Hall Gardner
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
American University of Paris
Who Dare Stand Against the Fissionable Glitch
of an Eclipsed Fuse??
by Professor Hall Gardner
Caterpillar larvae burrow deep into their tent-like nests
within the scarred skeletons of trees. Their antler limbs, as
if hacked off by machete, crash upon parked cars.
Scattered by sudden squall, the exiled exhaust of frenzied
humans metamorphoses into muck fit for the fertilization
of roaches beneath the nervous intensity of street lamps.
From the stratosphere, we peer down upon the cities
flaming with the mephitic implosions of train derailments.
As if celebrating Mardi Gras, we parade in the heavens in
inflated plastic garbage bags like those fondled each night
by the incisors of raccoons and bound tight by the elastic
straps of addicts. Already fractured by the relentless
incisions of razor wielding street gangs, the lopsided
planet winds itself through a murky void of boiling oil
and metallic filings.
With great striving, tarred and feathered, we attempt
to scour clean our prickly spirits so that we, untarnished,
may catapult in imaginary space vessels to the beatific
realm of poppies and drones, but are left solitary to
scavenge for what remains of the manna of twilight.
Knowing all flights of fancy are heartily condoned by our
philanthropic patrons, we still seek a reward for braving
the repetitive push-button ringing of cash registers yet
without access to the cash.
For each red and black rotation of the solar roulette of
fortune, we wet our pants. The Sphinx of Toronto spumes
Chlorine gas from its anteater's snout; ever so mellifluently
the poison infiltrates through human arteries while whole
cities are evacuated from the complacency of Snores and
nightmares. Nerves fray like an extension of electric wires
the likes of which the drowned priesthood of Atlantis
could never have envisioned... in such fear like those three
hours when the Leviathan's tracking screens went haywire
deep in the belly of Cheyenne Mountain and fantasized
renegade Behemoth missiles on the warpath. "Hear ye-
ye true believers of the infamous exploits of Gargantua
and Pantagruel– Rome had already proved for all eternity
that there is no possible defense against the penetration of
a mosquito's stiff proboscis," old Rabelais squealed.
Floating upon this these stormy asteroids, we have
witnessed how Sputnik's mollusk spines titillated the
martial spirits of ham radio operators, sending virus-
loaded virilia into distant climes of the stratosphere.
Irrespective of political salutations, scriveners now pore
through military manuals to study the mirrors of
Archimedes that once set aflame the fleet of Marcellus.
(History is considered bunk only after the moment when
the intrepid entrepreneur has come, seen, conquered.)
In the post-Sovieticus, phosphorescent Monitors and
Merrimacs still battle it out like great sperm whales and
giant squids, their missiles guided by flying computers.
Melville's war has lost its glory to the mundane utilitarian
mechanization of the gatling gun. Where is individual
honor? Where chivalry? All history just rusts away until a
split second of a blown fuse and collision of interplanetary
space junk. All evolution is convoluted from a state of
primordial menstruation, and ages to a purgatorial
menopause. Who forged this brittle metal? Upon what dire
anvil? With what dread gas? Exactly what was it you
prophesied, beaming eyed Blake? Would the fires of Orc
be stemmed? What of the Demon red with clouds?
Yet Ye Olde Truth Book responded NADA NADA
NADA NADA NADA at the very moment when a twelfth
century mullah had declared Holy War against all satanic
whores and pimps. The conflict seemingly perpetual, the
captors of Gulliver's children, after having once pretended
to dump overpriced wines into the D.C. gutter, are now
swarming on speedboats dropping Styrofoam floats before
battleships directly below the next defecation of the
Leviathan and its parasitic cowbirds that lay ever inflating
multitrillion dollar turds on the odds of the already
disastrous outcome. If still not convinced, then re-interpret
the words of Nostradamus as so desired:
"Rain, famine, war in Persia having not ceased,
Too great a faith shall betray the Monarch.
The end planned and conceived in France,
A secret sign for one to be more sparing."
In other words, the messianic holocaust stewed from
black gold (the putrid wine distilled in the ovaries of the
earth and sipped in porcelain cups) was obviously
prefabricated. [Made in France.] The semen of planned
obsolescence had already been impregnated into the very
architectonic design of the cosmic assembly line. It was
naturally Nostradamus who foresaw how holy messages
could be encrypted through Internet steganography: But
who?- the Leviathan?– is supposed to be "more sparing"?
If still not believers, then regard the Congress of
Vultures that hover above us in a cohesive pack upon spy
satellites. Their sharpened talons clutch the multiple
warheads of barbed missiles while waiting the moment to
mobilize the call of the wild with their shrieks. Focus the
zoom lens to observe the clenched fists in opposition that
salute the aerial bombardment of saliva and rotten eggs...
Let us thus not err, too wasted, into the bottomless pit that
awaits us. Are we to believe? To determine whether this
will be yet another Jonathan Edward's gospel sales pitch, a
public promotion for a new book, or a premonition of a
verifiable TRUTH will be, in itself, a millennial task…
In the distance, on the forgotten half of the planet, we
spy in televised re-runs the golden hooves of Shisha-
smoking Saracens and rebellious buzkashi players who
once brought both Albion Redcoats and Muscovy Knights
to their knees- after the Leviathan tricked the Soviet
Behemoth into invasion with flying elephant gun ships
bursting into flames stung by incendiary missiles. We
claim we cannot comprehend the terror of stoning once our
own home cooked barbeque escapades in rice paddies
have fizzled out- in outrage against Buddhas of Bamiyan
dynamited in idolatrous envy in ostensible protest against
development assistance for statues- not the poor.
Impossible to measure on the Richter scale, that giant
blast incites those prematurely prophesied riders of an
apocryphal Apocalypse to saddle their white, red, black,
pale horses in a hangman's posse of conquest, revenge,
speculation, TERROR... The same Beasts provide a perfect
pretext for the Timocratic Leviathan to dig itself deep into
Mesopotamian quicksand in adulation of Jingoist Albion
as it similarly wrestled the Sphinx and Sudanese Mahdi in
blistering heat more than a century before. Regard Sura
#18 "The Cave" for confirmation: "On that day, when Gog
and Magog are spoiling the land, we slhall let some of tlhem
surge against others and the Trumpet will be blow."
Thus so storm clouds continue to rage in pure fury in
concealing killer nano-satellites that gyrate within our
presence promoted by Von Braun rocketeers with solar
powered batteries to appease those who are still enamored
with the chimes of natural harmony. Yet to the dismay of
these same self-righteous defenders of nature, one
delinquent debutant after another flicks plutonium ashes
into oceanic suds. Naturally these nouveau-riche members
of the radiating jet set flirt flagrant promiscuity in high
society gossip columns. (Watch as the planet's
quintessential dietetic resource -plankton– is overspiced
with scrumptiously irradiated flavors– Zataar; Tandoori
or Balti Masala; Kin-Chi; with Glormeh-Sabzi promoted
on the way– a breakfast for tsunami champions and truly
food for thought for the UN P-5 nuclear club!)
"To be bright as light, yet not to dazzle!" This ancient
wisdom of Lao Tze is certainly not that of Pekinese Tarot
players who once stammered clumsily railroading huge
mobile packages into fixed indigo silos rotting with
subsidized grain, but who now possess new laser versions
of war-fighting video games with near real time vision.
Not a soul has been enlightened: The softest things shall
devour the hardest! The meek shall inherit!
If still not believers, then necessity dictates the
abandonment of all idealist materialist romantic positivist
prophetic theses! Even if Marx, resurgent, should claw out
of his battered grave, who would recognize him? (History
has sworn that he shall appear in the form of either
Lazarus or Dracula upon listening to the miswired
dialectics of dilettante computers, depending on the class
perspective of optical illusions achieved in virtual reality.)
So what is the significance of history's oracles, which
conceal themselves within hieroglyphics, upon cryptic
rune stones, or that whisper from the lips of bog men
frozen for all eternity in enigma? What do diviners say?
Who will lead us to the Promised Land and promise
likewise not to be struck down by the bullets of assassins?
With no response to our queries, heavenly assurances
mass like prefabricated masonry troops housed for tourists
in imperial tombstones, yet untrained for crowd control.
As we press our bodies firmly against the catacomb walls
of civil defense drills, we feel childhood lice festering in
our scalps: Our hair leaps like the fur legs of centipedes to
striped bandanas self-tied with a hangman's knot to our
necks. Undetected by invaders outside the Great Wall,
megalithic Fire Ravens, steeped in a kaleidoscopic poison,
rise in unison (after tracing the mobile missile treads of the
Behemoth) to proclaim blood wrath upon the vicissitudes
of human evolution– in pinpointing the Beautiful Isle,
Okinawa, the satellites of stardom, Hollywood and L.A.s
Chinatown. All within circular t/error probability!!
***
A shower of flaming arrows alights the sky like the sun
behind the flight of geese... Flame throwers of smokeless
fire, emerald swords and three-bladed javelins with swift-
striking shafts triggered by sound waves flash through the
haloed sky through what seems a hundred suns, a hundred
moons, a myriad of stars... But then- no night... no day...
all points of the compass utterly lost... the rain is black...
The clocks had stopped at 8:15. A metal lunch box filled
with boiled peas and rice broiled from the inside. The bronze
Buddha smelted at 7,000 degrees; glass bottles writhed like
yellow serpents. A school uniform hung buttoned to a tree;
the child's body was nowhere to be found. A glass lens
glistened from the eye socket of a skull severed from its
corpse. The flash had evaporated the paint from the walls,
the shadows of the bodies remain frozen for all time.
A young girl smiled with a broad grin outside a window
of a collapsed home surrounded in rubble. A solemn mother
milked her baby whose face was scarred with deep burns.
Warm winds approached from the distance; there were many
small fires, as if set off by fireflies, smoldering. Those at
ground zero had disappeared in a white flash without a
trace; those at a distance could not understand what ever-
burning horror had inserted itself beneath their leprous flesh.
Hair dropped from their scalps just a few weeks later.
The pilot of the Enola Gay watched the towering flames
of Little Boy from the clouds out of the pure blue heavens
once the bomb had hit Hiroshima. The pilot of Bock's Car
was supposed to have hit the arms factories and secret
chemical weapons plants at Kokura, but on account of bad
weather, he veered toward clearer skies and watched the
blaze of Fat Man as it struck the city of Nagasaki. A third
bomb was prepared to strike August 18. There had been
plans to drop three a month in September, October,
November- and up to seven in December. Niigata and the
imperial capital and sacred city of Kyõto had also been
listed as potential targets. Years later, the pilot of the Enola
Gay put it this way: "You hate to see them as collateral
damage, but the weapon is non-selective. It has no
discrimination. That's the way I look at it." His co-pilot
cried, "My God, what have we done!" The pilot of Bock's
Car never spoke publicly about it...
***
Blinded by the instant flash of shocking memories,
we cannot observe the contenders for the throne, only the
multitudes who tremble in supplication before a flame of
far greater intensity than that sparked by the silicon chips
Prometheus once stole. Who then dare stand against the
fissionable glitch of an eclipsed fuse? Dare those of the
Marx-Mayakovsky-Maoist Yue-fu Poet Bureau? Those of
the Nietzsche-Pound-Mishima Unity&Order Cult? Those
of elite Yeats-Eliot-Stevens aesthetic entropy? Or those of
the poppy-smoking anemic anomie of the Coleridge-
DeQuincey-Rimbaud Oriental Romantics Club? Or the
booze-bored Li Bai(jiu)-Poe-Plath heresy? Indeed, upon
which leaning Internet tower are all poets now babbling?
Upon re-entry into slums of urban pollution, our eyes
glaze as if coated by varnish. For typically exorbitant fees,
surgeons operate on the ocular nerves. Once the corneas
are removed, smog becomes as transparent as crystalline
waters. Truth serum injected, confessions are demanded
upon the torture racks of penal colonies. The pins of
acupuncture are now the devices of invisible inquisitors:
"What caused your blindness? From what are you here
to be cured?... Upon careful examination, we have
discovered no such disease recorded in our texts... For the
time being, which sedative do you prefer?... Be faithful, and
wait with patience. The research cannot drag on forever.
Some prescription must always fill the blank."
Hall Gardner -1980; 2008
This poem is republished by Civitatis International by kind permission of the author
in its original prose first published in Hall Gardner’s Book:
“The Wake-Up Blast” Narcissus Press, New York, 2008.
Hall Gardner is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the American University of Paris.
Professor Gardner is an internationally acclaimed expert and commentator on NATO
and the author of numerous books, including: World War Trump, (Prometheus, 2018);
The Failure to Prevent World War I: The Unexpected Armageddon, (Ashgate, 2015)
and Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History, (Palgrave, 2015).
Professor Gardner’s works can be found at his website: https://www.hallgardner.com.
of an Eclipsed Fuse??
by Professor Hall Gardner
Caterpillar larvae burrow deep into their tent-like nests
within the scarred skeletons of trees. Their antler limbs, as
if hacked off by machete, crash upon parked cars.
Scattered by sudden squall, the exiled exhaust of frenzied
humans metamorphoses into muck fit for the fertilization
of roaches beneath the nervous intensity of street lamps.
From the stratosphere, we peer down upon the cities
flaming with the mephitic implosions of train derailments.
As if celebrating Mardi Gras, we parade in the heavens in
inflated plastic garbage bags like those fondled each night
by the incisors of raccoons and bound tight by the elastic
straps of addicts. Already fractured by the relentless
incisions of razor wielding street gangs, the lopsided
planet winds itself through a murky void of boiling oil
and metallic filings.
With great striving, tarred and feathered, we attempt
to scour clean our prickly spirits so that we, untarnished,
may catapult in imaginary space vessels to the beatific
realm of poppies and drones, but are left solitary to
scavenge for what remains of the manna of twilight.
Knowing all flights of fancy are heartily condoned by our
philanthropic patrons, we still seek a reward for braving
the repetitive push-button ringing of cash registers yet
without access to the cash.
For each red and black rotation of the solar roulette of
fortune, we wet our pants. The Sphinx of Toronto spumes
Chlorine gas from its anteater's snout; ever so mellifluently
the poison infiltrates through human arteries while whole
cities are evacuated from the complacency of Snores and
nightmares. Nerves fray like an extension of electric wires
the likes of which the drowned priesthood of Atlantis
could never have envisioned... in such fear like those three
hours when the Leviathan's tracking screens went haywire
deep in the belly of Cheyenne Mountain and fantasized
renegade Behemoth missiles on the warpath. "Hear ye-
ye true believers of the infamous exploits of Gargantua
and Pantagruel– Rome had already proved for all eternity
that there is no possible defense against the penetration of
a mosquito's stiff proboscis," old Rabelais squealed.
Floating upon this these stormy asteroids, we have
witnessed how Sputnik's mollusk spines titillated the
martial spirits of ham radio operators, sending virus-
loaded virilia into distant climes of the stratosphere.
Irrespective of political salutations, scriveners now pore
through military manuals to study the mirrors of
Archimedes that once set aflame the fleet of Marcellus.
(History is considered bunk only after the moment when
the intrepid entrepreneur has come, seen, conquered.)
In the post-Sovieticus, phosphorescent Monitors and
Merrimacs still battle it out like great sperm whales and
giant squids, their missiles guided by flying computers.
Melville's war has lost its glory to the mundane utilitarian
mechanization of the gatling gun. Where is individual
honor? Where chivalry? All history just rusts away until a
split second of a blown fuse and collision of interplanetary
space junk. All evolution is convoluted from a state of
primordial menstruation, and ages to a purgatorial
menopause. Who forged this brittle metal? Upon what dire
anvil? With what dread gas? Exactly what was it you
prophesied, beaming eyed Blake? Would the fires of Orc
be stemmed? What of the Demon red with clouds?
Yet Ye Olde Truth Book responded NADA NADA
NADA NADA NADA at the very moment when a twelfth
century mullah had declared Holy War against all satanic
whores and pimps. The conflict seemingly perpetual, the
captors of Gulliver's children, after having once pretended
to dump overpriced wines into the D.C. gutter, are now
swarming on speedboats dropping Styrofoam floats before
battleships directly below the next defecation of the
Leviathan and its parasitic cowbirds that lay ever inflating
multitrillion dollar turds on the odds of the already
disastrous outcome. If still not convinced, then re-interpret
the words of Nostradamus as so desired:
"Rain, famine, war in Persia having not ceased,
Too great a faith shall betray the Monarch.
The end planned and conceived in France,
A secret sign for one to be more sparing."
In other words, the messianic holocaust stewed from
black gold (the putrid wine distilled in the ovaries of the
earth and sipped in porcelain cups) was obviously
prefabricated. [Made in France.] The semen of planned
obsolescence had already been impregnated into the very
architectonic design of the cosmic assembly line. It was
naturally Nostradamus who foresaw how holy messages
could be encrypted through Internet steganography: But
who?- the Leviathan?– is supposed to be "more sparing"?
If still not believers, then regard the Congress of
Vultures that hover above us in a cohesive pack upon spy
satellites. Their sharpened talons clutch the multiple
warheads of barbed missiles while waiting the moment to
mobilize the call of the wild with their shrieks. Focus the
zoom lens to observe the clenched fists in opposition that
salute the aerial bombardment of saliva and rotten eggs...
Let us thus not err, too wasted, into the bottomless pit that
awaits us. Are we to believe? To determine whether this
will be yet another Jonathan Edward's gospel sales pitch, a
public promotion for a new book, or a premonition of a
verifiable TRUTH will be, in itself, a millennial task…
In the distance, on the forgotten half of the planet, we
spy in televised re-runs the golden hooves of Shisha-
smoking Saracens and rebellious buzkashi players who
once brought both Albion Redcoats and Muscovy Knights
to their knees- after the Leviathan tricked the Soviet
Behemoth into invasion with flying elephant gun ships
bursting into flames stung by incendiary missiles. We
claim we cannot comprehend the terror of stoning once our
own home cooked barbeque escapades in rice paddies
have fizzled out- in outrage against Buddhas of Bamiyan
dynamited in idolatrous envy in ostensible protest against
development assistance for statues- not the poor.
Impossible to measure on the Richter scale, that giant
blast incites those prematurely prophesied riders of an
apocryphal Apocalypse to saddle their white, red, black,
pale horses in a hangman's posse of conquest, revenge,
speculation, TERROR... The same Beasts provide a perfect
pretext for the Timocratic Leviathan to dig itself deep into
Mesopotamian quicksand in adulation of Jingoist Albion
as it similarly wrestled the Sphinx and Sudanese Mahdi in
blistering heat more than a century before. Regard Sura
#18 "The Cave" for confirmation: "On that day, when Gog
and Magog are spoiling the land, we slhall let some of tlhem
surge against others and the Trumpet will be blow."
Thus so storm clouds continue to rage in pure fury in
concealing killer nano-satellites that gyrate within our
presence promoted by Von Braun rocketeers with solar
powered batteries to appease those who are still enamored
with the chimes of natural harmony. Yet to the dismay of
these same self-righteous defenders of nature, one
delinquent debutant after another flicks plutonium ashes
into oceanic suds. Naturally these nouveau-riche members
of the radiating jet set flirt flagrant promiscuity in high
society gossip columns. (Watch as the planet's
quintessential dietetic resource -plankton– is overspiced
with scrumptiously irradiated flavors– Zataar; Tandoori
or Balti Masala; Kin-Chi; with Glormeh-Sabzi promoted
on the way– a breakfast for tsunami champions and truly
food for thought for the UN P-5 nuclear club!)
"To be bright as light, yet not to dazzle!" This ancient
wisdom of Lao Tze is certainly not that of Pekinese Tarot
players who once stammered clumsily railroading huge
mobile packages into fixed indigo silos rotting with
subsidized grain, but who now possess new laser versions
of war-fighting video games with near real time vision.
Not a soul has been enlightened: The softest things shall
devour the hardest! The meek shall inherit!
If still not believers, then necessity dictates the
abandonment of all idealist materialist romantic positivist
prophetic theses! Even if Marx, resurgent, should claw out
of his battered grave, who would recognize him? (History
has sworn that he shall appear in the form of either
Lazarus or Dracula upon listening to the miswired
dialectics of dilettante computers, depending on the class
perspective of optical illusions achieved in virtual reality.)
So what is the significance of history's oracles, which
conceal themselves within hieroglyphics, upon cryptic
rune stones, or that whisper from the lips of bog men
frozen for all eternity in enigma? What do diviners say?
Who will lead us to the Promised Land and promise
likewise not to be struck down by the bullets of assassins?
With no response to our queries, heavenly assurances
mass like prefabricated masonry troops housed for tourists
in imperial tombstones, yet untrained for crowd control.
As we press our bodies firmly against the catacomb walls
of civil defense drills, we feel childhood lice festering in
our scalps: Our hair leaps like the fur legs of centipedes to
striped bandanas self-tied with a hangman's knot to our
necks. Undetected by invaders outside the Great Wall,
megalithic Fire Ravens, steeped in a kaleidoscopic poison,
rise in unison (after tracing the mobile missile treads of the
Behemoth) to proclaim blood wrath upon the vicissitudes
of human evolution– in pinpointing the Beautiful Isle,
Okinawa, the satellites of stardom, Hollywood and L.A.s
Chinatown. All within circular t/error probability!!
***
A shower of flaming arrows alights the sky like the sun
behind the flight of geese... Flame throwers of smokeless
fire, emerald swords and three-bladed javelins with swift-
striking shafts triggered by sound waves flash through the
haloed sky through what seems a hundred suns, a hundred
moons, a myriad of stars... But then- no night... no day...
all points of the compass utterly lost... the rain is black...
The clocks had stopped at 8:15. A metal lunch box filled
with boiled peas and rice broiled from the inside. The bronze
Buddha smelted at 7,000 degrees; glass bottles writhed like
yellow serpents. A school uniform hung buttoned to a tree;
the child's body was nowhere to be found. A glass lens
glistened from the eye socket of a skull severed from its
corpse. The flash had evaporated the paint from the walls,
the shadows of the bodies remain frozen for all time.
A young girl smiled with a broad grin outside a window
of a collapsed home surrounded in rubble. A solemn mother
milked her baby whose face was scarred with deep burns.
Warm winds approached from the distance; there were many
small fires, as if set off by fireflies, smoldering. Those at
ground zero had disappeared in a white flash without a
trace; those at a distance could not understand what ever-
burning horror had inserted itself beneath their leprous flesh.
Hair dropped from their scalps just a few weeks later.
The pilot of the Enola Gay watched the towering flames
of Little Boy from the clouds out of the pure blue heavens
once the bomb had hit Hiroshima. The pilot of Bock's Car
was supposed to have hit the arms factories and secret
chemical weapons plants at Kokura, but on account of bad
weather, he veered toward clearer skies and watched the
blaze of Fat Man as it struck the city of Nagasaki. A third
bomb was prepared to strike August 18. There had been
plans to drop three a month in September, October,
November- and up to seven in December. Niigata and the
imperial capital and sacred city of Kyõto had also been
listed as potential targets. Years later, the pilot of the Enola
Gay put it this way: "You hate to see them as collateral
damage, but the weapon is non-selective. It has no
discrimination. That's the way I look at it." His co-pilot
cried, "My God, what have we done!" The pilot of Bock's
Car never spoke publicly about it...
***
Blinded by the instant flash of shocking memories,
we cannot observe the contenders for the throne, only the
multitudes who tremble in supplication before a flame of
far greater intensity than that sparked by the silicon chips
Prometheus once stole. Who then dare stand against the
fissionable glitch of an eclipsed fuse? Dare those of the
Marx-Mayakovsky-Maoist Yue-fu Poet Bureau? Those of
the Nietzsche-Pound-Mishima Unity&Order Cult? Those
of elite Yeats-Eliot-Stevens aesthetic entropy? Or those of
the poppy-smoking anemic anomie of the Coleridge-
DeQuincey-Rimbaud Oriental Romantics Club? Or the
booze-bored Li Bai(jiu)-Poe-Plath heresy? Indeed, upon
which leaning Internet tower are all poets now babbling?
Upon re-entry into slums of urban pollution, our eyes
glaze as if coated by varnish. For typically exorbitant fees,
surgeons operate on the ocular nerves. Once the corneas
are removed, smog becomes as transparent as crystalline
waters. Truth serum injected, confessions are demanded
upon the torture racks of penal colonies. The pins of
acupuncture are now the devices of invisible inquisitors:
"What caused your blindness? From what are you here
to be cured?... Upon careful examination, we have
discovered no such disease recorded in our texts... For the
time being, which sedative do you prefer?... Be faithful, and
wait with patience. The research cannot drag on forever.
Some prescription must always fill the blank."
Hall Gardner -1980; 2008
This poem is republished by Civitatis International by kind permission of the author
in its original prose first published in Hall Gardner’s Book:
“The Wake-Up Blast” Narcissus Press, New York, 2008.
Hall Gardner is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the American University of Paris.
Professor Gardner is an internationally acclaimed expert and commentator on NATO
and the author of numerous books, including: World War Trump, (Prometheus, 2018);
The Failure to Prevent World War I: The Unexpected Armageddon, (Ashgate, 2015)
and Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History, (Palgrave, 2015).
Professor Gardner’s works can be found at his website: https://www.hallgardner.com.