President Trump does not appear to be a student of history, else he would have sensed the inner resentment felt by the Chinese Communist Party at their country still lagging behind the US.
Canada has long been the largest trading partner of the United States, and the two countries have been so intertwined that President Trump spoke of it as the 51st state of the US.
In Prime Minister Carney, the Canadians have an able administrator and communicator, as witness the swiftness with which he repaired relations with India after Justin Trudeau was forced to resign by his own party legislators.
Yet, if we were to go by the rhetoric of President Trump about Canada, it would appear as though the United States and Canada were foes of each other. Trump has threatened, and indeed has imposed, a broad spectrum of tariffs on Canadian products sold in the United States, despite much of these being produced by US companies. One searches in vain for any significant gesture from President Trump to repair the damage that he has caused in US-Canada relations.
Contrast this with his approach to the People’s Republic of China, which is a rival of the US in the race to be the premier power in the world. Even as Trump was being feted in Beijing and the gesture was reciprocated by him in Washington, young US citizens were dying each week of poisoning from fentanyl and other toxic substances brought into the US illegally by Chinese tongs, or gangs.
These have the tacit approval of the authorities in Beijing, who see in such export of narcotics payback for the Opium Wars of the past, when China was ruled by an Emperor. The “hundred years of humiliation”, as Chinese call the period of the overlordship of the country by foreign powers, mainly the US and Britain, remains a stain on the memory of the Chinese people.
Such memories have been kept alive and the embers of hate caused by them kept burning by museums, books, movies and even comic books detailing with some expertise the travail the Chinese people went through under both the Imperial rulers as well as their later Kuomintang successors by the western powers and the Japanese.
The latter are portrayed as uniformly cruel, and it must be admitted that the record of the Japanese army from around the 1930s to 1945 over the Chinese in lands conquered by them was unjustifiable in the extreme.
President Trump does not appear to be a student of history, else he would have sensed the inner resentment felt by the Chinese Communist Party leadership at their country still lagging behind the United States on several techno-economic fronts.
Even as CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping was being taken around some sites by President Trump in his latest Washington visit, US citizens were dying of drug overdose, the drugs having their origin in Chinese gangs active in a host of countries, from Southeast Asia to South America.
On each of his visits to Washington, whether under President Barack Obama or now Trump, a solemn promise would be made that supplies of narcotics by Chinese gangs would be stopped. They never were.
As for Trump, news reports are that the fentanyl issue never came up in his personal interactions with Xi. Such a silence from the US President comes just days after another celebrity, reality star Hayden Panettiere, died of a fentanyl overdose.
The Chinese have a hefty trade surplus with the US, quite apart from illegal smuggling by gangs, and Xi is working hard to make that surplus larger and not smaller, given that the PRC economy is slowing down. And despite such headwinds, the covert war with the US continues.
Along with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, Israel is the closest security partner of the US. The country appears to have been left to its own devices, while as far as the GCC countries are concerned, Iran attacked US bases in the GCC with precision, guided by Chinese satellite data.
That is not the only way the PLA has been helping the IRGC. Much of the missile and drone firepower of the Iranian rulers comes from China and to a smaller extent, Russia.
Indeed, Trump 2.0 was initially aimed at a reset in ties between Moscow and Washington, but this has yet to take place. Trump wants to be friends with the Zelenskyy regime as well, after initially pointing out that the regime was opposed to a peace deal based on an immediate armistice between Ukraine and Russia.
If Zelenskyy were the champion of democracy that President Macron of France and Chancellor Merz of Germany say he is, they should ask for an immediate holding of elections in Ukraine, as the date for that has long been overdue.
In the elections, Martial Law should be ended and parties favouring an immediate peace with Russia on the basis of the status quo should be allowed to compete. Let the people of Ukraine decide their own future and not Zelenskyy and his European Union admirers.
If Zelenskyy were to be allowed to come to the G-20 Summit in Miami two months later, his robotic insistence on Russia leaving behind the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine returning to the control of the Russophobes in Kiev would scuttle any peace deal with Russia.
Before the G-20 Summit, there should be elections in Ukraine and the winning side must be represented, if Ukraine is to be invited at all.
As for Iran, only the public there have the right to decide their destiny. Iran is not Gaza or Lebanon but a different proposition altogether. Outside regime change will not work, it will ultimately fail, and hence the people of Iran need to ensure that they are the masters of their own destiny, not the clerical regime.
Xi is of course backing the IRGC, as he does any force that fights the US through hybrid means.
President Trump may be unaware that the US and China are engaged in Cold War 2.0, and that one or the other will be bested, as was the case during the US-USSR Cold War (Cold War 1.0) with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Should the US midterms go the predicted way, with the fall of the Trumpians from control of the US Congress, the Iran war would stop, and once again it would be on the people of Iran themselves to settle their own fate.
In any country, misrule after a time invites a public reaction, and this phenomenon has been witnessed across the world. In Japan and Italy, “right-wing” leaders (both ladies) have won the public trust.
Germany and France are likely to follow. Both the AfD and the loyalists of Marine Le Pen are opposed to the Ukraine war. Should they win, Zelenskyy would be given short shrift by them.
It was the UAE that warned Netanyahu about a likely Hamas attack on Israel, just as it is Pope Leo XIV who has emerged as a strong anti-war advocate.
Once again let it be said, that people of all faiths are bound together in the confluence of humanity. And the quality most needed is precisely that, humanity, in each individual.
Wars are not the answer, neither is hate. It is a lesson being practised across India, a land where different cultures have converged into a common cultural and physical DNA for all citizens.
