Ceylon Today Editorial

Trumps’ Presidency – a Global Crisis?

04 January 2017

There's no doubt about the fact that political and corporate leaders in the west as a whole, and in many Asian, Pacific and South Asian nations, will watch with much anxiety the real foreign policy stances that US President-elect Donald Trump will opt for when he assumes office on 20th of this month.

Certainly his lauding of Russian President Vladimir Putin's deft move in holding back retaliation against Obama's expulsion of 35 of Putin's top diplomats in Washington raised eyebrows – and fear - in every world capital. It also reflects the new President–elect's now growing persona of a man who is not averse to holding up to ridicule not only his predecessors in office but the CIA , FBI and the entire US Intelligence structure – in addition to his painfully obvious political naivete. This is abundantly clear because one has to only consider Putin's options to know that it costs him nothing to hold back any retaliation against Washington and Obama, because the entire administration that swept away, Putin's 35 men from the US gets swept away when Trump is sworn in on 20 January and Putin would have to possibly make more changes had he opted for than in retaliation. Better to bide his time until 'friend' Trump gets comfy in the Oval Office where the new US President is set to run against the entire establishment and over 50 years of a consistent US foreign policy that he seems intent on upending even before he assumes office.

So, yes, Putin was smart but not in the way that Trump obviously presumes. In fact, by holding back a counter play, Putin was smarter than Trump perhaps gives him credit for. Putin has placed the ball squarely in Trump's court now as we will see, when Putin chooses replacements for those 35 who were sent packing from the Russian embassy and from New York's Long Island mansion that was occupied by them. Trump's learning curve might turn out to be bitterly nasty when his unrealistic, even ridiculous, apparently pacifist foreign policy options upend the US status quo in a new world order in which there's every sign of a spatial revivalist thrust by Russia, China and their allies. The Americans will have much to say about a Trump, as President, who drags the US down to the stature of a friend of men such as Assad. His de facto defence of Saddam Hussein against the Bush administration and the entire US intelligence on whose findings – not disproved to date – the US and Allies engineered the taking out of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Rubbishing US intelligence confirmation of Putin's hand in Russian hacking of the presidential election process has already angered the Americans who voted Trump into power. And when it's globally accepted that Russia does not and never will share US interests, and in fact run exactly counter to them, Trump has consistently shown he could perhaps inadvertently through his naivete undermine US global interests very dangerously and by that fact enhance the danger of global instability. US Senators are even now planning to push Congress for stronger sanctions than those imposed by Obama, but as a Trump supporter put it, "They've got the clocks, but Trump and Putin have the time and a new Congress in the wings".

The big questions are whether Trump will adopt a weak-kneed pacifist foreign policy especially with Russia and whether he will, as he has said he will, remove sanctions on Russia and even acknowledge Putin's armed annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine, a move that will put him outside the pale of political morality and bring the US into the gutters.

More worrying for world peace is whether Trump will also opt out of NATO as he has said he would, upending decades of US efforts to maintain a powerful deterrent against Russian and other expansionism. Will Trump however back Putin, along with Assad, ostensibly against the ISIS, but in effect to crush the legitimate demands of the Syrian people?

Was Putin's goal, that of ensuring a Trump victory to ensure the US pulls out of NATO and clear the way for Putin to push through his expansionist policy? It's significant that on the campaign trail Trump called NATO obsolete.NATO has been the lynchpin of American foreign policy after WW2. A stumbling block in Putin's way! Since 2008, Russia has moved troops into the former Soviet republics of Georgia and the Ukraine, and now Russia is making preparations to apparently attack Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – all members of NATO. Trump is unlikely to commit US troops to defend the Baltic States. End of NATO?

Trump has also said he sees no need for sanctions against Russia for its 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Trump calls this 'getting along' with Russia.