Just this morning we have several major pieces of news. It is difficult to make one coherent story out of these different tremors, but one can, perhaps, see connections between the rise of populism, the increasing chaos in Washington and astute political gamesmanship by Russia.
- KOREA. New president, new policy. BBC: "Mr Moon's key political challenge will be to realize the political aspirations of the populist, reformist movement that swept Ms Park from power and which is eager to see the transformation of the corrupt, elitist corporate and political culture that has dominated the country for many years." (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39457385)
- SYRIA/TURKEY: US decision to arm the Kurds announced today is bound to be very unwelcome in Ankara and is likely to push Turkey closer to Russia. This could have very big consequences. The US publicly avowed intention is to get rid of Islamic State - but what then? If IS is going to be defeated, will it be by the US backed Kurds or by the Russian backed Government forces? That question is dangerous enough, but the future orientation of Turkey is an even bigger question.
- FRANCE: Squaring up for the next round. Last day for gathering candidates for Mr Macron's new Republique en Marche party as the country squares up to another election. Meanwhile a believed-to-be most hard line member of the Le Pen family and MP for the National Front has today announced she is to quit politics. I suspect that this means that Marine Le Pen, the party leader, has in mind to edge her party a bit further into the political middle ground in order to increase its electability and make her the clear "leader of the opposition" eclipsing the conservatives and socialists.
- USA: Trump sacks Comey, is it a cover-up? The American government is in quite a mess. Evidently arguments inside the White House are very sharp and there is increasing incoherence to its actions. In Washington there is increasing complexity of suspicion and outrage. If Russia did interfere in the election it has been very effective - not so much in getting Trump elected, but more in sowing seeds of suspicion, confusion and discord. Machiavelli would understand this perfectly. Of course, in some ways this is karma - the US is known to have sponsored disinformation campaigns in other countries in order to destabilise governments it did not like.
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I think I was wrong about the change of script from comedy to thriller. We seem to be back to comedy already with the mix up over photos of Trump's meeting with the Russians. However, there are still many mysteries still to solve. Perhaps the story about Trump being in cahoots with the Russians is just American paranoia. But if that is so, who has been doing all this hacking? I suppose it could be a teenager in a basement in Macedonia, but it looks a lot more professional. If it wasn't the Russians then it surely has to be either an independent group or the CIA, but in either case what is the motive? One can see a possible motive for the CIA to be behind the French hack since it tends to drive a wedge between the new French presidency and Russia. Could it be the the Russians did hack the Democratic convention and then the CIA did a copy-cat operation on Macron knowing the Russians would get the blame? You can't trust anything these days.
Thanks, Robert. We might see a Russian-Turkish one rather sooner.
I can certainly see much sense in a German-Russian entente, given the complementarity of their economies and I think it will come eventually, especially if, as seems quite on the cards, a rift develops between Britain and the EU with Britain being the US rep off the shores of Europe rather as Japan is off the shores of Asia.
I think that to be a spy one either has to be thoroughly inconspicuous or so conspicuous that inconsistencies are overlooked. You can get away with things if nobody notices you or, alternatively, if you look and act as though you own the place anyway. But, of course, I agree with you.
It is interesting how things persist through history. Espionage and good "intelligence" were foundation stones of the success of the Mongols under Gengis and his successors. They were very skilled in exploiting and amplifying divisions among their opponents, assiduous in collecting inside information and, in their military campaigns relied heavily upon subterfuge and surprise. The founding of the Russian state took shape under their suverainty.
Machiavellian as a term would have to cede to Trumpian if Trump was planted as a fifth columnist. The greatest act of political skulduggery would have to be that inside Trump is a cool calculating effective soviet agent who knows discretion while portraying himself over many years as an egotistical buffoon, ignorant of most everything that seems to matter to good minded folk. 'That may be so' but if so I need to retire from any sort of political understanding.
While I would not use the word agent, maybe unintentional actor for the Russian cause is on the mark here. Yes it seems Putin is running much of the US political drama these days and I wonder just what his electronic espionage has brought him in regard to ability to blackmail government, bureaucratic and corporate leaders.
For some years I have pondered a Russian German rapprochement. That would certainly shake up global hegemony.
US politics have, in recent months, seemed to bear some resemblance to a comedy script. Comedy is, of course, a suitable drama for for the dark nights of winter. With the weather warming up, the plot seems - perhaps correspondingly - to be morphing into a thriller. Now if this were a blockbuster summer read, then in the last chapter we would probably discover that Donald Trump had been a KGB agent all along, recruited partly by money and partly by blackmail after rashly using dubious forms of corporal entertainment during his visits to Moscow, kindly but surreptitiously supplied by unlisted Russian agencies. What would such a recruited agent do? Well, I suppose, penetrate the American government at the highest possible level, spread confusion and discord and try to fragment NATO. (Russia has good reasons for wanting to fragment NATO - no country want to be in the position of having half the most powerful countries on the planet ganging up against it.) There are ways and ways of getting things done and espionage is certainly one of the spiciest and one that the Russians are, by all accounts, quite good at. However, this is not a novel, it is the real world, so we can't possibly expect anything like that to really be the case - can we? How could anybody dare to suggest such a thing?