Greetings from Kiev. Before I go any further, I know I promised to start each day by linking to a pro-war column (the Iran war, not the Ukraine one) but my Internet access is a little fitful and likely to be more so as I progress eastward, so, if helpful readers could alert us to any optimistic columns they have come across, I'd be most grateful.
Aside from that, I have had a sleepless night due to the near constant blare of air-raid sirens, which the hotel helpfully pumps direct into your room on the in-house audio. Unlike Lviv, no comely Kievienne thought I was sufficiently "feeble" to come and "retrieve", so I stayed put through the barrage. In the morning I learned that the Russians had launched over 140 drone attacks in the small hours, of which approximately 100 were Shahed drones, which I take it the Kremlin will have to replenish. So Iran has had quite a lucrative night, with more to come: Putin seems minded to drone Ukrainian cities daily to soften up civilians for his coming summer offensive in the Donbass.
I know the yellow-blue flag-avatar crowd moved on years ago, and nobody cares. But I'm making two somewhat obvious points:
Wars are easy to start but rather harder to stop - and, as Washington should have learned in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, when they do eventually stop, it's not in any place that would have seemed remotely plausible back when you started. In Kabul, you hand the Taliban back more territory than they'd held twenty years earlier; in Baghdad, you invest a fortune in blood and treasure to create a highly functional client state of Iran; in Damascus, you buy a new suit for the al-Qaeda honcho's blood-soaked deputy you let talk his way out of Abu Ghraib, and then install him as successor to the blood-soaked but secular dictator, to let him get on with slaughtering Syria's Christians.
It is not just that we lose all the wars but that we lose them in ways that no reputable editor would have published in the early days, and indeed which did not exist outside the more advanced rounds of Mad Libs:
"You know those inbred goatherds who only shower once a month? We're gonna leave 'em enough firepower at Bagram for them to take on a nuclear neighbour...
"You know that country song about not knowing the difference between Iraq and Iran? Well, an easy way to remember is this: Iran are the mullahs we put in the Axis of Evil, and Iraq is the country your sons were sacrificed for in order that we could hand it over to the evildoers who've been totally evil for (altogether now) forty-seven years...
"Oh, and you know those al-Qaeda guys we've been fighting since the beginning of the century? If your regime-change rolodex is a bit thin, there's some awfully promising talent on the AQ executive board..."
Ah, but this time it'll be different, because this time it always is. As my old boss Conrad Black wrote just a week ago:
There is little that the voters of America like better than victory in a 'splendid little war' at a low cost (Theodore Roosevelt on the Spanish-American War).
Is a $200 billion supplemental line-item on a one-and-a-half-trillion defence budget really "a low cost"? Only if you've no intention of paying off that $40-trillion federal debt, and didn't notice that one consequence of the war to date is the weakening of the petrodollar that ultimately enables the out-the-top-right-hand-corner-of-the-graph US debt...
And would today's USA really find a Spanish-American War that "splendid"? As we touched on in yesterday's excerpt from America Alone, over a third of all school students on suburban Long Island (a mere two thousand miles from the southern border) are now "Hispanic". Maybe we should add the Spanish-American War to that Mad Libs list...
But enough of Washington's strategic genius. On to my second point: Asked about the nightly bombardment here a couple of days back, President Trump said, "Ukraine is moving along, I wish they could get along...
I mean, if we're close to a deal to end it, yes, I would do that. But we're close to a deal.
By contrast, when I talk with Ukrainians from all over this vast country (albeit only a third the size of Iran), all of them expect the war to continue for some years. True, they're a self-selecting slice of a dwindling population: They're the guys who haven't fled the country to clean up in Mayfair as one of Sir Keir Starmer's fetching Slav twinks. They've chosen to stay, they're resigned to living in a warzone, and they'll take that over the alternatives.
Because they live here.
Because it's not "a deal", it's their country. If, say, the Chinese droned Minneapolis, would America be "desperate to make a deal"? As if their homeland were merely some peripheral rental property in Jared Kushner's portfolio for which the zoning obligations have become tedious and onerous?
Before bulking up their frequent-flyer miles to Islamabad, Kushner and Witkoff were the US emissaries tasked with getting a "deal" not only on Russia/Ukraine but also on Israel/Gaza. Had their dealmaking skills prevailed in either or both, that might justify dispatching them on yet another red-eye. But that's the problem with the "deal" framing: the other parties live here; America doesn't.
As I write, the Administration is planning to put JD Vance on Air Force Two to Pakistan, while Iran's state media are reporting that Tehran has "no plans for now to participate". We shall see how things stand later today.
Twenty years ago, when America's inability to leverage its military dominance was perhaps not yet so obvious, I wrote in America Alone:
So, just as the only guy in town with a tennis racket isn't going to be playing a lot of matches, the logic of America's military dominance is that both its allies and enemies have every interest to find some other form of battlefield, whether (for France) the international talking shops or (for Islamist clerics) the suburban mosques of North America, just to name two venues where the hyperpower is far less confident.
And so it goes: In the intervening two decades, China has taken over the world without firing a shot. For example, Peking now controls ninety per cent of the planet's "rare-earth metals". Ooh, sounds boring, I'm going back to Fox, to listen to highly-decorated thirty-four-star general Jack Keane explain how taking Kharg Island is the cure for what ails you. But, if there are no "rare earths", there are no mobile telephones for you, and there are no F-35s or precision-guided missile systems for "the most powerful military the world has ever known". So, if the supply chain of "the most powerful military" is utterly dependent on China, who's really got the power?
My only-guy-with-a-tennis-racket analogy took it as read that no sane person wants to get into a tank-battle with the US military. Which is why Iran decided to make the Strait of Hormuz its preferred battlefield, apparently to the collective surprise of all those forty-seven-star generals. But it is also true, as I can presently see from my bedroom window, that the calculus of warfare has changed: you still have your expensive tennis racket, but I now have a cheapo bubble wand from Lindsey Graham that for thirty-seven bucks can be wirelessly programmed to lob aces down your awe-struck gullet.
Meanwhile, on the neglected western home front, in America JD Vance is playing to empty stadia of the sullen young (ie, anybody under sixty) and in Britain Nigel Fagage is taking a bold stand against ...X:
This has got to be the moment when anyone sane realises Nigel Farage has changed and is now the containment candidate.
— Dan Wootton (@danwootton) April 20, 2026
To suggest X is "dangerous" because free speech is allowed is fucking nuts.
What's dangerous is censorship of social
media. pic.twitter.com/T55FPOZMxg
As for me, I am quitting Kiev a little prematurely, not because of the drones but because I'm sick of the scam artists badgering me every hundred yards. I am confident they will be fewer in the east.
On the first Clubland Q&A of the new war, I quoted Marechal Bosquet:
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre.
Nearly two months later, it is worth recalling his next words:
C'est de la folie.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with Mark's column from Ukraine under drone assault. Saturday's edition of his weekend music show found him spinning an hour of blasts from oblasts, while Rick McGinnis's movie date plumped for Malcolm McDowell in Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! On Sunday Mark offered a beautiful ballad by way of Kiev, and our marquee presentation was the latest installment of Mark's highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone.
If you were too busy this weekend blockading the blockade of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.