World

EARTH, UNHINGED

The world’s politics are in a maelstrom – with no clear way out

The world’s politics are in a maelstrom – with no clear way out
US President Donald J. Trump speaks with reporters during the Announcement of the Guidance on Constitutional Prayer in Public Schools in the the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 16 January 2020. (Photo: EPA-EFE/Yuri Gripas)

Are the trend lines pointing to some strange things in the world? Add up Russia, Iran, Lebanon, China, Taiwan, and the US and what do you get?

They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain.
There’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch.
And I don’t like anybody very much!
But we can be tranquil, and thankful, and proud,
For man’s been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud.
And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off, and we will all be blown away.
They’re rioting in Africa, there’s strife in Iran.
What nature doesn’t do to us, will be done by our fellow man.

Merry Little Minuet/They Are Rioting in Africa
by Sheldon Harnick/Tom Lehrer (1958)

Our world, now, really can be more than a little bit disorienting and a frightening place — even more than 1958 was. This writer took a short break this past week (incidentally ending up trapped on a cross-country “express” train that took 46 hours to go from Johannesburg to Cape Town, rather than the 24 hours in the schedule) and in that interval, the world seemed to go careening off its usual axis. In Russia, Iran, Washington, Hong Kong, Lebanon, and various other spots, it seems things are not what they seem.

In Russia, for example, in a totally unexpected moment, President Vladimir Putin announced his entire cabinet had just resigned — or, more likely, been pushed — to clear the decks for some desired constitutional changes. These changes reportedly are to be designed to give Putin even more centralised control over Russia’s political life than he already holds, and, in particular, to give him a platform for continuing to exercise control, once his second pair of two consecutive presidential terms of office conclude in 2024.

By that year he would have had a quarter of a century of effective rule, including his stint as Dmitri Medvedev’s ostensible number two for one term of office. Among other outcomes, that would put Russia in the hands of a man who will continue to wield power — with vast experience, and with a global rival for that kind of longevity in office only in Xi Jinping in China.

Reporting on these sudden events, The Washington Post noted:

Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow and the chairman of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center, called the day’s events ‘absolutely unprecedented. There has been nothing similar in the history of the Soviet Union or post-Soviet Russia,’ he said.

Medvedev’s move to Russia’s Security Council, which Putin chairs, has added to speculation that Putin may be looking to copy the path of a former Soviet republic, Kazakhstan, in retaining power past his presidency. Last March, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s long-serving president, stepped down but became chairman of the Security Council for life ― making him the effective power broker.

In his speech to parliament Wednesday, Putin again suggested limiting presidential terms to two, indicating that he won’t attempt to seek a third consecutive term. He also set out plans to shift power away from the presidency to the lower house of parliament ― a move that would erode the influence of his successor.

“ ‘This is all about how to influence the prerogatives of the future president,’ said Tatiana Stanovaya, the head of R. Politik, a think tank. ‘Putin would like to have some leverage, some mechanism to control and to get involved, in case his successor makes mistakes or has some disagreements with him.’ ”

…Stanovaya considers it unlikely that Putin would want to be prime minister again after his presidency, but both she and Kolesnikov said chairing a beefed-up State Council could appeal to him.

“ ‘He doesn’t want to get engaged in routine social and economic policy, like the budget ― it’s boring for him,’ Stanovaya said. ‘He wants to focus on foreign policy, and I think the State Council is much more convenient for him. But for that, he will need to make it a constitutional body and significantly enlarge its possibilities.’ ”

But nobody saw all of this coming, except Vladimir Putin, of course.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, the fallout from the shooting down of the Ukrainian Air passenger jet over the Iranian capital continues. Previously unreleased tracking video showed not one, but two ground-to-air missile strikes against the jet, thereby setting off questions about the quality and professionalism — or the lack of it — of Iran’s missile command and control structures, as well as the quality of the equipment.

A major passenger jet has a distinctly different radar profile from a cruise missile or drone, not to mention a passenger jet’s active IFF (friend or foe) transponder. Iranian sources said there have been arrests of some of those responsible — as well as miscellaneous dissidents and protesters. The compensation to families of the victims is nowhere close to closure yet, however.

As Al Jazeera reported these events:

An earlier video released on Friday [10 January], also showed that the plane was hit by a missile was also published. The video, first reported by the New York Times newspaper and CNN, is consistent with statements made by Canadian, US and UK officials, who said intelligence indicated that an Iranian missile brought down the plane, a conclusion initially dismissed by Iran.

Then on Saturday, Revolutionary Guards aerospace commander Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh acknowledged a missile operator had mistaken the plane for a cruise missile and opened fire. The second blurry footage shows the plane on fire and circling back to Tehran’s airport, the Times said. Minutes later, it exploded and crashed. The footage was shot from a rooftop in Bidkaneh, a village four miles from an Iranian military site, the Times said.

Angry protesters, most of them students, have taken to the streets in the wake of the tragedy, chanting slogans against Iran’s leaders and demanding accountability. Iran’s judiciary on Tuesday announced the first arrests over the accidental shooting, without naming who or how many people had been detained. Fars news agency has also been quoted as saying that the person who took the first video was also arrested by authorities.”

Moving closer to the Mediterranean, riots, demonstrations, ongoing street battles between demonstrators and Lebanese police have continued, as they have for weeks. Protesters have been vociferous in confronting a flailing government that is virtually out of cash, and whose economic policies are unable to bring financial and economic order out of chaotic circumstances.

Should the Lebanese government collapse completely, it would be an open invitation for other regional actors (Syria, Iran and the militias associated with them, Israel, and maybe still others such as outside, yet larger powers) to intervene to block some of the others, or to take advantage of the instability and incipient chaos.

Meanwhile, presidential elections in Taiwan saw incumbent Tsai Ing-Wen gain a major victory over her opponent who had urged closer ties with China. The latter continues to see Taiwan as a renegade province (stemming from the Kuomintang government’s defeat by the Communists in 1949 when the defeated forces fled the island) that denies the territorial integrity of the nation. Tsai’s victory was partially helped by ongoing violent police actions against students and other protesters in Hong Kong (with no real end in sight to the turmoil). They are increasingly upset by Beijing’s apparent efforts to weaken the agreement to keep the Hong Kong economic and legal systems free from domination by China under the “one nation, two systems” agreement from 1997.

And in the United States, amid all these other developments, four different but interrelated sequences of events have been taking place as well. First has been the growing momentum of the Democratic Party’s struggle to identify a candidate who can take on incumbent President Donald Trump.

The first formal selection vote is the Iowa caucus on 3 February. In the polling in the aftermath of the final multiple-candidate, televised debate before actual voting, it remains clear former vice president Joe Biden retains a slim lead in national polling over any of his rivals, and he remains the strong preference of older Democratic voters, African Americans, and more moderate Democrats; although four candidates are now closely bunched together — Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigeig, and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. A number of other would-be candidates are trailing behind them.

The two senators represent the more leftist version of Democratic politics. While there were real differences among the six competing candidates on healthcare reform measures, international affairs and national economic and tax policies, the real fireworks came about over a disputed remark by Sanders in 2018.

Warren asserted Sanders had effectively told her in a private meeting between the two that she should simply give up on the idea of being the candidate, since America would never elect a female president. Sanders disputed the veracity of the remark, noting that Hillary Clinton had actually gained three million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016.

But the way the debate unfolded, at the end of it, Warren confronted Sanders on the stage and accused him of calling her a liar on nationwide television. These acrimonious words — not the kind of thing usually expected between progressive struggle stalwarts American-style — were picked up by a still-active microphone, and now this tangle has become pretty much the only thing people may remember from this debate. The point of this, of course, is that an increasingly bloody Warren-Sanders tussle splits the progressive Democrats when it is clear only one can confront a moderate like Biden (or someone else) — by the time the big primaries and then the nominating convention arrive.

The second major event was a signing ceremony on Wednesday 15 January, of an initial instalment of a ceasefire in the pending US-China trade dispute. Actually, the agreement is more a tiny down-payment than a major moment, but Trump insisted on speaking non-stop for more than an hour — and naming everyone in the room and calling them all excellent, brilliant, or best-of-show — before finally taking a breath and allowing the Chinese vice premier, Liu He, a chance to say a single word. His report on this circus would probably have the texture of an explorer reporting on having just met a group of heretofore unknown, isolated tribesmen living in a faraway mountain range.

The agreement appears to commit the Chinese to such things as purchasing significant amounts of US agricultural and other products, affording better protections of intellectual property, and establishing new dispute resolution guidelines. However, some critics are already saying this agreement largely returns bilateral trade to the status quo ante position it was in before the recent rupture and the disruptions to American exports to China. In that light, the Chinese would seem to be throwing Trump a bit of a short-term lifeline, so they can continue their long game of manufacturing products the world hankers for, including the full panoply of that 5G stuff.

Ah, but then there is the impeachment, items three and four on our little checklist. The House of Representatives has now formally voted to hand over the articles of impeachment to the Senate, creating a surreal, made-for-TV moment when a legislative guard of honour carried that secular “holy relic” to the administrative elements of the Senate to be dealt with by the Senate’s Republican leadership.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi named her prosecution managers, including a variety of House heavy hitters, although the president’s team has yet to be formally announced. Next up for the Senate will be votes on the rules covering how the trial will proceed. Will there be summonses for new documents or subpoenas for witnesses, or will the Republicans try to squeeze it down to a minimalist effort? Complicating this are the nervous druthers of four or five Republican senators who may be taking their oaths of office for this trial seriously and are reportedly leaning towards agreeing to call witnesses.

But now the embarrassing evidence about how the president, his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and the latter’s goombah heavies had had much closer, much earlier connections. The major heavy, Lev Parnas, was busy with the digging for dirt on Joe Biden and his son, colluding on getting rid of the US ambassador in Kyiv, and a whole roster of other equally ugly items.

The Ukrainian government has even announced it would now be looking into the possibility of illegal surveillance of the US envoy by various nasties. To top off the latest news at the end of the day, the US Government Accountability Office, the ultimate arbitrator of good and bad behaviour by government officers and offices, has just rendered a decision to say that the original decision to withhold aid to Ukraine until those conditions about investigating the Bidens were met was, to put it bluntly, illegal. That sounds suspiciously like a judgment that the first article of impeachment’s a proven fact. Taken together, this is going to get really interesting after the Martin Luther King holiday on Monday 20 January, once Congress reconvenes. DM

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