China may have astutely played its North Korea card last week but US President Donald Trump again stole world headlines on Thursday with a sudden announcement in a mid-West political rally that America “will soon” withdraw its military from Syria. And, leave aside consternation in other capitals and demoralisation among Syrian rebels, the US leader’s announcement, like many previous pronouncements, again left his own government speechless and confused because no one, not even his closest aides, had known of this seeming radical policy shift by Washington.
In that same speech in Ohio state, Trump also declared that he would delay ratifying the US’ latest trade deal with South Korea until an agreement is reached with North Korea.
Governments and analysts across the world are further scratching their heads over this weird linking by the American leader of US-South Korea trade with the US-North Korean nuclear armaments dispute!
In Israeli occupied Palestine, at least 16 people were killed during protests in the tiny Gaza Strip last week to mark the ‘Land Day’ commemoration of the 1940s’ Palestinian displacement from much of their homeland and the setting up of the state of Israel. The protests last Friday reminded the world of the on-going tragedy of the complete up-rooting of a nation and its continued virtual imprisonment in two tiny areas of their original homeland, namely in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli authorities said troops opened fire when thousands of stone-throwing Palestinian protestors attacked the border fence. Of course, as all reported indicated, the Israeli forces themselves were not directly affected, but that did not stop them from opening fire on the protesting civilians.
Meanwhile on Thursday, the Russian government issued a video of the successful second testing of its Sarmat-2 inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) carrier, probably the world’s biggest and longest range nuclear-capable rocket.
‘Sarmat’, named after an ancient Siberian nomadic tribal group, has a range of 11,000 km and can carry up to 10 independently targeted nuclear warheads. Sarmat-2 is the second generation Russian super-heavy missile in the Sarmat series and is designed to replace the older Sarmat-1 (technical name ‘R-36M-2’) deployed in the 1980s. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) which code-named the first Sarmat as ‘Satan’, has now code-named the latest version of the Sarmat as ‘Satan-2’.
Some western analysts are already claiming that this was part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s retaliatory gestures following the recent mass expulsion of Russian diplomats by the UK, US and most NATO and other Western allies. The expulsion of Russian diplomats by the Western powers follows claims by the UK government that Russia was responsible for the attempted murder by poisoning of a Russian spy who had betrayed his country as a ‘double agent’ for British intelligence and had been living in exile in London. Russia, too, expelled a number of Western diplomats in a typical ‘tit-for-tat’ reminiscent of the Cold War when there were many of such espionage-diplomacy confrontations.
Capitals in West Asia as well as in many NATO countries are yet seeking clarification of the US leader’s surprise announcement of an imminent US withdrawal from Syria. After all, the Syrian crisis largely came about because of initially covert American and other Western support for moderate and hardline Sunni groups rebelling against the Baathist regime of Bashar Al-Assad. That covert support became overt military support with NATO-led aerial warfare over Syrian skies and the collapse of Syria as a stable country sending millions of refugees through Turkey and Greece into continental Europe.
However, with the Syrian regime under threat, Russia, which, as the Soviet Union, had long maintained military bases in Syrian (a naval port and airfield), quickly began using its forces on the ground and its Syrian-based airpower in support of Damascus. Initially, Russia had common cause with the West in defeating the Islamist insurgent group IS (so-called Islamic State) which had carved out its own base territory in northern and eastern Syria centred around the ancient city of Raqqa.
Following the defeat of IS on the ground, Russia had focussed on supporting the Damascus regime against what it claims are other Islamist fundamentalist groups.
The West, which had earlier indiscriminately supported a broad spectrum of Syrian rebels not caring whether they were secular (a very few are) or pro-democracy (several are) or religio-fundamentalist (many are), later had to face the reality that the biggest rebel groups are, indeed, religio-fundamentalist, some with close ties with IS and Al Qaeda.
Later Washington cunningly reduced its support for the main anti-government insurgent movement and focussed its support on the Kurdish rebels in norther Syria who were closing in on the IS stronghold of Raqqa. The Kurds, among the most modernised of West Asian societies, had earlier success in driving IS out of Kurdish populated territory in north-eastern Syria (east of the Euphrates river).
Today, the US has infiltrated (from across Syria’s eastern border with Iraq) some 2000 special forces troops who are working with the Kurdish rebels, much to the dislike of Turkey who has long fought a separatist insurgency by Kurds in its own eastern regions.
Today, following the Syrian Kurds victory over the IS in Raqqa, Turkey has quickly sent in forces to sieze and hold Syrian territory bordering Turkey to prevent the Kurds on the Syrian side from helping the rebellious Turkish Kurds.
Today, after some six years of devastating civil war in one of the world’s oldest and most richly civilised countries, Syria is barely surviving as a country with a host of outside powers vying for influence in its destiny.
At the same time, capitals in east Asia are now seeking clarification from Washington of Trump’s wild boast that he would delay ratifying the South Korea-US trade agreement that had been crafted by his own Republican Administration until the US has an agreement with North Korea.
It looks like Donald Trump will now have to walk back on both these loud boasts. Both the Defence as well as the State Department as well as the White House hierarchy have not been able to confirm the apparent drastic shift in US strategy towards Syria. Inside the US, everybody seems to be desperately trying to explain away the American leader’s Syria pronouncement as an “off the cuff” remark at a political rally.
And with South Korea, too, the Washington is now probably soothing ruffled feathers in Seoul while in Washington itself, the White House is probably having to explain to the Republican Congress and the Cabinet the truth or, the probably falsity of their President’s pronouncement on the trade pact.
All of this chaos inside the world’s sole superpower is, in a sense, also stabilising for the rest of the world. Such chaotic behaviour and incompetence by the US leadership – not just by Trump but also by an Administration which allows the chaos – renders the US weaker and allows other actors and other factors greater play on the world stage.
People no longer need wait for the ‘Word’ from Washington.
Indeed, Beijing has demonstrated just that last week by hosting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and publicly letting the world know that its diktat counts in Pyongyang more than anyone else’s.
Not only did Kim visit Beijing from Sunday to Wednesday last week, but the two neighbouring nuclear powers (if we acknowledge North Korea’s new status) let the world know that over half a century-old friendship was alive and kicking.
When Kim assures Chinese Presiden Xi that his country r committed to de-nuclearisation once a suitable environment is in place, and Xi assures North Korea of its commitment toward ensuring such conditions, the world is informed that it is not the US but China that is the key arbitrator in the Korean Peninsula.
As if to drive home the point, Xi apparently messaged Washington about the “success” of the Kim visit and also sent a special representative to Seoul to brief the South Koreans.