Reykjavik rendez-vous? Liberalism is in retreat. Outgoing US president Barack Obama certainly goofed every time he and his administration meddled in the Middle East. Not so with new US President Donald Trump. In the Icelandic capital Reykjavik in 1986, former US president Ronald Reagan met with the secretary-general of the Communist Party of the then Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev. And the world was never to be the same again. Predictable claptrap is being uttered about Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Middle East in the light of the storming of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and one-time economic hub, in the week preceding Christmas. This earned the Russian president accolades from Trump and like-minded leaders in Europe and across the globe. So what is meant precisely by like-minded leaders? Populism and protectionism and ironically enough an open international system are fast gaining momentum in the corridors of power of powerful nations, not excepting Russia. Trump came to power by winning a majority of votes in the Electoral College system in the US. This consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 is required to elect the president in a mechanism unique to the US. Trump ran for the presidency without a precise policy platform, and Putin has no qualms about Trump's rise, with profound implications for international geopolitics. Trump and Putin are scheduled to meet again in 2017 in Reykjavik. Déjà vu? In contrast, Obama's “handshake” to Islam in June 2009 in a speech at Cairo University that was full of initial promise and earned him his Nobel Prize came to naught. It was meaningless. Obama's half-hearted intervention in Syria was also deplorable. His “red line” in Syria was a sham. Russia now has the upper hand in the Middle East, and Trump is elated by Putin's political acumen. Putin talks and acts accordingly, and Trump openly praises Putin. The mantras of liberalism ring hollow today. The spirit of fin de siècle gripping the US suits the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. “We know, including from the lessons of our own history, that a people that has lost its historical benchmarks, that has renounced the continuity of generations, is easily converted into an object of social and ideological experiments. And the cost of such experiments is too high,” Russian patriarch Kiril remarked recently. The collapse of the liberal order of 1917 that ushered in the Russian Revolution and the wavering of the liberal order in Washington are ominously similar. “Russian history requires defence on the part of civil society. We do not have the right to indifference in the face of attempts to distort it maliciously; we should protect it from the destruction of its key benchmarks. There are boundaries that we have no right to pass. After all, the historical facts themselves that witness to the spiritual strength of our nation in the years of victory and the bitter lessons learned during the years of unrest are able to stop the expansion of destructive social energies,” Kiril elaborated during an address at the 16th World Russian People's Council. The implications of a Russia that is opening up more to the outside world and at a time when a US president apparently has a penchant for Slavic wives — Ivana, his former wife, was Czech-born, and Melania Trump is Slovenian-born and gained her American citizenship a decade ago — cannot explain Trump's infatuation with Putin and Russia. As a shrewd businessman, the former reality TV star, media mogul and property tycoon has his eyes set on resource-rich Russia. Washington may be heading for an increasingly isolationist policy that is bound to have tremendous ramifications worldwide, but it appears to have nothing to do with Trump's love affair with the Kremlin. Russia under Putin's leadership is surging ahead of Washington in the international arena. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a case in point. This political, economic, and military organisation comprises China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. All these nations have bolstered their opposition to intervention by Western powers in world affairs. In July 2015, the SCO decided to admit India and Pakistan as members. Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia have observer status within the SCO. Nations such as Afghanistan, supposedly an American ally, are fed up with US incompetence. There have also been other jolting developments. Trump has designated his former competitor for the presidency Hillary Clinton as a sore loser. He will now have to deal with the aftermath of the former Obama administration ordering the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats in response to alleged hacking of the US Democratic Party and Clinton campaign during the 2016 presidential elections. Trump's take on the expulsion of the Russian diplomats has been diametrically opposed to Obama's and Clinton's. For Clinton, the Kremlin is a knot of contradictions. Trump begs to differ. “I know a lot about hacking,”' he told reporters, “and hacking is a very hard thing to prove.” He admires Putin's composure. “Great move on delay [on a retaliatory expulsion of American diplomats by Putin],” Trump tweeted when the news of the expulsions came through. Former CIA acting director Michael Morell has claimed that Trump may be a “Kremlin agent”. Trump dismisses the charge as balderdash. While there is something pleasing about the notion of the end of Cold War-like warmongering by Clinton and Obama, it soon transpires that though Trump's aims may be high-minded, his tantrums are frequently anything but. “Nobody believed he would win except for us,” Putin said last year. He cast Clinton in an undignified light and spurned the Democratic Party claim of Russian hacking of Clinton's campaign e-mails as hogwash. “They are losing on all fronts and looking elsewhere for things to blame. In my view this, how shall I say it, degrades their own dignity. You have to know how to lose with dignity,” Putin said at the time. Trump's tweets contain a wealth of cryptic comments, anecdotal information and startling revelations. “You know, if you have something really important, write it out and have it delivered by courier, the old-fashioned way,” he said. “Because I'll tell you what — no computer is safe.” The new world order of 2017 ignites wildly contradictory sentiments. Trump is constantly chasing the future moment. His gripes about the “liberal media” are conspicuously candid and unequivocal. His selection of former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state has been cause for concern among the president's detractors in Washington. Some US political circles still maintain a Cold War mindset. Tillerson has long had close ties with Russia and with Putin personally. “Trump has already appointed the vilest and most incompetent right-wing Zionists in his circle to advise him and make — or execute — his policies on Israel and Palestine: one of his several bankruptcy lawyers, David Friedman, will be the American ambassador to Israel (he might as well be the Israeli ambassador to the United States) and the Trump Organisation's chief legal advisor, Jason Greenblatt, will be his ‘Representative for International Negotiations'. With those appointments, the Israeli settler movement is riding high,” wrote Andrew Levine, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. Trump's selection of Friedman and the planned relocation of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem have stoked concerns in Arab and Muslim nations. “Stay strong Israel,” Trump has tweeted, “I'm coming,” a message that sent shock waves throughout the Arab world. His perceptions of Israeli settlements on the West Bank have sparked fears that Trump will blunder his way to further crises in the Middle East. The Arabs can scarcely afford to brush Trump's brazenly pro-Israeli policies aside. Anxieties also linger on the question of “Make America Great Again”, a cherished Trump slogan. Putin, too, wants to make “Russia Great Again”. “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes,” Trump has tweeted. A nuclear nightmare may be in the making. But with Clinton hamstrung, it seems unlikely that any future war will be between the US and Russia. With Trump at the helm in Washington railing against Beijing, something else may be in the offing.
