Robert Fisk: The world is suffering under Trump and his fellow fragile tyrants
The Sick Man of Europe
– as the Russians and then the British once called Turkey for its gradual
impotence amid the crazed political and military decisions taken during and
after the First World War – has now been replaced by another Sick Man of Europe
and another Sick Man in America. That’s how empires dissolve: when satraps still take
their false caliphs seriously, ignore their incurable mental distress, and pay
no attention to the outrageous behaviour of their attendant lords. Goodbye to
the poor and huddled masses.
The sanest comment to emerge this week from the latest fandango in the Washington lunatic asylum came from Iran. Asked for an official response to the political murder of John Bolton – these Richard III killings, in which the characters are either smothered or stabbed by tweets, are, after all, routine to the point of absurdity – the Iranian foreign ministry ponderously replied that it did not “interfere in internal American affairs”. It was a wonderful po-faced response to the ever more outrageously comic Trumpian theatre. True, the various supreme and less supreme leaders of Tehran performed a little dance of joy at the demise of Bolton the “warmonger”, but at least the description was spot-on.
Normally sane western
correspondents, however, performed their own routine: having all admitted
(rather late but many times) that Trump is a crackpot, they resorted to their
usual bland circus of reporting “tensions” in the Trump asylum, as if there
actually was a Bolton “policy” or a Trump “policy” on the Middle East. Having abandoned ink,
this is the new kind of journalism, in which reporters must fill their pens
with mercury – and write.
Off we went again
(this from a great western news agency) on the whirligig clichés of Trumpian
“foreign policy”. Trump had faced “a cascade of … global challenges” while
experiencing “a trying moment … on the world stage”, and Bolton had opposed his
president’s desire to talk to “some of the world’s most unsavoury actors”. After the great North
Korean leader, for heaven’s sake, and the deputy Iranian supreme leader and the
heroic Taliban, who might Trump want to chat to next? The great Syrian leader,
perhaps? I will leave readers
to savour the adjective “unsavoury” – which western experts will never use
about Messers al-Sissi (with his 60,000 Egyptian political prisoners) or Mohammad bin
Salman (of surgical fame) or various other democrats in Brazil and elsewhere.
But the clichés of “stages” and “actors” innocently betrayed what this was all about. Foreign policy doesn’t exist any more in many world capitals. Only the ghostly wreckage of the theatre remains...
But the clichés of “stages” and “actors” innocently betrayed what this was all about. Foreign policy doesn’t exist any more in many world capitals. Only the ghostly wreckage of the theatre remains...
see also
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The regime reveals itself
