New World Order

There will be no day of days then when a new world order comes into being.
Step by step and here and there it will arrive

So it begins. Yesterday, Donald J Trump managed to do what only one person in the past 130 year has managed to do – Grover Cleveland in 1892 – and was sworn in as President of the United States for a second, non-consecutive term.

As a citizen of the United Kingdom, I have as little right to pronounce on political happenings across the Pond as Elon Musk has to dictate what happens over here. It didn’t stop him, and it’s not stopping me, either.

Within hours of his inauguration, Trump had taken the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement for a second time, ditto the World Health Organisation, declared a national emergency at the USA borders, forbidden all federal employees from working from home, and stuck two fingers up at the rule of law by freeing all 1600 people involved in the January 6 riots.

Let’s not forget that those riots happened because a bunch of people decided that they would not accept the result of an election in the largest democracy in the world. Many of them were calling for the then Vice President, Mike Pence to be hung. They were after Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blood. Would they have made good on those threats had they found Pence and Pelosi? Who knows, but we’ve seen countless examples, even on our own shores, where mob-rule means all bets are off.

The long-heralded tariffs on everything that the US imports haven’t been established – yet – and the implications and repercussions of his presidency will take time to materialise , though the UK Green Building Council have already described the Paris Agreement withdrawal as a ‘preposterous betrayal of US citizens’.

There’s little point in trying to second-guess what might happen and what effect the Trump presidency could have on the UK at this stage. Nor even to speculate how much havoc the ‘tech-bro-ocracy’ might wreak, before Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg get bored, and go off to play with their money. In any case, look at how many changes of personnel there were in Trump’s first stab at the Presidency. How many of of his pre-inauguration appointments will last the course this time?

One thing he had already been claiming credit for was the ceasefire in Gaza, and, although it was a definite joint effort with the Biden administration officials, who had been working behind the scenes for months, it follows a precedent. Minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in in January 1981, 52 hostages from the US Embassy in Tehran were released after 444 days in captivity, although the deal had been in the works during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

The Gaza cease-fire is, for now, holding. It was probably ever going to be thus, but those of us who had been hoping for an end to the war in Gaza and the safe return of Israeli hostages since October 7th 2023 watched with a no small amount of trepidation the return of the 90 Palestinian prisoners, and the propaganda which accompanied the release of the three Israeli hostages – four more women are due to be release on Saturday. The message from their balaclava-clad, gun-toting captors was clear: “we are still here”. There are no winners in situations like this, and there never will be. Just different degrees of losing.

If it doesn’t last, you can bet that the Trump administration will disavow any involvement in it, and it will be “Joe Biden’s bad deal. A very bad deal”.