Dear Editor:

Xerxes had his Salamis; Alcibiades, his Sicily; Antony, his Actium; Cornwallis, his Yorktown; Napoleon, his Waterloo; and Hitler, his Stalingrad. Is Trump is about to have his Hormuz?

Having insulted our former allies in NATO, he is now issuing threat-laden orders that they bail us out of the mess he has created in the Persian Gulf. The Geman Defense Minister said it best, in responding to Trump’s imperious demands for aid: "What does Donald Trump expect a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to do in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do? This is not our war, we have not started it.” A spokesman for the German government added, “Neither the United States nor Israel consulted us before the war, and Washington explicitly stated at the outset of the war that European assistance was neither necessary nor desired.”

Who are we left with, in this very expensive ($2B a day) and unnecessary war of imperial overreach? Bibi Netanyahu, who has committed serial war crimes with his destruction of Gaza and his invasion of Lebanon. Trump became his fitting partner at the outset of his “short excursion” in Iran by bombing a girls’ school in Minab, killing 168 people, most of them students.

Erika Guevara-Rosas of Amnesty International expressed the global outrage: “This harrowing attack on a school, with classrooms full of children, is a sickening illustration of the catastrophic and entirely predictable price civilians are paying during this armed conflict. Schools must be places of safety and learning for children. Instead, this school in Minab became a site of mass killing. The US authorities could, and should, have known it was a school building. Targeting a protected civilian object, such as a school, is strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law.”

Aerial bombing alone has never won a war. Aggressors don’t succeed. “America First” has become “America Alone,” a rogue state increasingly isolated by Trump’s arrogance and ignorance.

Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler is in two volumes: “Hubris” and “Nemesis.” We’ve already read the first and are about to open the second.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay