The indiscreet Papadopoulos

There is something delightfully comic about the scene reported on by The New York Times in which the glamorous-looking George Papadopoulos, former foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump, whispers into the ear of the Honourable Alexander Downer, former Australian foreign minister with a nice taste in fishnet tights, during a drinking session in a posh London bar, that the Ruskies have thousands of emails linked to Hillary Clinton which would dish the dirt on Trump's rival for the presidency. Let me explain the fishnet tights quickly. Downer, in the 1990s, posed for charity in fishnet tights and high heels, and the photograph went round the world and back again, like a boomerang. Good for him I say. But here he is again, this time as Australia's High Commissioner in London, standing in a bar with Trump's Judas-in-the-making, in May 2016, and suddenly out comes Papadopoulos with the little gem about Ruskie mischief. Papadopoulos had picked up the info from an academic in London allegedly with links to Moscow. Papadopoulos is obviously the type who cannot keep a secret. Perhaps he had read about Downer wearing fishnet tights and thought he was a good guy to tell about the Ruskie secret. Downer is an Honourable by birth - his father was a baronet - and he is an all-round good chap. I played cricket against him once in Australia during a wonderful journalists' cricket tour in 1997. He turned up and batted rather well. Anyway, the point is, Papadopoulos and Downer probably made good drinking companions. But the indiscreet Papadopoulos probably never realised the risky game he was playing. Perhaps too many gin and tonics. Downer, being a loyal servant of the Australian government, reported the indiscretion to his superiors. They kept it to themselves for a couple of months until suddenly out of the blue, WikiLeaks starts publishing emails which put Hillary in a very very bad light. Such as the ones from the chairwoman of the US Democratic National Committee which showed an underhand plot to undermine the campaign of Hillary's then rival for the presidential canditure, Bernie Sanders. The leaked emails were courtesy of the Ruskies. Two and two were put together in Canberra, and the Australian government tipped off the FBI who began a secret secret investigation. Ony four words are needed to sum up the result of all this whispering and secrecy: Trump won, Hillary lost! So, in a nutshell, based on "facts" as we now know them, Hillary's chances of winning the election were spoiled - I'll say no more than that - by Moscow, WikiLeaks, Papadopoulos, Downey, Canberra and the FBI. Wow, that's quite a combination. It doesn't prove collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign, but it's a wonderful story.

Trump's axis of evil

So far Trump's axis of evil consists of just two countries, North Korea and Iran. Unlike George W Bush, he hasn't actually labelled these two countries with any sort of headline name, but everyone knows they are highest on Trump's hate list. He will no doubt be delighted that Iran is currently having its own internal problems, with thousands of protestors out in the streets demanding an end to clerical rule. Iran's economy is not in good shape and they blame the men with long beards. The men in long beards' regime, however, blames the West, and the US in particular, for the state of the economy. To a certain extent this is right because the years of tough sanctions have had a big impact. But mismanagement, corruption and, of course, the drop in the price of oil have all played their part in makning Iran a poorer place. The young people of Iran - and there is a disproportionate number of them compared with the middle-aged and elderly - are fed up with the way things are going in their country and want a better lifestyle. They blame the austere clerics for their miserable lives. But, strangely, most of them support Iran's nuclear programme, even though this is at the heart of the longstanding confrontation between the Tehran regime and the international community. The 2015 nuclear deal under the Obama administration should by now be bringing significant benefits to the Iranian economy but it hasn't happened yet. Trump hates the nuclear deal and can't bear the thought of allowing Tehran to get billions of dollars back into the government's coffers which can then be spent on expanding the mischief-making of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard across the Middle East and elsewhere. The street protests are a reminder to the Tehran regime that there is an anger in the country which it either has to recognise or suppress. Based on past action, the regime is more likely to turn to suppression to stop the protests. That will lead to even more opposition in Washington to the nuclear deal. There is an interesting Catch 22 situation here for the Mullahs. Trump must now be looking ahead to his main hit/hate list for 2018 while he's playing golf in Florida, and just below North Korea will be Iran. There are dangers here, not as great as the North Korea nuclear scenario, but there is the potential for a mighty Washington/Tehran bust-up in the next 12 months.

Big names in 2018

Making predictions is a fool's business but after a whole year of Trump, looking into the crystal ball for 2018 is unavoidable. Who are going to be the big names next year and why? I'll pick four straightaway: Trump of course, Vladimir Putin, Xi Zinping and Kim Jong-un. Almost no one else matters, even though some other names are going to feature a lot throughout the year but with much less impact. I select the Pope (leading the way on climate change), Theresa May (Brexit boring Brexit), Bibi Netanyahu (facing corruption charges), Emmanuel Macron (trying to reform the whole of Europe), Angela Merkel (for surviving), and Nicolas Maduro (for being the most hateful so-called leader on the planet). But back to the Big Four. Next year is going to be the year of action one way or the other re North Korea. Kim Jong-un will fire one intercontinental ballistic missile too many and Trump will think to himself, "that's it". Trump is going to make a lot of noise in 2018, much more than in 2017. He is going to deal with Kim Jong-un with some form of military response - not total shock and awe but a bit of Trump shock and awe to make the North Korean leader sit up and the rest of the world take sides. Putin and Zinping will join together in opposing any military action. In fact Putin and Zinping are going to become pretty friendly, each lined up against Trump. This will really anger Trump and will play a part in his decision to tell Jim Mattis, the US Defence Secretary, to give him three options. I reckon this will happen around August time. No one else in the world will support Trump because they will be so scared of the consequences of moving against North Korea. But it's probably true to say that Trump is the only leader with the balls to order a strike against Kim Jong-un. I'm not saying that's the right thing to do, I'm as scared as everyone else at the prospect of a war, any type of war, on the Korean peninsula. But while previous US presidents have issued threats and ultimatums to Pyongyang, Trump may be the only one prepared to actually do what he is threatening to do. US military action against Kim's regime will not lead to total war. But it will bring about a massive restructuring of political alliances. Putin might come round to support Trump eventually but Xi Zinping will never forgive him. Never. And that will lead to a dangerous deterioration in relations between Washington and Beijing. Happy New Year.

Trump is a station

Of all the "achievements" Donald Trump has made since taking power on January 20, the one he might be secretly very pleased about is the announcement by Israel's transport minister that he wants to name a railway station in Jerusalem's Old City after the US president. It is surely the ambition of all leaders to be named after something. President Reagan has an airport in his name, in Washington, President Gerald Ford has a new class of aircraft carriers being built in his name, President George HW Bush's name is on the front gate of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, then there's the Kennedy Centre in Washington, named after JFK. Trump has got himself a railway station - in Jerusalem. Well, it's only a suggestion at this stage but I can see Trump making a state visit to Jerusalem to open the new US embassy there, and then pop over to the railway station to look pleased with himself. Even Churchill didn't get a railway station named after him. But then Churchill is everywhere in the UK, most prominently in Parliament Square where a statue of his hunched figure glowers over the Houses of Parliament. There's also Churchill Square, Churchill Street, Churchill Crescent and Churchill Avenue. Perhaps when Trump has completed his first four-year term, some mayor down in the south will rename a side street Trump street. But for now, the president has to make do with Trump Tower in New York, Trump hotel in Washington and all the other buildings which he built or acquired before he entered the White House. But Trump Railway Station sounds pretty good, provide the Israeli transport minister gets his way.

Flynn to be thrown to the wolves

The Trump team is planning to get ugly with Mike Flynn. Well that was inevitable, no surprise there at all. According to a breaking story in The Washington Post, the White House is preparing the ground to cast Flynn into the wilderness by announcing to the world that whatever he is claiming in his chats with Robert Mueller, the special counsel, are lies lies lies. I could have predicted that, in fact I'm pretty sure I did predict that in some past blog. Flynn, retired lieutenant-general and former very short-lived national security adviser, has been talking to Mueller in return for pleading guilty to lying to the FBI in order to ensure a lighter sentence. So, according to the news, if Flynn so much as dares to accuse Trump or Trump accolytes of wrongdoing re Russia/Moscow/Putin/collusion, the White House will say his accusations are totally false and that he is only making such claims to save his skin. It's an easy argument. A lot of people might well think that Flynn would say anything to avoid a prison sentence. But Mueller is no fool. He was trained, was he not, to tell the difference between a liar and a truth-teller? If Flynn starts spinning a yarn about late-night meetings with Russians behind White House hedges, will Mueller think to himself, "Ah ha, now I've got him". Or will he think, "Come on Flynn, you've got to do better than that." Flynn is a trained military intelligence operative and it's unlikely he will risk the rest of his life by lying to Mueller. He lied to the FBI and look where that got him. So the chances are, if he has any evidence of deliberate collusion with the Russians to help Trump win the presidential election, he will spill the beans, or has already spilled the beans, to Mueller. Trump and his team know what Flynn knows. What they don't know is what Flynn has told Mueller. That's why they are now, apparently, coming up with Plan B, C and D, which is to rubbish Flynn as a sort of paranoid lying toad to try and put Mueller off his game. Mueller, on the other hand, now probably knows what Flynn knows but he is not absolutely certain in hs mind whether what Flynn has revealed is 100 per cent fact or just a series of impressions and recollections. For that reason, Mueller will have to corroborate everything Flynn has said. And to do that, he will have to persuade another big player to come forward and cooperate. He can't count on Jared Kushner, even though he probably knows more than most about the Russia Thing, because he is married to Trump's daughter. He's not going to throw that away. So my guess is Mueller now feels he has the beginnings of a conspiracy but not enough evidence to back it up unless he can find at least one more, and probably two or three more Trumpites or former Trumpites to provide corroboration. I doubt that is going to happen. So Mueller is heading for frustration, or to put it more bluntly, a brick wall.

Trump arms for Ukraine

I cannot believe that providing the Ukrainian government with anti-tank weapons is going to bring peace to this former Soviet Union satellite nation. The US has a very chequered history of throwing arms into a war zone, often with disastrous results. But Trump, in his wisdom, has decided that anti-tank weapons will change the balance of military power in Ukraine because it will help government forces to destroy the tanks and armoured vehicles driven by the "rebels" who are backed, supported, financed, trained and everything else by Moscow. Many of the rebels are in fact Russian Spetnaz special forces in disguise - and not very good disguise at that. So, logic says that to counter the Ruskies, advanced anti-tank weapons are needed, and Washington feels it's right for the US to be the provider. Well, of course, if Russia is involved it has to be America that sends arms to the other side. It's good old-fashioned Cold War thinking. It's surprising how much of that thinking is still around, both in Moscow and Washington. But Ukraine is not going to become a happy place if one superpower and another former superpower trying to reinstate itself to Cold War status are pitted against each other. More arms means more killing and more killing means a more divided and miserable country. That's not to say that Moscow should be allowed to get away with stirring it up in Ukraine but sending in arms cannot always be the answer, and I don't believe it is the answer for Ukraine. Unless, by some miracle, the "rebels" decide that it's now too risky to prosecute the war and stop fighting. If only! What will happen is that Moscow will send in weapons to counter the anti-tank weapons, or more Spetnaz will be secreted over the border to blow up the storage sites with the anti-tank munitions. War war and more war, and even worse relations between two countries - America and Russia - who really should by now be grown-up enough to stop playing such dangerous games and start cooperating to confront the real threats facing them and the world - such as North Korea. Look what happened to all those US arms given to the Mujahiddeen in Afghanistan to fight the Russian occupiers. Once the Russians had left, the Mujahideen metamorphosed into the Taliban and we all know who they started to fight - the US-backed Afghan government. The CIA had to scrabble around frantically to get their Stinger anti-aircraft missiles back from the Mujahideen before they could be fired at Afghan, US and other coalition helicopters and fighter jets. Amazingly, they largely succeeded. Some Stingers remained in Taliban hands but by then thy were a bit rusty and no longer viable. But here we are nearly in 2018, and we have the prospect of US/Russian confrontation in Ukraine, nuclear war with North Korea and yet moe climate change. Very depressing.

Trump would love to be Macron

Poor Trump. He thought, after winning the election, he would be followed everywhere by adoring crowds of fans. Afraid not! And as for the media, most of the big-time newspapers, such as The New York Times and Washington Post, spend most days attacking him. Oh to be Emmanuel Macron, he must think to himself. Macron, only just 40, and pretty popular after all his reforming policies, and good-looking, and with a wife who looks pretty damned good - better than his monosyllabic spouse - it really isn't fair. Now Macron has given a walk-around interview to a posh French television station in which the reporter involved spent the whole time fawning over the French leader like he was some sort of Renaissance King. Well, it's true Macron does seem to fancy himself as an Emperor-type, but any decent reporter would have quickly asked questions that might have burst Macron's egotistical bubble. But, no, the reporter, a goodlooking chap himself, just waffled on in his praise and adoration. Of course that probably made most viewers think, "Yuk" or "Beurk", the equivalent in French. But it just showed the reverence in which Macron is now held. I'm not sure anyone holds Trump in reverence. So he must be very jealous of his French counterpart. After nearly 12 months of Trumpism, especially his mountain of tweets, I don't think anything is going to change on that score, looking ahead to 2018.