The Scourge of Henry

The man who - perhaps fittingly - made his last, and perhaps ultimate, appearance at Davos World Economic Forum this week, had only just escaped the clutches of the Nazi state in 1938, at a time when its territorial ambitions were as limited as its bloodlust was teetered (and limited to scions of its ruling party, its immature, unruly military wing, and thousands of Basque subjects of still-emerging Head of State general Franco) as Prime Minister Chamberlain - also just appointed - made a Faustian, or possibly Trumpian, "deal" with Chancellor Hitler over not only the disputed, and mainly German, Sudetenland but selling off Czechoslovakia as a whole in exchange for said Chancellor's autograph. Now, at the ripe age of ninety-eight and celebrating, presumably in Switzerland, a mighty riper ninety-nine tomorrow (thus entering his hundredth year) the old bastard and first European-born Secretary of State (preceding the pre-Munich-Czechoslovakian-born, and recently predeceased Madam Kunin) proposed to end the emerging security crisis-turned-disaster over Ukraine by a similar Faustian, or Munich-ian proposal of ceding Crimea, formerly Russian and more lately a claimant for independence, and its majority-Russian population, into the clutches of very-current and mighty active, for a near-septuagenarian and in age of being Henry's child, president Putin.  

In this, and in giving the Devil his due, I deem him right. Whereas the dilemma already postulated in his twenties, of a world where one - and then two - superpowers, armed with immensely destructive weapons well beyond the range of their own destructions, mankind (as it was then, and even 20 years later) must finally learn to behave. In light of this knowledge, matured into wisdom and praxis, the price of nuclear war over parts of Ukraine would seem a more ridiculous price than Korea, or Hungary, or even sweet Berlin. How such a handover, of undeniable Munich-esque proportions, is to occur - and not stretch beyond the Sudeten analogy into "Ukrainian Ukraine", for just as sure as Crimea may be just as, or decidedly more Russian, so Mr. Putin's speech is irredentist dogma in its denial of the Ukrainian nation undeniably, if regrettable to some, developing out of the eternities of geographical and topographical differences, centuries of linguistic, cultural, ethnic recompositions and realities of frontier life, and now decades of semi-self rule. His speech is as unlikely to vindicate a (self-assured) Russian spirit in independent Ukraine as he is to be elected its president, too, after a free multi-party election, or his stooges Pushilin, Pasechnik, Balitsky or Saldo, which itself would require the ejection of every Russian under arms from its space. Crimea is different, not only for security purposes but the popular sentiments "on the ground", so firmly expressed by the referendum of the rifle when green men overran it so effectively in 2014, and then pulled the trousers from the ostensible order of the past quarter century. While the efficiency, and subsequent slyly waged proxy wars, clearly concealed the Russian military might in its true glory, they also reflect a hard truth too substantial to be swallowed in tablet form, or resolved through calls for genocide. 

My ability to aptly finish biographies, long denied to reemerge with the Englishman Jackson's great De Gaulle biography last year, has been recently allured by Niall Ferguson's project to - with the statesman's ostensible cooperation, although we may wonder how far - 

Jackson's and Ferguson's countryman (still, in the latter case) Hitchens may have pointed out 

So, apart from that, what is he?