With the so-called bromance between Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Donald J. Trump of the United States at last week’s G20 summit of industrialized nations, relations between the superpowers have certainly come a long, long way since the October 1960 shoe-banging at the United Nations General Assembly by then-Soviet President Nikita Khruschev, triggered by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong.
Sumulong had lambasted the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the communist predecessor state of today’s Russian Federation, for having “swallowed up” Eastern Europe and “deprive [it] of political and civil rights”. Between 1945 and 1990, the USSR exercised political control over several East European nations, including Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia) Romania and Bulgaria.
Khruschev waved Sumulong away contemptuously and branded him “a jerk, a stooge, a lackey” and a “toady of American imperialism”. The Soviet leader then took off his right shoe and, by some accounts, banged it on the podium table. Others dispute the banging, and said Khruschev just waved his footwear at Sumulong, an uncle of the late democracy icon and Philippine President Corazon C. Aquino.
From diarchy to undominance
Whatever fate befell the shoe and Sumulong, things have certainly changed immensely for the former global diarchy of USSR and the US of A.
Today, the Soviet empire’s Russian core has shed not just its East European satellite states, but its surrounding republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgistan and Uzbekistan. Plus, its technological lead over most of the world, which, among other firsts, once put the first satellite and the first astronaut in space.
America, meanwhile, is retreating from global leadership, partly because it is now the world’s biggest debtor-nation, endlessly spending hundreds of billions of dollars more than what it earns, burning through mountains of cash borrowed at home and abroad decade after decade.
So, China is now the top trading partner of most economies, and with its Belt and Road Initiative to build a global transport network, the leading source of new aid and investment for many countries.
And now Trump has won a mandate to put America first and stop being the world’s policeman and cheerleader in freer trade and cleaner ways of living and making a living.
Thus, at the G20 summit, Trump was content to let Europe and Japan forge closer trade ties. And a month ago, he pulled the US out of the Paris climate-change accord and ceded green leadership to China and Europe. Is that why the leaders of America and Russia are becoming good friends: both nations have become less globally dominant?
Sure, their guns still make the difference where wars rage or threaten. Last week Trump and Putin agreed to a limited cease-fire in Syria, to better target Islamic State.
Yet, in the other big world security concern—North Korea’s aim to build intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) able to nuke America, helped by its ICBM test last week—the nuclear superpowers stand on opposite sides, with Moscow joining Beijing in pressing Washington to avoid armed action against Pyongyang.
When blocs turn into bilaterals
All this is disconcerting to many geopolitical and diplomatic watchers, especially those long comfortable with the certainties and conventions of the 1945-1990 Cold War. Then, allies and enemies were mostly clear, and can even be plotted on the map, with the USSR-ruled “East” in red divided by the totalitarian “Iron Curtain” from the US-led “West” in blue.
But today, Western solidarity in defense and trade is fraying, and so is the Arab-American alliance, with Trump claiming to have instigated the Saudi-led transport and trade boycott of Qatar over its links with Islamist groups suspected of extremist leanings.
Even Washington’s longstanding rivalry with Moscow and Beijing is softening, to gain support for the US agenda in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. For sure, there is the old saber-rattling—threats to shoot down Western planes in Syria, US carriers and bombers nearing North Korea—and even some actual shooting, with recent attacks on a Syrian air base and the shooting down of a Syrian jet.
But the overarching drive is not alliance interests, but national ones: American and Japanese fears of North Korean nukes, the Western and Russian war on jihadist terror, and China’s need for the North Korean buffer state, and for expanded trade and transport links too many and vast to interdict in war.
So, is this brittle new world better or worse than the rigid, tightly run Cold War camps?
Maybe this is wishful thinking, but Trump and Putin doing deals last week and making sure they don’t give each other reason to play hard ball is more reassuring than a Soviet presidential shoe being hammered before the United Nations over the speech of an imperialist lackey.
Unlike Cold War ideologues, dealmakers won’t incinerate the world.