A year of terrible wars and the re-invigoration of populist politics which has all underlined deeply worrying trends in international relations
Donald Trump speaks during an election night event in Florida: his victory was dramatic evidence of the spread of populist politics. We live in uncertain times,” a Swedish emergency readiness pamphlet last month warned every household. The world is a more dangerous place, it might have added, and advice on what to do in the event of war or unexpected crisis, even nuclear attack, also circulated to increasingly nervous citizens of the region from Finland to Denmark and Norway.
Putin has thrown North Korean troops into the battle. Long-range missile exchanges, some into Russia, have escalated, as have Russian-sourced hybrid attacks on European states, from fire bombings and assassinations to cyberattacks and election manipulation, to allegations of mysterious deep sea cable sabotage.
Gaza – with over 45,000 now dead -– continued relentlessly. Ceasefire talks, also involving the release of Israeli hostages, are again underway though prospects of success are uncertain. The conflict was extended to Lebanon in an invasion which both decapitated the powerful Hizbullah militia and dealt a crushing blow to Iran’s axis of resistance, enabling the welcome overthrow of Syria’s brutal Assad dictatorship.
The shock to conventional analysis of US politics was, as US political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, that Trump represented a “challenge to the New Deal realignment of 1932 as the most consequential election of the past 100 years… Conservative power is consolidated in a way that makes the Biden administration look like the fluke, the last gasp of a dying order.”
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