OUTRAGED cries and calls for US President Donald Trump to apologise for saying that ‘Europeans . . . stayed . . . a little off the front lines’ during the war in Afghanistan are still rebounding off the walls of Westminster days later. His statement was undoubtedly wrong and appeared to be crassly ill-informed. By late yesterday afternoon he had backtracked.
Trump’s generalisation was difficult to parse and therefore easy to condemn, so the truths in what he may have been thinking and what prompted his ire went unreported. Not least his patent disgust with ‘Europe’ for thwarting his peace-keeping efforts in Ukraine and Gaza.
