In Augsburg the thermometer reads five degrees. Partly cloudy, the radio says. I sit at the window with cold coffee and the foreign newspapers, and I observe the following: the American troops who guarded my country for eighty years are being told to go home. Five thousand of them, says the Pentagon. More than five thousand, says the President a day later, correcting his own ministry by megaphone. In Berlin, the chancellor offers what the press calls "a measured response," which is the diplomatic phrase for: we did not see this coming, and now we must pretend we did.
The Germans, it turns out, had assumed the threats were theatre. A serious mistake. When a man tells you, repeatedly, that he intends to leave the room, do not be surprised when he reaches for his coat. Berlin now urges "stronger European defence." Naturally. The horse has bolted; let us study the door.
I will not feign sorrow. The presence of foreign tanks in Bavarian fields was never the proof of friendship the speeches claimed. It was an arrangement. Arrangements end. What troubles me is not the leaving but the manner of it – the casual way a continent's security is rearranged between breakfast and lunch, while the bond markets twitch and the chancellors compose their faces.
SONG OF THE SHIFTING GARRISON
*The soldiers came in forty-five
With chocolate and a flag.
They stayed and stayed and stayed alive,
And now they pack their bag.*
*The General signs, the markets fall,
The Chancellor clears his throat.
The men who never asked at all
Are told to mind the boat.*
Now consider Spirit Airlines. A company in the United States that sold cheap seats to people who had little money. Yesterday it shut its doors. The cause, we are told, was the price of fuel, and the price of fuel was driven up by the war on Iran, and the war on Iran was begun, in part, to keep certain interests intact. Observe the circle: the state makes war to protect its commerce, and the war destroys the commerce of those too poor to absorb the shock. The bailout was discussed; the bailout was refused. The cleaning women in Fort Lauderdale and the mechanics in Detroit will find other work, or they will not.
Meanwhile the State Department, bypassing its own Congress, fast-tracks weapons sales to Gulf monarchies and to Israel: 8.6 billion dollars. The cannon foundries do not close. They never close. Spirit Airlines collapses; Lockheed Martin posts a quarterly record. I would put this on a placard and hang it from the proscenium, were I still working in the theatre.
In Tehran, a Nobel laureate – Narges Mohammadi – is taken from her cell to a hospital with what the doctors call a cardiac crisis. Her family fears for her. She has done nothing but speak. The regime that jails her and the regime that bombs her country will both, in their official statements, claim to act on behalf of the Iranian people. The people themselves remain in the dark, except where, as the BBC reports, smugglers run Starlink terminals across the border so that some can see what is being done in their name. A satellite dish in a peasant's hut: this is the iconography of our century.
THE BALLAD OF THE CARPENTER FROM LIMA
*A man in Lima read the sign:
GOOD WORK ABROAD, GOOD PAY.
He thought of bread, he thought of wine,
He flew to Moscow Bay.*
*They gave him boots, they gave him gun,
They gave him frozen ground.
The contract that he thought he'd won
Was for the trench he found.*
*Now ask the question, ask it plain,
And do not look away:
Whose hand inscribed the lying sign?
And who, today, must pay?*
The Peruvian prosecutors are investigating. Their countrymen, lured by advertisements for jobs in Russia, have ended up forced into the trenches against Ukraine. This is not a metaphor. This is what it looks like when poverty in one hemisphere becomes ammunition in another. Mother Courage sold pots and shoelaces along the wagon-train of the Thirty Years' War; today the trade is in human beings themselves, packaged as labour, delivered as soldiery.
In Caracas, the Americans have ousted Maduro and announced they will "unleash prosperity" by commandeering the oil industry. The reporter from the Times walks the streets and finds that, for most Venezuelans, very little has changed. The faces above the palace are new; the queues for bread are the same length. A useful lesson for those who believe a regime change is a thing that happens once, on a Tuesday, with bunting.
In Gaza, the displaced fight rats and weasels in their tents. "If we sleep, they bite," a man tells the BBC. The diplomats negotiate ceasefires in air-conditioned rooms; the children are bitten in the dark. Set these two scenes on stage, side by side, and let the audience draw its own conclusion. I have always preferred audiences who draw their own conclusions.
There is a small item from Stuttgart that I cannot leave out, because it pleased me. A German museum, after thirty-five years, has agreed to send a 113-million-year-old dinosaur skull back to Brazil, where it was dug up. The thing is called an Irritator. An Irritator returned: a small justice, eccentric, late, but real. If a fossil can be repatriated after a century in the wrong glass case, perhaps other things can be returned also. I will not list them.
The news from Iran continues. A 14-point peace plan has been delivered; the President says he will "review" it but does not believe a deal can be made. The strikes, he warns, may resume. The diplomats in Doha and Islamabad pack and unpack their briefcases. Somewhere in the Persian Gulf, ships wait for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen; they have been waiting for weeks.
The clouds over Augsburg have not lifted. Five degrees, partly cloudy, the world rearranging its furniture. I close the newspapers and write the title of my Sunday lesson on a card:
WHEN THE GREAT ONES SPEAK OF PEACE, THE COMMON FOLK KNOW THAT WAR IS COMING. WHEN THE GREAT ONES CURSE WAR, THE CALL-UP PAPERS ARE ALREADY FILLED OUT.
I wrote that line many years ago. I see no reason today to revise it.
