Alan Tacca
US President Joe Biden’s initial refusal to acknowledge that he might deteriorate rapidly in old age triggered a chain of mistakes in America’s Democratic Party, leading to the makeshift candidacy of Ms Kamala Harris.
It is a useless pastime (except of course for passing time) constructing various scenarios in which the Democrats and Republicans could have presented to American voters candidates leading to a president less unsettling than Donald Trump.
Without absolutely dismissing the possibility of a disruptive event, Trump will be America’s next president.
In the circumstances, a strong majority of Americans chose him to address their priorities. But the policy choices Washington makes will be important to many non-Americans around the world.
Perhaps more curiously than over any other issue, the world will be watching how Trump approaches the war in Ukraine. There is no other major conflict in which the immorality of the aggressor is so clear.
For instance, the current war in the Middle East was indeed triggered by the event in which Hamas militants crossed from Gaza into Israel, killing more than a thousand people, and maiming, raping and taking hostage hundreds of others.
The savagery of the attack was astonishing, but it followed decades of Israeli occupation and cynicism, tit-for-tat Arab-Israeli attrition, failed diplomacy and explosion into many full-scale wars; all this against a backdrop of thousands of years of biblically implied theocentric Israeli ‘supremacism’.In a nutshell, any war between Israel and its Arab neighbours is quite ‘normal’, thanks to Arab recklessness and Israeli ruthlessness.
Considering the war in Sudan, most of the world has only a vague idea of two serious thugs with high military ranks engaged in a struggle for power; a struggle whose senselessness is also ‘normal’ because it is between Africans, a backward mass characterised by primitive greed, bad governance and wanton violence. You are free to call it prejudice.
By contrast, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a huge anomaly. Coming from a country whose heritage claims Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, Putin stands out as a monster who callously planned and, against all civilised arguments and protestation, invaded neighbouring Ukraine.
The tragedy of hundreds of thousands who have been killed, maimed and taken prisoner on both sides in that conflict lies squarely with Mr Putin and his new imperialism.Not surprisingly, Putin’s allies, who include North Korean, Chinese and some African autocrats, would not be everybody’s favourite neighbours.
Will Donald Trump lean towards or away from Putin in that struggle?Joe Biden’s administration has firmly supported Ukraine’s resistance against Russian aggression, albeit with considerable restrictions on the use of military hardware supplied by the US.
In-coming President Trump talks about making America great again. But he also insinuates that he might try to appease Russia by bearing down upon Ukraine to accept loss of some of the territory currently under Russian occupation, like the Crimea.
It would be to end a war without establishing justice. It would be to reward arrogant aggression and to betray the Ukrainian fighters who have resisted so heroically.
Russia’s perceived victory would also embolden those looking for a big power to lead them in establishing an axis of fascism.
Greatness comes by an enlargement of the human spirit in its realisation of values that raise us above vulgar ‘success’.
Greatness implies a depth of moral intelligence that transcends the acquisition of big quantities of money and arms.
America can get richer and militarily stronger but shrink in stature in its account of the spirit of our times. It could become alienated and even despised.
Mr Tacca is a novelist and socio-political commentator.
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