Wednesday 3 January 2018

Table Manners

According to Donald Trump, his "recognition" of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel puts the question "off the table".

This is a man with little or no discernible influence over anything that happens in his own country or even in what is nominally his own party, and whose global leadership extends only to the Great Powers of Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru (because the Israelis paid them in kind), Palau, and Togo.

Donald Trump might at least snap certain people out of their lazy description of the President of the United States as "the most powerful man in the world". He is not even the most powerful man in the United States. That one varies, but it is rarely the President, and it is certainly not so at the moment.

The most powerful man in the world also varies, but the American constitutional order means that it is never the President of the United States, although few of those have been as powerless internationally as this one is. At present, there is no contest. By a country mile, the most powerful man in the world is Xi Jinping.

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