The Fragile World
By David K. Shipler
As of January 20, when Donald Trump is inaugurated, the world’s three strongest nuclear powers will all be led by criminals. Only Trump has been convicted, but Vladimir Putin faces an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court — for his war crime of abducting children from Ukraine to Russia — and Xi Jinping should face one for his genocide against the Muslim Uighurs in China. Trump has obviously been found guilty of much less — mere business fraud — although he was justifiably charged with mishandling classified documents; obstruction of justice; and attempting, in effect, to overturn the linchpin of electoral democracy.
The world is in the throes of criminality. Where government is weak — or complicit — organized crime or terrorism often fills the vacuum. In Mexico, cartels manufacture drugs freely and now control the conduits of illegal immigration into the United States. In areas of Myanmar ravaged by internal combat, narcotics producers are in open collusion with Chinese traffickers, and kidnap victims are forced onto the internet to scam the unsuspecting out of their life savings. And so on, amid a sprawling disintegration of order.
Moreover, warfare has widened far beyond the familiar headlines. Not only in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Sudan, but in 42 countries total, wars are raging: invasions, insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and militias fighting over precious resources. Combined with drought and storms fueled by the earth’s unprecedented warming, the wars are uprooting millions in the most massive human displacement of modern history. As of last June, an estimated 122.6 million people were living as refugees worldwide after having been driven from their homes by violent conflict, persecution, and human rights violations, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Another 21.5 million people each year, on average, are forced out by droughts, floods, wildfires, and stifling temperatures.
Into this maelstrom come Trump and his eccentric minions with their wrecking balls and decrees, soon to be taught the inevitable Lesson of Uncertainties: The outside world can be neither controlled nor ignored by Washington. It intrudes in unexpected ways, defies prediction, and resists domination. It pushes presidents around.
Therefore, while some sure things are probably in store, it’s more useful to examine questions, not answers, regarding what the new year might bring.
First, will Trump’s bluster and impulsive promises to end wars with a stroke of his social media rants bear fruit? He likes to think of himself as a dealmaker, as we’ve been told endlessly by people who know him. But he is a bully, not a chess player, and he seems less canny than his opponents in Beijing and Moscow. Most of the ideologues and acolytes he’s naming to his administration look ill-equipped to deal with this fragile, threatening world.
A modestly hopeful scenario rests in two wars most susceptible to resolution, Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas, which are both approaching a turning point toward diplomacy.
If Trump proves skilled enough to navigate through the various parties’ maximalist demands, both Russia and Ukraine might be ready for a halt. After nearly three years, the war is practically a stalemate, even as Russia gains ground and exhausts the Ukrainians. On the one hand, Russia has paid dearly in lives, military hardware, economic security, and its own domestic freedoms. It has revealed its weaknesses as Putin has damaged its global standing by his humiliating dependence on Iranian drones, North Korean ammunition, Chinese technology, and even North Korean troops. Far from dividing NATO, his invasion added to its ranks by scaring Finland and Sweden into joining. A rational, non-messianic leadership would look at the debit side of the balance sheet and see Putin’s war as a deterrent to future adventures.
On the other hand, Putin is, in fact, a messianic leader devoted to reestablishing the Soviet empire, which broke apart into 15 countries in 1991. He is also patient. He plays the long game. And his vision might pay off if Trump makes good on his anti-Ukraine impulses and curtails aid. Europeans see the risk of an emboldened Russia and a wider war, which Trump may not recognize.
In diplomacy as in warfare, timing is key. Back in November 2022, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged Ukraine and Russia to negotiate, because he saw total military victory as unlikely for either side. He was abolutely right, obviously. “You want to negotiate from a position of strength,” he declared. “Russia right now is on its back.” He might have been channeling Carl von Clausewitz, who noted that war is diplomacy by other means. Or, on the other side of that aphorism, it’s clear that a settlement at the bargaining table reflects the lineup on the battlefield.
The Gaza war, after 15 months of atrocities, might also be close to a pause, although certainly not a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unless Trump undergoes a conversion, he is likely to be the worst possible president to help Israel and the Palestinians toward a lasting settlement. He might get a temporary truce, at best. The remnants of Hamas are trying for a ceasefire that will save the embers of their presence in Gaza, which Israel is determined to extinguish permanently, even by bombing massively, killing and maiming innocents, disrupting food and medical supplies, and obliterating hospitals and schools.
President Biden and his staff have worked hard on a ceasefire, have come close, but have not been able to get Hamas to release all the Israeli hostages it seized on October 7, 2023, or to get Israel to withdraw its troops. Biden hasn’t put the screws to Israel for its devastating military onslaught, and Trump is poised to give Israel carte blanche. His prospective ambassador, Mike Huckabee, supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, which would finally close off the option of a Palestinian state as a means of settling the conflict.
Second, Iran is a question mark. Since its two failed missile attacks on Israel and Israel’s near demolition of Iran’s air defenses and proxies — Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — the Tehran government appears vulnerable both internationally and domestically. But militant authorities that are backed into a corner can go in different directions. Iran’s complex society might produce more conciliatory leadership; it has strong pro-Western elements. Or, the government might rush toward completion of its nuclear weapons capability.
One of Trump’s most thoroughly stupid acts as president was withdrawing from the intricately negotiated agreement that halted Iran’s progress toward nuclearization, at least temporarily. The country is now on the cusp of becoming as untouchable as North Korea.
The short-term military answer would be an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, with the help of US aircraft and bunker-busting bombs that are beyond Israel’s capability. Israel appears to have laid the groundwork for such an attack. Would Trump give the green light? Would he commit US forces? He’s made a point of wanting out of wars abroad. But perhaps he knows that a nuclear Iran would generate a region-wide nuclear arms race including Saudi Arabia and some other Arab countries.
In summary, the developments arise in an era of remarkable instability. Syria, a keystone in the Middle East, teeters on the brink of failed statehood after the fall of the house of Assad. Yemen collapses into civil war. Iran, cornered and temporarily debilitated, races to build an arsenal of nuclear weaponry. A traumatized Israel lashes out violently at widespread targets of opportunity with no conceptual framework achieving a future without warfare.
Third, China’s economic and military expansionism raises critical questions of how to manage a relationship that ought to include cooperation as well as competition. Symbolism and language, always woven into international affairs, are not Trump’s strong suit. He likes insults and threats, which might work with allies but rarely with adversaries. He and the militant China hawks he’s appointing, such as Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, seem ready for confrontation through tariffs and forward military gestures.
But China doesn’t have to retaliate in kind. It can counter American interests in asymmetrical ways, perhaps by blockading or even attacking Taiwan, a dominant chip manufacturer. How would Trump respond? What military posture would he adopt? Is he ready to send the Seventh Fleet to Taiwan’s rescue? If not, and if he really wants to avoid tripping into a war, he needs some advisers who know China and can think clearly.
Fourth, what is to become of pluralistic political systems in the US and abroad? How much stress can they take with wannabe authoritarians at their helms?
The question is especially acute for the United States, but Italy, France, and Germany also face this challenge. For their part, Americans have entered a Faustian bargain by selling the soul of their democracy for lower grocery and gas prices. Trump pledges to round up undocumented immigrants in massive sweeps that would chill many communities nationwide. He promises to pardon white supremacists who were duly tried, convicted, and imprisoned for attacking Congress in its most sacred duty of certifying the election results of 2020. That would unleash on ordinary Americans an extraordinary onslaught of armed militants beholden to Trump and hostile to the basis of a legal and democratic order.
He plans to turn his Justice Department and the FBI into tools of revenge against his legitimate political opponents — an assault on more than two centuries of democratic values and practices. And he might be able to do it, because he is surrounding himself this time with sycophants who seem ready to display, their passion to amass personal authority in a vacuum of moral and ethical restraint.
Trump has inflicted terror on members of the Republican Party, who don’t dare oppose him and purge those who do. His instincts, like those of a mafia boss, will strain the ligaments of the constitutional order. And he has managed already, just in his first term, to pack the Supreme Court with compliant justices who went as far as to grant him immunity from criminal prosecution for so-called “official” acts.
Yet, there are those observers grasping at straws, hoping that Trump cares about a more dignified legacy, that the weight of presidential responsibilities will restrain him, that his draconian campaign promises will prove as empty as most politicians’ electoral flamboyance, or — as a last resort — that the checks and balances that the Framers so ingenious wove into America’s governing fabric will somehow save us.
As Trump likes to say, we’ll see what happens.
