SPRINGTIME FOR DICTATORS
W ant to murder your opponents or jail dissidents? Don’t worry, Trump’s your ally if you have an oil or property deal for him
What a glorious time it is to be a dictator in the world. You can kidnap, kill, maim and torture your people and others, and never need to worry that you will face international censure or be brought to book.
Why? Because the president of the US, Donald Trump, has your back.
It is a trend. The president of the US, a role which we have come to associate with standing up for human rights and against dictatorships across the world, now routinely befriends and defends the globe’s strongmen and dictators. He is great buddies with President Vladimir Putin of Russia — a man he has gone to extraordinary lengths to defend even as Putin jails and murders rights activists in his home country.
Trump is great buddies with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (also known as MBS), even as evidence piles up that the prince is implicated in the murder of the former Saudi insider and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. And he jails women’s rights activists.
Last week, after meeting North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, Trump was eager to defend the man, saying he trusts him.
Trump was asked about the late Otto Warmbier, the 21-yearold University of Virginia student who was arrested by North Korean authorities while on a group tour in the country in January 2016.
He was charged with trying to steal a propaganda poster praising Kim’s father.
He was forced to recite a confession, which was videotaped, in which he said he took the poster at the behest of the CIA and an Ohio church (an extraordinary alliance, that).
Warmbier was initially sentenced to 15 years of hard labour, but was returned to the US in June 2017 in a comatose state — brain dead, blind and deaf. North Korea said he fell ill from botulism. He died shortly after his return to the US.
Nothing of the magnitude of the death of an American happens in North Korea without Kim’s knowledge. Yet, asked about this, Trump last week said he believed Kim when he said he did not know what had happened to Warmbier.
“Those prisons are rough; they’re rough places, and bad things happened. But I don’t believe he [Kim] knew about it,” Trump said. “He tells me he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”
It is exactly this trait that galls. Remember how Saudi government operatives kidnapped, tortured, killed and then cut into pieces the body of the dissident exile Khashoggi in its consulate in Turkey?
The people who murdered the columnist were in contact with heir to the throne MBS before and after the murder and many have appeared in pictures alongside him.
Yet, in a country where nothing happens without the crown prince’s say-so, he claimed he did not know. Trump believed him too. “We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder,” he said in November. “In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran.”
The real special relationship for Trump, though, is with Russian strongman Putin. When his intelligence agencies told him Moscow had meddled with the US elections in
2016, he told them to go jump in a lake. He even leaked the contents of a classified, and highly sensitive, Israeli intelligence operation to two highranking Russian envoys.
The trend conclusively points to the fact that any persons wishing to murder their own people, jail dissidents and shut down free speech already have an ally.
That ally is Trump. For his protection and allegiance, just supply him with oil (as the Saudis do), have something on him (as the Russians seem to) or have the potential to have a lot of property developments spring up in your country (as may happen with an openedup North Korea).
Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela should perhaps give Trump some oil concessions. He would be surprised at how swiftly US policy towards him could change.