, the Russians have also observed how the Iranian leadership has now dispensed with even the polite diplomatic hypocrisy of pretending to listen to Witkoff and Kushner’s latest meaningless “proposals,” let alone host those two buffoons again.
Vice President J. D. Vance, significantly, is the one US leader who the Iranians are still prepared to talk to. For Vance, they realize, still has that quaint, ridiculous sense of personal credibility and honor, that what he says, agrees to and solemnly signs might bear some vague approximation to what his country actually will or will not do.
No wonder therefore, that Trump has banished Vance to the outermost nebulae of his great galaxy.
The Duran - always a grimly reliable source of reporting from the other side of the hill (in simplistic American terms) - reports from Moscow that Russia is moving to a war footing.
The Conventional Wisdom in Washington, London and Brussels of course is that this simply portends a slight ratcheting up of “pressure” or “shocking” conventional missile strikes on Kiev. In other words, it is “war” as once defined by Hermann Kahn and Robert McNamara - Incremental, cautious, supposedly rational, an inch at a time, doing nothing but “signaling” to the other side.
So all our legions of chickenhawk pontificators proclaim.
On the other extreme are those who genuinely desire peace but who also believe that we are so irredeemably sinful and evil that our looming foes must be peace loving, pure, virtuous and harmless. But nations armed with thermonuclear weapons who have every reason to believe they have been pushed to the brink of annihilation are none of the above. They are not harmless at all.
Therefore, as our hairsplitting micromanagers squabble and endlessly debate in the Western capitals over every jot and tittle, the decision for war may have already been taken in Moscow. And if it already has been so taken - or if it so happens in the next few days - we and especially our mad, sheltered, unworldly, endlessly posturing leaders, will know nothing about it until they too - along with the rest of us - are annihilated.
Trump has given the Russians yet another incentive to green-light total annihilation. He has boasted - and it is open talk in Washington - that new developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have revolutionized deep underground sensing radar from orbiting satellites, now make it operationally practical to identify the deepest Russian underground nuclear launch silos and their most formidable strategic missile submarines prowling at the bottom of the Barents Sea and the rest of the Arctic Ocean.
But if that is in fact the case, then the Russians will be doubly determined to annihilate us - by which I mean the entire NATO West - before we can do it to them.
After all, Western leaders are now calling for a wall-to-wall, arm-to-the-teeth militarization of all North America and Europe to mobilize against Russia on a scale never seen during the Cold War. As Sophocles warned in his “Antigone,” those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
Western missiles delivered to Ukraine have already started to hit civilian targets in Russia. Sober assessments place Russian combat deaths from the four and a half years of war with Russia at 325,000, with a further 1.2 million casualties. Of course, they could be much higher. The United States suffered lower combat losses than it did during World War II and saw no realistic alternative to dropping the first two atomic bombs used against human targets on two Japanese cities to end the carnage.
But once we launch even any limited nuclear strike, even just one teeny-weeny little non-thermonuclear firecracker on a Nagasaki or Hiroshima scale would most certainly set off a global holocaust.
For as Professor Peter Kuznick of American University pointed out in his July 8th appearance on the Capitals Uncovered podcast with me and co-host Pelle Neroth Taylor, it is quite simply impossible to stop any thermonuclear war once it starts.
Every war game that has been played and acted out by Western militaries and think tanks - and there have been thousands of them over the past 70 years - confirms this bleak, unwavering remorseless conclusion: There is no way to stop a thermonuclear war once it starts. Retaliation and escalation are inevitable until one side or the other, or both are totally annihilated.
What alternative for the survival of even a fraction of their own people would serious, desperate leaders then see, except to go whole hog, and activate annihilating destruction against the other side first?
For if President Trump and his clown of a secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth truly imagine they have AI systems now capable of detecting targeting and fixing for annihilation all second strike preemptive weapons systems that Russia and China have, surely THEY have been able to do precisely the same thing to target US?
Millions of people ought to be out protesting in the streets, marching on the White House, Number 10 Downing Street, the Elysee Palace, all those for so long fabled centers of power and responsibility that are about to vaporized more thoroughly than Ancient Rome, Babylon or even Atlantis
Yet instead, the Dance of the Doomed, the Masque of the Red Death continues to stumble along its infernal way, before the uncomprehending eyes of its billions of future victims.
I'm always fascinated by Western reports of estimated Russian casualties, without a corresponding number for Ukrainian casualties. It seems to me it would be much easier for Western reporters to get better and more accurate reports of Ukrainian casualties.
From reports I've seen of both prisoner exchanges, and exchanges of fallen soldiers, that Russia usually returns, at a minimum, roughly five times the prisoners and five times the fallen soldiers as Ukraine. So if we have estimates of Russian casualties, why no reporting on Ukrainian casualties? Or is it that if we had those Ukrainian numbers, perhaps the West would lose its enthusiasm for this war?
Given that all the involved nations are run by people who love their wealth and greed, why would they want total annihilation?