The world in 2017: Putin, Isis and the right’s revolt

The right’s revolt

In the centenary year of one seminal sequence of events – the Russian Revolution – that helped shape global politics for more than half a century, a very different revolt is set to take shape.

The insurrection led by Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen comes from the right, not the left, but as with the revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power in 1917, it seeks to upend a triumphalist liberal order whose values have held sway for decades.

For a long time, the battle between the populist right and the mainstream was more rhetorical than real. Twenty years ago, Brexit was a concept whose adherents were largely confined to the fruitier fringes of Britain’s Tory party. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the Front National in France, delighted in needling the liberal Parisian elite, but his party’s overt racism and anti-Semitism won it only electoral toxicity.

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And in Germany, a succession of right-wing parties of varying degrees of competence came and went, each one unable to gain a foothold at federal level or to overcome the taboo attached to anything that smelled even vaguely of Nazism.

Election fever

In 2017, across the West, parties of the populist right will be either in power or within striking distance of it. In March, Dutch voters will go to the polls in a general election that could see the Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, emerge as the largest in the country. Wilders, who wants the Netherlands to leave the European Union and favours drastic cuts to immigration, has seen his party's support rise from 6 per cent to 20 per cent in the past decade.

Two months after the Dutch vote, Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter and successor as party leader, is likely to make the run-off in France’s presidential election, a culmination of her efforts to broaden the Front National’s appeal by softening its edges without diluting its core anti-immigration, anti-EU message.

With hardline eurosceptic or reactionary regimes already in power in Poland, Hungary and the UK, the European map shows the outline of an arc of illiberal nationalism.

But the populists of the radical right don’t need to run Europe to set the agenda. Anxious establishment leaders, looking nervously over their shoulders at the traction gained by the populists’ easy answers, are in many places themselves embracing the rhetoric and policies of their demagogic rivals.

Notwithstanding his consistently poor performance in Westminster elections, Nigel Farage for years had succeeded in provoking the Conservative Party into imitating his act. Eventually, with the Brexit referendum last June, the process reached its logical conclusion and the Tories enthusiastically co-opted UKIP’s raison d’etre.

In a similar vein, without winning the presidency or making much headway in parliamentary elections, Le Pen has shown an ability to bend French political debate to her will. The centre-right has chosen as its candidate a man, François Fillon, who has refashioned himself as the most presentable voice of frontist ideas: social conservatism, hostility to immigration, rapprochement with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Even in Germany, led by a popular chancellor who took a more generous-minded approach to the refugee crisis than her counterparts in the other major powers, the rise of Alternative für Deutschland has spooked the centre into a rightward swerve.

With elections due in 2017, Angela Merkel launched her campaign this month by vowing to speed up deportations and endorsing a ban on face-covering veils.

As the coming year could make clear, this tactic carries clear risks. By failing to address their own shortcomings and the underlying causes of voters’ anger and offering instead merely a poor imitation of their opponents, established parties invite the question: if you want xenophobia or a strike against globalisation, why not choose the real thing? It’s a dilemma the establishment will face in many countries in 2017, when the only political divide that matters will be open versus closed.

The broad consensus that bound liberal democracies in the postwar era is fraying at the edges. In the populists’ sights are principles that have been articles of faith among Western elites for decades: global convergence, migration, open trade. In their place, the populists propose tariffs, barriers and walls. At least that’s the theory. This year will be about the practice. What exactly will the populist right do with its power?

Brexit

Some of the most keenly awaited answers to these questions will come from two countries that experienced political shocks in 2016: the UK and the United States. The Brexit vote presents London with a task so awesome it will consume the political class there for a decade. But it also deepens a larger existential crisis for the EU itself, already reeling from the turmoil of the euro zone crisis and ever-louder challenges to its legitimacy in many member states.

On the 25th anniversary of the Maastricht Treaty, which lit the path to the single currency, Brexit introduces a reverse gear to a project that has lived by the principle of constant forward motion. European capitals may seek solace in the knowledge that the UK was always emotionally semi-detached anyway; an awkward sibling that never quite seemed at ease with the European family or its own place within it.

But across the continent are parties that yearn for their own countries to follow the British example. That will put the UK in a weak bargaining position when talks begin in the coming months on the process of extricating it from the unfathomably complex web of European laws, treaties and relationships. British prime minister Theresa May has relatively little leverage, while across the table no European leader facing a domestic threat from the right will be in any mood to reward her for leaving.

Trump’s presidency

In any other year, the fallout from Brexit would be the biggest drama in western politics. But 2016 was the year of Donald Trump. Across the world, America’s friends and enemies will spend the next 12 months anxiously trying to figure out what the reality TV star, who moves into the White House on January 20th, will do with his vast power.

Trump is a showman untethered by conviction, convention or policy know-how. That makes him a tabula rasa, a blank screen on which his fans can project their hopes and everyone else their fears. It will not take long for world events to put to the test his stated desire to rein in Washington's interventionist impulses.

Syria’s future

One of the foreign leaders seemingly with least to fear from Trump, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, has just won his biggest battlefield success of the five-year civil war by retaking all of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest pre-war city. Assad’s forces, aided by Russia and Iran-backed militias, now control all major urban centres in Syria and have rebel factions on the back foot. But the war is far from over. Even a conventional victory for Assad could be followed by years of guerrilla insurgency.

Trump the candidate was vague on his plans for Syria – he wanted to “bomb the hell” out of Isis and lend more support to the Kurds – so his first moves will be closely watched, not least by the states, including Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, that have proxies fighting on the ground.

Isis on the defensive

Islamic State also enters 2017 on the defensive. Its surprise recapture of Palmyra in December obscures a broader trend that has seen the territory held by the group, also known as Isis, shrink dramatically in both Syria and Iraq. The loss of a long stretch of land on the border with Turkey, as well as towns such as Fallujah and Manbij, has staunched the flow of fighters, supplies and taxes to Islamic State, while the American-led air offensive has resulted in the deaths of several of its leaders and caused severe damage to its infrastructure.

In 2017, all eyes will be on Mosul, the biggest Islamic State-controlled city and its most valuable possession in Iraq. The fierce battle between Iraqi forces and the occupying fighters for control of the city looks set to continue well into the year.

Battlefield defeats for the jihadists in 2017 could nonetheless cause their own problems. One lesson of recent years is that when Islamic State finds itself cornered on the ground in Syria and Iraq, it lashes out elsewhere.

Terror attacks

In Europe, the Middle East and the US, police will be on high alert for new attacks. Meanwhile, the war will continue to produce waves of refugees, putting even more pressure on Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey while highlighting the west’s continued failure to come up with a response to meet the scale of the catastrophe.

What US allies fear most is that Trump means it when he talks about America retreating from its global commitments. Does he really envisage pulling back from Nato, a prospect that has caused alarm in central and eastern Europe? Will he pull the US out of the Paris climate deal? Can he be serious about ending the long-standing US pledge to defend South Korea in the event of an attack from the nuclear-armed North?

International crises

Trump’s decision to break with four decades of diplomatic practice by speaking to Taiwan’s president in December will have unnerved China. Coming after a campaign in which the businessman frequently bashed Beijing over its currency policies, its activities in the South China Sea and its stance towards North Korea, it means one of the world’s most important relationships – between a US president and his Chinese counterpart – will begin with even more acute mutual distrust than usual.

The Chinese leadership will itself be focused on domestic machinations in 2017. President Xi Jinping, who has consolidated his own power in recent years, is almost certain to be anointed for a second term when the Communist Party meets for its congress in the autumn, but appointments to the politburo and its important seven-member standing committee will be closely watched for signs of potential successors moving into position.

Somewhat less opaque will be the process by which a transfer of power could take place in Iran this year. Reformist president Hassan Rouhani oversaw a nuclear deal with the West in 2015, but benefits from an easing of sanctions have yet to be widely felt in the country. Unless hardliners can settle on a convincing challenger, Rouhani is on course for a second term, but with a number of Trump's key administration appointees known to be hostile towards the nuclear deal and the incoming president himself having mused aloud about how Iranian boats approaching US ships in the Gulf could be "shot out of the water", the potential for a flare-up will rise after inauguration day in Washington.

Add to this some of the other tense flashpoints that could explode at any moment – the Korean peninsula, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the standoff between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, to list just a few – and the potential for an international crisis in Trump’s first year is clear.

The power of Putin

In this year of uncertainty, however, one world leader will survey the geo-political landscape more serenely than most. The past year could scarcely have gone better for Vladimir Putin. His intervention on the side of the Assad regime in Syria swung the momentum sharply in Damascus's favour, making it more likely that Moscow will get to retain its strategically important naval base on Syria's Mediterranean coast while at the same time burnishing Putin's credentials as a global power-broker.

Moscow may also feel emboldened, having stirred no serious reaction from the West even as the civilian death toll mounted in Aleppo and elsewhere.

Closer to home, Putin has seen the EU weakened by Brexit and pro-Kremlin parties come to power in Bulgaria and Moldova, while two of the candidates most likely to contest the run-off in the French election – Fillon and Le Pen – each claim the Russian president as an ally. Most important of all, Putin will see installed as US president a man who swept to power – helped by a Russian intelligence operation, according to the US government – while praising him more than any other foreign leader.

A hundred years on from one revolution, Moscow has every reason to cheer another.