In the Middle East this time, it is all different: Trump is back

Just twenty years ago this week, the world’s greatest scholar of Islam, Sir Martin Gilbert, wrote of George W Bush and Tony Blair that they “may well, with the passage of time…join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill….when Iraq has a stable democracy, with al-Qaeda neutralised, and when Israel and the Palestinian Authority are independent democracies, living side by side in constructive economic cooperation.”

This was not written by a shallow neo-con ideologue, but a scholar steeped in Judaic and Islamic learning. Every single future condition stipulated by Gilbert is today even further from realisation than it was then. Moreover, predictive journalism is invariably devoid of the influence of accidents, like the stalled Graff & Stift limousine outside Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen in Sarajevo in June 1914, with a panicking and inexperienced chauffeur unable to find reverse gear, while behind him an impatient Grand Duke chafed.  Even without the intervention of happenstance, predictive journalism is rather like an angler fly-fishing with an unfamiliar rod on a strange river using untried bait on fish whose habits and diets are a complete mystery.

That minor reservation aside, some larger generalisations generally apply. Western interventions within the Iraq-Syria-Saudi nexus are almost always rewarded with chaos, bloodshed and regional tyranny. Western vacillating weakness, likewise. Complete western neglect, similarly. The first condition was met admirably by Blair and Bush. The second was achieved by Barack Obama, a truly terrible President who in 2012 had warned Assad that if he used chemical weapons, he was crossing a red line. Assad duly crossed the red line, killing over a thousand people with Sarin gas and Obama did nothing. Assad then remained in power for another twelve years, during which hundreds of thousands of people died terrible deaths. The third condition, that of systematic neglect, was the prelude to 9/11.  

However, there is vital historical difference between previous episodes and the present one: the US is now about to be governed by an epoch-shaping President. If Trump makes a threat, it will not be idle. Trump also has vision, and he knows that he and the West face two foes who are also war criminals: Putin and Xi. Both regard it as their personal duty to avenge the historic injustices allegedly done to their countries, each being a brilliant user of circumstance to further their ambitions. 

Putin observed Obama crumple before Assad, correctly assessing him as a wordy coward and a man of straw. He then deployed his assassins very visibly in the UK to get the measure of Prime Minister May. The 2018 Novichok poisoning of Sergei Skrypol and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury was deliberately done by known and traceable agents of Russian intelligence, the GRU. Its purpose was not to kill the Skrypols, which could have been done far more professionally and discreetly, but to mount what is called “a reconnaissance in strength”. The purpose of such operations is to assess the enemy’s response to them, making them quite costly, but nonetheless rewarding, especially for a despot. May’s moral predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, would have closed down Russia Inc in the UK, lock stock and banking barrel: May merely expelled most of the Russian embassy staff and fiddled with sanctions. Thus, a woman of straw in a state of straw.

Four years ago, President Xi conducted a reconnaissance in strength with his opportunistic re-enactment of the 1343 siege of Caffa by the Khan Janibeg, during which the khan had spread the Black death by catapulting the corpses of plague-victims into the town. The myth might well not have been historically true, but what was undeniable was that airliners were far more powerful vectors than trebuchets. When Covid erupted in China, Xi ensured the West was thoroughly infected by keeping international air-routes open while cancelling internal traffic in China. The ploy helped to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency, though the accidental death of George Floyd was a bonus beyond the wildest predictions of the most optimistic Chinese soothsayer. Not merely did this combination remove Trump from Xi’s calculations, it removed him also from Putin’s when the latter contemplated his attack on Ukraine. With a senile and incontinent incompetent in the White House, Putin thought the highway to Kyiv lay open to him. Just one thing stopped him: Kyiv. Murderous mayhem duly ensued, reaching as far as North Korea and into the Soviet-style Arctic labour camps, where – as the late Alexei Navalny’s family can now attest – Novichok poison again rules, and will continue to do so into the near future.

However, Trump is back, this time with an Elon Musk-enhanced team and a clear agenda, part of which is to make Europe finally pay for its own defences. That is a wistful ambition: Europe is not merely ailing, it is dying, demographically, economically, technologically and culturally.  The EU, far from being a union of strengths, has proved to be an alliance of frailties, with sectional selfishness masquerading as cultural diversity. Trump might do wonders for Miami, Milwaukee or Memphis, but he can do nothing for Milan, Munich and Madrid. These must go their own sad way, though of the three, Milan is probably best placed to come through the coming storm. Italy’s calamitous failure to have babies is at least balanced by a growing awareness that being Italian is a noble thing, whereas being “European” is simply a vacuous vanity inside a vaulted vacuum. Merkel’s Trojan horse of two million Syrians of a decade ago, alongside the doctrinaire edicts of the European Court of Rights compelling European countries to admit the families of foreign nationals already present in their jurisdictions, will have vast existential consequences, and for Berlin especially. In short, a human autobahn has opened that connects the Arab world to Germany. The irreversible transformation of German cities is now well underway: unless Germany wakes up, ahead lies a crimson lake of tears, of grief and of bloodshed. 

What is acutely so for Germany is also true, though in a less dramatic fashion, for most European countries, many of which have immunised themselves against truth and identity by describing all those who believe in such essential virtues as “far-right”. The term conjures up visions of concentration camps, though almost all such barbarities were the creation of the Left, either the National Socialists of the Third Reich or the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union.  Genuine right-wing parties seek small-government states imbued with a tolerant patriotism, as represented classically by Giorgia Meloni of Italy and by Poland’s Law and Justice Party. The latter, tragically, is now out of power, though Poland’s pro-EU prime minister Donald Tusk does occasionally show signs of a growing awareness that his country is shackled to a diseased and moribund behemoth wheezing its last. Likewise Orban’s Hungary, which rightly cherishes its identity, will probably withstand the insidious disease that is killing the EU.

In short, the EU’s doom will move several notches closer this coming year, while the US, minus a George Floyd freak, will return to the uplands of growth and power. Trump will be obliged to act on his promises to expel illegal immigrants, though just where to put them is another question: Mexico can hardly be expected to house the millions of people who passed through its territory to avail of the opportunities permitted by Biden, the most fatefully incompetent president in US history. Indeed, if one wanted to chant a three-decade three-word curse that nearly cast the USA into the abyss, the mantra Clinton-Obama-Biden does it nicely.

But nothing that Trump can do will prevent the collapse of Africa and much of South-West Asia, including Iran. These have been afflicted by a demographic explosion that was largely made possible by UN-funded western medicine. In essence, this was a global suicide pact embodying the aphorism that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. Who could possibly argue in 1970 against keeping an ailing baby alive?  Before that child dies as a septuagenarian in 2040, he or she might have begotten seventy multi-generational offspring. Though all of these have probably been kept alive by western medicine and food-aid, they have nonetheless proved mostly indifferent to western procreative continence while not being indifferent to various forms of religious zealotry. These have mutated with increasing malignance since the birth of the hilariously-misnamed Arab Spring in 2011. This was triggered by a Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi who was so humiliated by a woman police officer taking away his unlicensed vegetable cart that he burnt himself alive. This triggered a social convulsion from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans, causing the liberal left-media to croon it was all about “Enlightenment”. It was not. It was about Endarkenment, and the neo-Nazi religious movements it has since spawned will in 2025 still threaten polities across an entire swathe of the conjoined African-Eurasian landmasses.

So, with the left-liberals getting the immediate past empirically wrong, is it surprising that they imagine the immediate future with comparable inaccuracy? The Western media generally foresee a Trump-driven trade-war between the USA and the EU, whereas Trump knows that such wars invariably impoverish all sides. His recent mischievous game-playing with Canada, Greenland and Panama will probably reach an affable and satisfactory conclusion for all concerned, especially Canada, once it has rid itself of the political syphilis that is Trudeau. Israel will soon conclude its horrifically bloody victory in Gaza, (as Hamas had always intended, but without having precipitated the worldwide political isolation of Israel, as also intended) and the Gulf States will finance the reconstruction of the enclave, though probably enforcing an exclusion-order on all overt Hamas activity. The most important initiative of Trump Mark I – the Abrahamic Accords – will be revived. 

So, maybe some of Martin Gilbert’s predictions might in time turn out to be true. But not those about Tony Blair, whose political career cast an enduring blight upon the realm that he prime-ministerially ruled and comprehensively ruined. No future, regardless of it benignity, can easily or swiftly undo a catastrophic past. That is the true lesson of history: good government lasts but a generation, whereas truly bad government such as Blair’s, rather like a time-travelling plague, generously dispenses its septic buboes down the following decades. And where the UK has long gone, poor Germany will probably follow, whereas Poland and Hungary seem happily bound in the opposite direction.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.