Trump and global disorder

There is never a dull moment, say foreign diplomats posted to Pakistan. Indeed, there is always a lot to chatter about or report back to their capitals.

Take, for instance, the scenes of the media being tutored and being asked to be more ‘positive’. It seems the adage ‘good news is no news’ seems to have been forgotten. In this age of private and social media, even public media tries to be objective and tolerates the airing of flaws in governance. This desire to see positive news may increase the pressure on state media to paint a rosier picture of the mess we are in.

One is tempted, almost instinctively, to see how the US president is dealing with the media, only to discover that by now he has alienated the mainstream media, with the exception of Fox Network. Trump’s difficulties with the press keep mounting, mostly on account of his own misdeeds. I asked a US academic visiting Pakistan what he felt about the man in the White House. The gentleman replied that he has frequent nightmares about someone like him having a finger on the nuclear button. That was more vivid than what you may come across in the media with regard to the dangers posed by Trump to his country and the rest of the world.

Those nightmares about Trump may end before he completes his term as there are growing signs that the Democrats may consider initiating impeachment proceedings against him after the new House with a Democrat majority is convened next month.

Just to refresh the readers’ memory, Trump had gate-crashed into the Republican Party, trampling mainstream contenders for the 2016 convention along the way. He received two million votes less than Hillary Clinton in the election but that did not stop him – thanks to a quirk of the US system – from taking oath as president. Halfway to the next election, Trump has lost the campaign for the House of Representatives, now under Democrats’ control.

Folks in the countryside may not be hooked to the mainstream media that keeps reporting Trump horror stories but matters may come to a head if the Democrats decide in favour of impeachment with Trump calling upon his supporters for a popular revolt.

The new multi-polar world order is a mess thanks primarily to President Donald Trump who reached the White House on campaign slogans inspired from an exclusionary ideology. Half way through his four-year term, Trump refuses to make amends as he comes up with a new provocation almost every week. Since Nixon, no other American president has been besieged like Trump is. However, that dubious distinction does not seem to deter him from ridiculing a nation like France, by showing a group of ‘protesters’ chanting for Trump, while they were actually Neo-Nazis in a different place.

According to CNN, a bête-noire of Trump, storm clouds are gathering over Trump as more and more evidence of his wrongdoings and lies surfaces. Is it a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ Trump will be a target of impeachment? “L’etat, c’est moi” appears to be his leitmotif as he disregards all domestic and international conventions to satisfy his super ego. But he is not alone in facing tremendous difficulties in exercising power as we see the neo-liberal French president Macron being taken to task by a new social upheaval. Unlike Trump, though, Macron has already conceded some demands in order to restore social harmony.

Across the channel, British Prime Minister May finds herself in an intimidating position as she leads the British ship through a storm not seen since WWII. Whether she gets her Brexit plan approved by parliament or not, there is no early end in sight to Britain’s travails emanating from a referendum on EU membership that led to Cameron’s resignation after his projections went wrong and the ‘yes’ vote prevailed. A major part of Europe is in turmoil, with the exception of Germany, which emerges as Europe’s leader but confronts Trump’s unilateral agenda in the North Atlantic alliance.

The Middle East is in turmoil as the US and its Arab allies forge an alliance to counter the rising power of Iran. The tour d’ horizon of the global disorder will not be complete without taking into account the erstwhile superpower, Russia and the future superpower, China. Russia has paid the US in kind by demonstrating its raw power and clever tactical moves such as reaching out to the Afghan Taliban before the US.

China may be temporarily hurt by Trump’s trade war but is ready with a long-term strategy as the next superpower. Its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), designed to build stronger economic ties with Asia, Europe and Africa, is an antidote to American plans to encircle China with the help of regional allies.

India, though sharing opposition to the BRI with the US, will continue to engage with China as well as Russia as evidenced by an informal Putin-Xi-Modi meeting on the margins of the G20 summit in Buenos Aires. There appeared to be a consensus among the three against unilateralism and in favour of a multilateral trade system. Separately, China has dismissed notions of a new cold war. In any event, a new cold war engineered by the US without European support would be another unilateral effort.

Pakistan too needs to reconfigure its role in these emerging settings, combining the government’s moralistic stance with real politik.

Email: saeed.saeedk@gmail.com