Today is one rare day: Not only did a Democrat win a special election in Alabama, sparing the US the embarrassment of having to seat a child predator in the US Senate; despite Donald Trump’s recent claim that talking to Rocket Man would be a waste of time, Rex Tillerson announced that the US would meet with the North Korean president without preconditions, after Vladimir Putin offered to mediate.
Simultaneously with that offer, Vladimir Putin, tagged as ‘The Man Without a Face’ by Masha Gessen, a Russian born writer whose main subject of interest is her former president), and as ‘a bored kid in the back of the class’ by former President Obama, hopped over to Syria to announce to the Russian troops stationed there that they were coming home, but that he will enlarge Russia’s air and sea bases, with Iranian troops remaining until Syria is restored to full sovereignty.
Although most Americans have hazy notions of geography, a few may realize that these announcements come just as President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital transfers the title of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian standoff to Vladimir Putin, like a crown being moved from the head of an upstart to its legitimate bearer.
A lot of Americans today are heaving a sigh of relief that the Alabama judge accused by several women of trying to seduce them when they were teenagers was defeated by a Democrat in a state famous for its devotion to the Republican Party. (One definition of the US is ’an East coast and a West coast with Alabama in between…’). But thanks to a lack of information about world events, they are less likely to understand why Vladimir Putin is increasingly taking the center on the international stage.
For months Washington has oscillated between dismissing him as an upstart and painting him as a threat to ‘all things bright and beautiful’ as mentioned in a nineteenth century hymn. As the US political class, echoed by a frenzied media, wallows in a constitutional crisis over alleged Russian interference in its ‘democracy’, while flogging to death sexual misconduct, manifestly unable to distinguish between trivia and the fate of the world, it’s safe to say that ‘the man without a face’ is fast becoming humanity’s best hope.
If a daily example is needed, the New York Times has failed so far to cover the One Planet Summit organized by French President Emmanuel Macron and attended by more than 50 world leaders in Paris yesterday. Although he is a staunch neo-liberal, it’s with good reason that the forty year-old Macron refers to himself as a ‘Jupiterian’ President, i.e., one who gets things done, like the man in Moscow.
Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years, exlusively for the online journal “New Eastern Outlook”.
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