AS Donald Trump arrives in Ireland this weekend, it might be a good time to ask him why America is permanently engaged in war.

In every single year since the end of World War II, US military forces have been in active combat – always in someone else’s country.

Although Trump himself was elected on a promise of peace, he could not resist the temptation recently to “bomb the hell out of Iran”, in a war which he started, but for which he has yet to offer a consistent explanation.

It is also a war which he is unable to win.

Fionnbharr Rodgers: How can Irish people be British?

Fabien McQuillan: From pain au chocolat to pain in minor injuries

It follows a string of military defeats and stalemates stretching back from Afghanistan in 2021, through Vietnam in 1973, to the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961.

So why are American presidents in love with war?

The answer appears to lie in a complex mishmash of politics, psychology and an unending drive for multinational profit – and always in the name of God.

Since it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 200,000 people in 1945, the US has fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Iran.

In those same years, it has intervened in Chile, Guatemala,........

© The Irish News