This Is Progress?

The last time a Republican took office as Presidenct without the formality of winning a majority of the popular vote, he surrounded himself with a group of people (the ‘Neocons’) with a positively 19^th century Mahan and MacKinder world view.  The geopolitical consequences were a bad joke in written in buckets of blood.  The Afghanistan War was not the Greatest Game, Redux, and the Neo Cons either forgot, or more likely never knew, that Julian the Apostate met his end inside what is today known as the Sunni Triangle.  I guess those over-educated twits weren't as culturally literate as the American soldier who scrawled SPQR on a wall in Afghanistan.

This time, again taking office without the formality of winning the vote, the new President has started his project of building a Wall along the Mexican Border.  Now, walls in history—the Great Wall, the Athenian Long Walls, the Berlin Wall—have been, not to be too ugly, fairly limited in their success.  When they work, they work generally as deterrents, not physical obstacles.  

But, apparently we’re gonna have a Wall. And what Trump's Wall brings to mind is the Maginot Line.  I guess we’ve moved from the 19^th to the 20^th century.  The Maginot Line, as you may recall, was an enormous investment of French military resources and psychological capital throughout the 1930s that foiled the German invasion of France in 1940 when, as scripted, the Nazis futilely threw division after division of the flower of Wehrmacht at it in a repeat of Verdun (NOT).