The Second Coming of Trump: Prospects for war and peace

Although foreign policy was the least concern of the American voters, it is one of the most talked-about topics outside the United States in the afterglow of Republican powerhouse Donald Trump’s decisive victory over Democratic blowhard Kamala Harris.
The second coming of Trump, which he and his diehard evangelical supporters believe was destined by God to make America great again, has generated apprehensions across the world, and rightly so. From the United States’ NATO friends to economic foes like China and political foes like Russia and Iran, the mood is one of preparation to expect the unexpected.
Trump is a maverick and self-styled know-all. Nobody, not even the US deep state, knows how he will deal with the burning world issues, such as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, the Ukraine-Russia war, the trade war with China, Iran’s nuclear programme, and the most crucial global issue, climate change.

If one were to judge him by his first four years in the White House, the only consolation is that he did not start any new wars, unlike his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama, or his successor Joe Biden. Bush started the Afghan and Iraq wars; Obama ordered war on Libya and sent troops to Syria; and Biden was responsible for starting the Russia-Ukraine war and sponsoring Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Trump even tried to make peace with North Korea by meeting Chairman Kim Jong-un in Singapore in 2018 and in Hanoi in 2019.
This does not make Trump pacifist. Far from it. He messed up the Middle East and killed whatever little window there was for a just solution to the decades-old Palestinian problem. He recognised Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel and shifted the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He did not respect international law, according to which East Jerusalem is an occupied territory. Besides, it is the capital of the future Palestinian state. In another act of rewarding the wrongdoer, he recognised the Golan Heights as part of Israel, though the rest of the world insists it is part of Syria.
Although it was largely the economy that decided the winner in Tuesday’s election, foreign policy issues, especially the Gaza war, did feature in the campaign trail and became one of the factors that helped Trump turn the blue states into red, including Michigan, which traditionally backed the Democrats. Michigan has a significant Arab and Muslim population, and they were disappointed with the Biden-Harris administration’s all-out support for Israel’s massacre of Palestinians. 
Trump, on the other hand, met the Arab Muslim leaders and pledged to end the war. For the disappointed Arab and Muslim Americans, Trump appeared as a better bet than Harris, even though they knew Trump had said that if he were the president, he would have given Israel the free hand to finish the job in Gaza.
Trump is a Zionist. In his first term, he appointed as his Middle East envoy his pro-Israeli son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose peace plan for the Middle East involved converting pro-Palestinian Arab leaders into Zionist-friendly vassals through the so-called Abrahamic accords.
During his first term, to the much delight of Israel, he even stopped funds for the Palestine-specific United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Israel, which banned the agency last week, could not be happier. He even got the US withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council after accusing it of being a cesspool of political bias and unfairly targeting Israel. No wonder Israel’s hardline prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not hide his elation over Trump’s return to the White House. He beat other world leaders to congratulate Trump.
Nobody knows what preposterous actions Trump and his son-in-law have up their sleeves for the Middle East peace. It will be the peace of the graveyard if they team up with Netanyahu.
While there is much uncertainty over the Middle East peace, the Ukraine-Russia war is likely to end under Trump’s watch.
Trump’s soft corner for Russian President Vladimir Putin is no secret. The Biden administration has pumped US$ 175 billion into the Ukraine war in the form of military and economic aid. Trump has vowed to end the war and save the money. He is likely to force Ukraine into an uneasy peace with Russia. What a loser Vlodymyr Zelenskyy is.
With China, Trump will ratchet up the trade war with new tariffs. With Iran, he is likely to explore more sanctions to undermine Iran’s economy.
On the most important issue of climate change, Trump is unlikely to support the UN efforts. He insists climate change is a Chinese-invented hoax. The 29th Conference of the Parties (COP 29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is to begin on Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan, but COP 30 will be most probably one without US participation. A climate sceptic, Trump is likely to fast-track the melting of the Arctic ice beneath which lies some 22 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and natural gas reserves. With the melting of the ice, these previously inaccessible reserves are becoming more reachable. Trump being Trump, he is likely to go for the short-term gains over the long-term survival of the planet.
As though climate change denial was not outlandish enough, he even urged his top health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting COVID-19. His actions were not to be laughed out of court. They carried dangerous ramifications. 
In his bestselling book, a senior Trump insider identifying himself as the Anonymous says that Trump was like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government discriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport.
Unable to bear with him, many of his top appointees resigned—a regular feature of Trump’s first term.

Yet, none in the Republican Party could match his popularity to be the winning candidate. 
Amid fears about Trump’s unpredictability and non-conformity to norms in dealing with serious issues, the rest of the world cannot find relief in the thought of having lived through it for four years during his first term. 
To expect that he will be different in his second term is a gamble not worth taking. Narcissism is ingrained in him. He goes into history as the first US president with a criminal conviction. He is a felon waiting to be sentenced for falsifying tax records. He shows little respect for women. He liberally lies. Top US psychologists have cast doubts about his mental fitness to be the president of the world’s most powerful nation. 
Yet he won and won decisively in what could be described as the malfunctioning of the US democracy. No longer is democracy the soul of America.
True democracies do not support genocide. True democracies do not veto United Nations Security Council resolutions aimed at ending wars and genocides. The boast of the United States being the world’s longest-running representative democracy is a mere empty slogan when its democracy is controlled by and slavishly beholden to the arms industry and the Zionist lobby.
Rarely do virtuous leaders emerge from defective democracies.