Geopolitical verities and surreal politics

By M.R. Josse

KATHMANDU: This week’s offering will cover a number of topical issues – some relating to geopolitical verities and others to surreal politics. I shall begin with the latter category, focusing on American President Donald Trump’s surreal acceptance speech last Thursday after being formally nominated by the Republican Party as its candidate for the November 3 presidential election.

ON PLANET TRUMP

Given space constraints, I will limit myself to just a small bunch of observations on his over 70-minute peroration, viewed live on CNN; days earlier, yours faithfully had similarly listened to and viewed the Democratic Party nominee former Vice-President Joe Biden’s 22-minute speech. Therein, he vowed to defeat Trump, ending what he termed as America’s ‘season of darkness’.

A future column – or columns – will assess the prospects of the two contenders in the 65 days that remain before America finally decides to re-elect Trump or to go with Biden, instead. This effort will, as stated, will be mostly devoted to Trump’s flight into political fantasy land. The in situ audience of nearly 2,000 supporters – mostly without masks and in flagrant violation of social distancing norms – lapped up Trump’s rhetorical surreal journey avidly, as they mentally accompanied him to ‘Planet Trump’.

For starters, a stark differential in the two acceptance speeches, apart from their widely differing lengths, was that while Biden’s was soft, clear, hopeful, but firm in tone – speaking mainly about national unity and returning the United States to its traditional leadership role in the world – Trump’s oration was characteristically brash, accusatory and brimming over with vitriol and braggadocio.

Revealingly, while Trump referred to his rival, in non-flattering terms, 41 times, Biden in his address had not even named the incumbent president once! Even more tellingly, perhaps, Trump’s acceptance speech gave the impression that he was actually speaking about not how things are but how he actually wished them to be.

Indeed, according to a CNN ‘fact-checker’, the American president presented over 20 ‘alternative facts’ in a matter of three minutes, including the ludicrous claim that he had done the most for African Americans in American history, after Abe Lincoln!

He also thought nothing of claiming that he had created 9 million new jobs – while forgetting to mention that that ‘achievement’ was more than wiped out by the number of unemployed spiking to 22 million, subsequently!

He seemed to forget that the problems besetting the United States today are happening in Trump’s – not Biden’s – America! He is the incumbent, not the political challenger.

SURREAL

It was mind-boggling to hear his long litany of claims of political achievement when he has been presiding over a post-Covid-19 public health scene which even as he spoke was marred by a horrific death toll of almost 180,000 lives – the highest casualty rate in the world.

People around the globe who follow current affairs are well aware that in the past Trump not only dismissed the pandemic as something that would go away, miracle-like but also proposed a string of weird ‘cures’ for the deadly disease, including one advocating swallowing phenol!

Despite that sombre reality, he brashly claimed he had made great contributions in tackling or managing the pandemic; that, without his competent handling, umpteen thousands more would have died.

Equally startling was to note that – even as incident after incident of racial unrest spawned, in part, by police brutality against blacks kept occurring with disturbing regularity across the nation – Trump, incredulously, blamed Biden and the Democrats, projecting them as ‘wild-eyed’ radicals and Leftists out to destroy America.

The truth is, of course, that Biden and the Democrats are not opposed to ‘law and order’ but merely against egregious excesses by the police, of which there have unfortunately been too many instances in recent days and months, all recorded on video. Democrats have also condemned the violence in the current rash of racial unrest but insist that peaceful protests against such racism are legitimate.

It is transparent that the purpose of such reckless allegations against the Democrats is to create a climate of fear, hoping that such a device would neutralize the significant lead in national polls that Biden enjoys today.

What was striking, but hardly surprising, was that Trump, despite a long-standing tradition in American political history of not using the White House for political propaganda, went ahead and brazenly exploited it as a prop for promoting the Republican Party.

All in all, the tamasha at the White House last Thursday night – dubbed by many American commentators as the ‘Trump Show’ – was overwhelmingly dominated by him and a host of Trump family members. For cosmetic purposes, however, it had a number of black and ‘coloured’ speakers intended to prove his popularity among the black and immigrant community.

It is well known, of course, that in the Trump cabinet there is only one black member; they are also in woefully small numbers in most key departments of the Trump administration.

Finally, even more, disturbing has been Trump’s reluctance to unequivocally declare his readiness to accept the poll result if Biden is declared victorious; so, too, are his continuing efforts to suppress balloting by attempting to obstruct mail-in voting, an absolutely vital component for voting during the pandemic.

SAYONARA ABE

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s snap announcement on his retirement Friday has not only brought the curtain down on Japan’s longest-serving premier but has possibly set off a new period political uncertainty while opening a veritable geopolitical Pandora’s Box.

To appreciate the significance of Abe’s sayonara from the Japanese political scene – he will continue as premier until his Liberal Democratic Party elects a successor and is formally approved by the Diet – it will be necessary to recall not only his ‘special’ relations with President Trump but also that his ultra-nationalism had aroused deep suspicions in China and the two Korea, given their bitter experience at the hands of imperial Japan in the pre-World War II era.

Abe had travelled to New York to meet candidate Trump at his luxury apartment in 2016 – even while Barak Obama was still American president! Trump’s ‘unofficial’ tete-a-tete with Abe was, in fact, the former’s very first meeting with a foreign leader.

Abe’s rare diplomatic gesture probably helped further consolidate Japan-America security ties and may, indeed, have resulted in Trump taking a much softer line towards Japan than he has vis-à-vis other allies such as in matters of trade and cost-sharing of mutual defence arrangements, including the American ‘nuclear umbrella.’

Abe was unsuccessful in achieving his cherished objective of formally re-writing the U.S. – drafted pacifist constitution at the end of World War II – because of poor public support. Abe’s political rhetoric had often focused on making Japan a “normal” and “beautiful” nation with a stronger military and greater role in international affairs, raising the spectre of Japanese militarism in the Koreas and China.

He was also unable to secure the return of the contested islands claimed by Japan and Russia, thereby enabling Tokyo and Moscow to sign a formal peace treaty officially ending the War.

Though dealing with fraught relations with an increasingly influential China constituted one of Abe’s most important foreign/security policy agenda items, their dispute over the uninhabited East China Sea islands – which Japan calls Senkaku and China labels as Diaoyu – remains unresolved, to date.

Abe did manage to work out a delicate modus vivendi with Chinese President Xi Jinping, despite strategic strains in the Sino-Japanese relationship, given Beijing’s rapidly increasing global role and influence, on the one hand, and, Japan joining in such thinly disguised anti-China gambits as the still-evolving ‘Quad’ security arrangement between the United States, Japan, India and Australia, on the other.

With Abe’s exit, and Trump’s future looking increasingly insecure, the ‘Quad’ concept may go south if not collapse altogether, significantly impacting India, among others. If post-Abe Japan cannot get its act together – and soon – there is the possibility that North Korea could get tougher on Japan than it has been in the past and, possibly, South Korea and China, as well.

While it remains to be seen how things in the East Asia/Pacific theatre actually pan out, an important geopolitical verity seems to be shaping up nearby: in the form of a nascent ‘Eurasian alliance’. To summarize Pepe Escobar’s interesting recent article in the ‘Information Clearing House’, the “definitive passing of the geopolitical torch from maritime empires back to the Eurasian heartland” is actually slowly but surely taking shape. “Beijing-Moscow is already on, Berlin-Beijing is a work in progress; the missing link in the future is Berlin-Moscow.” Interesting geopolitical times clearly lie ahead.

BELARUS: A NEPALI VIEW

Indeed, the very same can be predicted from the portents of the massive but peaceful daily protests erupting in Belarus, particularly in its capital of Minsk. They come in the wake of the patently fraudulent 9 August election where President Alexander Lukashenko claimed he received an unbelievable 80 percent of the vote in his sixth consecutive victory – after 26 years of unpopular, authoritarian rule!

Those triggered a massive and viscous crackdown against the protestors – a situation that has aroused widespread anger in Belarus and the ire of international public opinion, triggering sanctions by the E.U. which has rejected the ‘results’ of the poll.

The gut issues behind the crisis, however, actually are geopolitical – mainly encapsulated in neighbouring Russia’s well-known security sensitivities vis-à-vis Belarus. In many, if not all, ways this is redolent of India’s familiar stance on her security, vis-à-vis Nepal.

But, although both Nepal and Belarus are landlocked, Nepal, unlike Belarus, has an adjacent countervailing power – China – to balance any possible/hypothetical aggressive move against her from India. Though Belarus has a multiplicity of neighbours, unlike Nepal, she does not have a ‘China’ as such a potential shield. Her dependence on security assistance from Russia, in the case of outside intervention, is total. So is her vulnerability.

That is why it is obvious that Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to play the most decisive role in what happens next. He has promised to send in his military – if the need be felt – as Russia has so often in the past, particularly in her ‘near abroad’.

It is, after all, a well established geopolitical truism that Russia regards its security as being inextricably tied to the political orientation of her neighbours. Since the protestors in Minsk are not chanting pro-West or anti-Russian slogans, there is hope that Russia will not have to intervene.

While ruling nothing out, I find it illuminating that President Trump has not chosen to speak out personally, either in favour of the beleaguered Belarussians or to counsel Putin that he should ‘cool’ it.

NEVER-NEVER LAND

I began this discourse by saying how surreal I found President Trump’s acceptance speech. Truth be told, the conditions in our own land are no less incredulous. Though we have a government that commands a brute majority in parliament, it has, for months now, been characterized by inaction, incompetence and a seeming inability to control endemic and rampant corruption.

And, as is becoming increasingly apparent day by day, its impotence in checking the raging pandemic has acquired almost legendary or mythical dimensions. What is more: while official scribes wax eloquent about Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s recent ‘ice-breaker’ call to his Indian counterpart on India’s Independence Day, that conversation seems to have ignored the elephant in the room: the urgent need to shut down – pronto! – the open Nepal-India border, if we are not to be submerged in a tsunami of virus infections ‘imported’ from India.

What’s more, the powers that be seem to be totally infected by the kissa kursi ka syndrome with endless, useless meetings and debates in party conclaves that do not translate into anything worthwhile or concrete for the janata janardan. In short, it continues to be all about enjoying the ‘loaves and fishes’ of office and of ‘making hay while the sun shines’.

Work clearly within the purview of civilian ministries is outsourced to the Army. Revealingly, too, most high-profile appointments in the government sector turn out to be controversial and unacceptable.

A much-hyped federal system that has been established is, from all relevant metrics, unsustainable from an economics or revenue point of view. How long will such inanities continue?

A government composed entirely of Communists functions as though they are as far divorced from the masses that they supposedly represent, as one can imagine.

According to a plethora of angry social media outpourings, the nomeklatura have become luxury junkies, easily outdoing their former counterparts of the panchayat era.

A government of supposed atheists very often behaves as if it were the Nepali version of the BJP in India. Secularism apparently is only for show – for Westerners! Quite apart from the ideological absurdity of multi-party Marxist-Leninists cohabiting with one-party ‘Maoist’ revolutionaries, there is also this tell-tale irony: these ‘Maoists’ were nurtured not in Mao’s China but in Gandhi’s India.

Where such gaucheries, absurdities and contradictions are going to end, and how, God only knows. In the meantime, we, too, are condemned to live in a totally surreal world of make-belief that the tearing down of the ancien regime, with generous extraneous help, has birthed!

The writer can be reached at: manajosse@gmail.com

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