Tea at Trianon: Eternal Peace

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Eternal Peace

From Coffee and Covid 2025:

Trump’s breathless pace —ending six wars in seven months, and now dropping a full-fledged Gaza framework with unprecedented global Muslim buy-in— makes the usual machinery of diplomacy look like a Potemkin village. For decades, the UN and Foggy Bottom have hosted countless swanky summits, produced reams of resolutions, shuffled legions of diplomatic envoys, generated astronomical quantities of “roadmaps” binders, and spent trillions on “peace,” all while conflicts continued smouldering.
Then along comes Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff, and suddenly, ceasefires, prisoner swaps, and even “eternal peace in the Middle East” are done deals or at least plausible talking points. Trump is making peace look easy. It’s like he saddled up his white stallion and rode out kicking butt and taking names— without firing a shot.
It raises the uncomfortable suspicion that the old, beastly system wasn’t actually designed to solve conflicts so much as to manage them indefinitely— with bureaucrats’ and NGOs’ careers, budgets, and influence all depending on the wars never actually ending. If Trump’s two-man diplomacy shop can pull off what a multi-billion-dollar bureaucracy couldn’t, it’s less a miracle than an indictment.
Hilariously, Trump’s framework doesn’t cut out the UN entirely, but rather demotes it to a role of glorified caterer. The globalist institution that switched off Trump’s teleprompter will be reduced to running convoys of flour sacks and bottled water. Under the plan, the UN will basically become the hired help: they’ll deliver the bread and rice, while all the decision-making and governance —via the new Board of Peace (chaired by Trump) and a U.S.–Arab stabilization force— will handle the actual politics and security. (Read more.)