This week has seen a remarkable series of events
As 2018 draws to a close Donald Trump continues to make the headlines. Here we reflect upon the US President’s fortunes and some of the other major international stories of the past year
IT was a year of hunger in Yemen, and yellow vests on the streets of France. We will remember Saudi Arabia’s Jamal Khashoggi and no doubt hear more of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
From the Helsinki summit to the Sea of Azov, Russian president Vladimir Putin made his mark and then, of course, there was Donald Trump, always Donald Trump.
As the end of 2018 draws near it should come as no surprise that love him or loathe him the US President continues to hog the headlines.
Even by his own unpredictable standards, this past week has seen a remarkable series of events unfold with Trump at the centre.
The hallmark, of course, has been Trump’s penchant for attention grabbing. Where once it was a form of self-publicity, these days it has become a political survival strategy and necessity.
It was the veteran Washington political player, 80-year old Leon Panetta, who has been everything from White House chief of staff to director of the CIA, who last week bemoaned the fact that Trump simply doesn’t listen to his advisers.
“He enjoys chaos because he thinks chaos produces attention for him,” observed Panetta during an interview on CNN on Thursday night.
Panetta’s remarks came in the wake of the resignation of US Defence Secretary James Mattis, the man many regarded as the “last adult in the room” of Trump’s White House. For many, Mattis’s presence in the Administration was the only thing preventing disaster.
But Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria was the last straw for the former US Marine corps general who, according to legendary American journalist Bob Woodward, said Trump had the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader.
Even as Trump engages in yet another attention grab by threatening to shut down parts of the federal government in order to get funding for his Mexico border wall, it’s hard to get past the President’s reckless decision earlier in the week to withdraw US troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
Mattis, along with countless other military advisers, intelligence analysts and diplomats, saw it for what it is. Not only does it effectively give the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group a get-out-of-jail card, but simultaneously provides free rein in Syria, to other key power players, Russia, Iran and especially Turkey.
“We’ve won,” announced Trump in a video statement speaking about his troop withdrawal and insisting that IS had been defeated and no longer posed a threat.
It was all very reminiscent of that previous “mission accomplished” claim by former US president George W Bush in the wake of the war in Iraq, except that in Trump’s case it was not delivered from the deck of an aircraft carrier. The US President, after all, has never been in a conflict zone.
Had he ever visited the Syrian city of Raqqa he would have seen precisely what his definition of “victory” means. Looking back now on the past year, my own time spent in this devastated city that was once the self-proclaimed capital of I S’ s “c al i phate” s t ands out as unforgettable.
In the ruins of Raqqa the real measure of Trump’s mythical victory is starkly laid bare. Codenamed the Wrath of Euphrates, the onslaught on Raqqa was a no quarter military campaign.
According to independent research groups that track American and Russian airstrikes in Syria, US aircraft and artillery bombarded Raqqa with an estimated 20,000 munitions during the five-month operation there. This is more than was dropped in all of Afghanistan in the whole of 2017.
“Our intention is that IS’s foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa. We are not going to allow them to do so. We are going to stop them there and take apart the caliphate,” Mattis said at the time.
His President this week, however, had other ideas, a decision that has left the job of containing IS unfinished, America’s Kurdish allies abandoned and Raqqa still in ruins allowing for the anger of a disgruntled population to once again be exploited by the jihadists.
Indeed, barely hours after Trump’s withdrawal announcement, IS set off a bomb in Raqqa, killing a Kurdish fighter.
It might have been a small, isolated attack, but it indicated on IS’s behalf a canny assertion of the stakes in the American withdrawal and that the group was looking forward to exploiting a changed reality in Syria.
Syria,of course, was not the only place where a changing political reality was played out his year.
It was all very reminiscent of that previous ‘mission accomplished’ claim by former US president George W Bush in the wake of the war in Iraq, except that in Trump’s case it was not delivered from the deck of an aircraft carrier
Much closer to home, France has been a sombre and embittered place of late.
Sombre in that it mourned again the latest victims of an Islamist-inspired terror attack in the city of Strasbourg and embittered after weeks of almost unprecedented street protests in Paris, that pushed President Emmanuel Macron i nto a uncharacteristic climbdown.
Nebulous yet vicious, the gilets jaunes or yellow vests protest movement follows in a long French tradition of taking politics onto the streets. France, after all, is a republic that was founded in popular violence.
Ugly as the scenes in Paris have been, as international stories go this past year, the gilets jaunes, their grievances and demands appear to have captured the imagination of many far beyond France.
There is now no doubt that the gilets jaunes have given voice to the genuine economic and social distress in a peripheral and middle France that sees itself alienated and financially exploited by the country’s privileged metropolitan elite. As Aurelie Dianara, a research associate in international economic history at the University of Glasgow recently pointed out, over the last two decades the largest fortunes in France have increased tenfold.
This figure, she says, stands in marked contrast to a study by the French Economic Observatory (OFCE), which revealed that alongside this hike for the rich, French families’ average “purchasing power” has fallen by €440 a year since the 2008 financial crisis.
Even President Macron, the former Rothschild banker, appears to have recognised that France is anything but an economic level playing field right now.
As part of his climbdown in the wake of the protests, he announced that minimum wage workers would receive an increase of €100 per month. There would also he said be an exemption from taxes on overtime pay, and an exemption on certain social security taxes for retirees who earn less than €2,000 a month.
The pressing question now, of course, is whether this will be enough to take the sting out of the protests?
A hike to the minimum wage and a Christmas bonus may quell the violence from some of the yellow vests, but it’s unlikely to win over the die-hard troublemakers, who in part have hijacked the movement.
At best, though, it might just make others think twice about strapping on their vests again ahead of the festive
In the ruins of Raqqa the real measure of Trump’s mythical victory is starkly laid bare. Codenamed the Wrath of Euphrates, the onslaught on Raqqa was a no quarter military campaign