Tock, Tock, Tock

 So—yesterday—we nudged a few minutes—if not hours—closer to nuclear midnight. And it didn't even make the day's top news. 

Remember how—briefly, yesterday—Russia invaded Poland's air space with drones, and a NATO member state shot down enemy aircraft over NATO territory for the first time in the treaty organization's history? 

This is, I hate to admit, a big deal. We just had a flash of a hot war for the first time between a NATO country and nuclear-armed Russia since the treaty organization was founded. 

Two weeks into September, and this fall is already coming in hot. All autumn, the chafe and jar / Of nuclear war, as Robert Lowell wrote of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—who still publish their Doomsday Clock—say that in 2025, we are "closer than ever to midnight." 

Back and forth, back and forth
goes the tock, tock, tock
of the orange, bland, ambassadorial
face of the moon
on the grandfather clock. [...]

It's easy to tick
off the minutes,
but the clockhands stick—as Lowell wrote.

Any other U.S. President would use this moment to reaffirm our commitment to NATO and to send some message of deterrence to Russia—before they actually invade our NATO ally outright. 

But Trump, instead, issued the verbal equivalent of a shrug. "What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!" was all he wrote—hours after the crisis began. 

Perhaps Trump's message to Putin is that he doesn't actually care if the Russian dictator invades yet another democratic nation that has looked to us for protection? 

Trump, after all, is busy committing his own acts of unilateral aggression, murder, and mayhem with drones (viz. the recent strike on the Venezuelan boat)—so why should he object to Putin's? 

It wouldn't be the first time an American president betrayed Poland in this way—in its centuries-old struggle for freedom against the Czarist empire. 

In the nineteenth century, as it battled for independence and asked for aid from abroad—"Poland found America deaf"—as Emerson lamented, in his lecture on the Fugitive Slave Law. 

"The national spirit in this country is so drowsy, preoccupied with interest, deaf to principle," Emerson observed. Can we say any different of our own time? 

E.E. Cummings may have mocked the Cambridge ladies for their "delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?"—but he was utterly scathing when the U.S. government sacrificed Poland's neighbor Hungary to the maw of Russian imperialism in 1956; and rightly so. 

Trump's "America First" policy is of course merely an update of the same selfish and callous isolationism that sacrificed Hungary to "containment" at mid-century; or which had sacrificed the Sudetenland to the policy of "appeasement" decades before that. 

"Preoccupied with interest, deaf to principle" as Emerson put it. 

"America First" is, alas, all too deaf to principle—and Trump's actual conduct has been all too consistent with the unprincipled moral stance of his own slogan. "America First" is perfectly consistent with his shrugging at the sight of Russia invading Poland's airspace. "What's with that? Here we go!"

After the liberal powers in the 1860s similarly chose not to intervene to rescue Poland from Czarist oppression—Dante Gabriel Rossetti thought of altering the title of his earlier sonnet "On the Refusal of Aid Between Nations"— 

He now reportedly considered making the title even more pointed: "On the Refusal of Aid to Hungary 1849, to Poland 1861, to Crete 1867."

Plus ça change... 

In its hour of need today—as it faces unprovoked, brazen aggression against the historic enemy, the great power that oppressed it for centuries—Poland again "finds America deaf." There is again a terrible "refusal of aid between nations." 

And it is by such signs as this that we know, as Rossetti plaintively concluded—
[O]ur earth falls asunder, being old.