The Tribune

SOMETHING truly astonishing happened on Tuesday in Washington. And, while it certainly wasn’t hidden, it got only passing notice.

Maybe, in a kind of coincidental, serendipitous way, what happened can somehow help lead the US and the West out of the quagmire we’re all stuck in at the moment.

The leaders of two nations existentially at war for several years – but not with each other -- met with US president Donald Trump Tuesday at the White House within hours of each other, yet no pundits were blathering about it. Even Trump’s White House, not exactly reticent about publicizing the diplomatic efforts of its famous primary occupant, had little to say.

The occasion was the funeral services for South Carolina senator Lindsay Graham, one of the more flamboyant characters in Washington during his eight years as a congressman and another 23 as a US senator. Graham’s most notable action was his change of heart on Donald Trump.

As a pitiful, ineffective rival candidate in the 2016 GOP primaries, Graham had said this of Trump:  "He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot ... He doesn't represent my [Republican] party ... I don't think he has a clue about anything ... He is empowering radical Islam ... You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell." He added, "I'd rather lose without Donald Trump than try to win with him."

In May 2016 Graham tweeted, "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed...and we will deserve it." 

Trump won anyway.

Graham’s condemnation was certainly definitive. However, early in Trump’s first term, Graham did one of Washington’s most celebrated about-faces in becoming one of the president’s closest allies and advisers. Trump and Graham played a lot of golf together, and the president seemed to listen to his friend – at least some of the time. There has been much speculation that Trump won Graham to his side by listening to him, at least on foreign and military affairs.

That’s quite a distinctive concession from a president who is not generally known to sincerely seek counsel or follow it from almost anyone.

Graham was also influential in the recent careers of both Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These were the two foreign leaders who had private audiences with Trump on the same morning on Tuesday.

Zelensky has rightly praised Graham as one of his most consistent allies, especially with Graham’s staunch support of Ukraine’s struggle to survive a four-year Russian onslaught. And Netanyahu’s relationship with the South Carolina senator was similarly warm and supportive.

What’s so interesting about all of this is that Trump has largely been seen to be on the wrong side of his relationships with both foreign leaders for years. And furthermore, that their respective wars are now viewed for almost the first time as somehow linked.

It never gets dull with Donald Trump in the White House.

Trump’s fascination with Vladimir Putin is not news. He has seemed for the past decade to envy Putin’s autocratic hold over Russian politics and society, and apparently sought to emulate it in what is still one of the world’s most resilient democracies in the US.

When Zelensky failed to play ball with a cynical Trump scheme to gather evidence in Ukraine with which to smear former president Joe Biden, Trump tried to blackmail Zelensky by withholding military assistance, and clearly carried on his resentment of the Ukrainian after that effort largely failed.

At the beginning of the current Trump term, the president and vice-president JD Vance notoriously berated Zelensky before reporters, angrily castigating him for not appearing to be sufficiently grateful for the grudging military assistance Trump did allow for Ukraine. Trump must also envy the widespread admiration accorded to Zelensky by most of the rest of the world’s political leadership.

As for Netanyahu, most observers still believe that the wily Israeli leader led Trump into the current war with Iran, from which no one in public life has yet prescribed an exit strategy that does not result in personal humiliation for Trump and another costly overseas failure for the US.

Furthermore, Trump’s silent acquiescence while Israel under Netanyahu attempted to neutralize or destroy the Iranian-backed militant group Hamas by essentially annihilating Gaza brought no credit to the US.

So, Trump’s embrace of Netanyahu discredited the US in Gaza and embroiled it in a no-win war against Iran, while his disdain for Zelensky may have prolonged Russia’s increasingly feeble attempts to forcibly annex Ukraine by emboldening Putin and denying or delaying needed US military assets that could help Ukraine survive.

No one yet knows what Trump discussed with these two leaders earlier this week. Since there was a high-profile memorial service to attend later on, it’s likely that not too much business got done.

But the significance of these coincidental visits is hard to ignore.

That’s because these two hot wars, one in the heart of the Middle East and the other in the heart of Eastern Europe, with nothing more important at stake than the world’s primary energy source and one of its major food supplies, seem to be oddly converging.

In many quarters, there’s a growing belief that in their respective desperation as targets of long-term debilitating economic sanctions by the great industrial powers of North America and Western Europe, Russia and Iran have been driven into each other’s arms. And thus, their antagonists in Europe and America might be pushed similarly into each other’s tactical embrace.

That would go some ways to undo one of the most misguided of Trump’s foreign policy objectives, namely his persistent initiatives that promote the weakening of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

What a wonderful development that would be.

Meantime, how should we assess Iranian-Russian relations? Superficially, Russia and Iran share a close, pragmatic partnership driven by mutual anti-Western alignment, military cooperation and economic ties, formalized by a recent 20-year strategic treaty. This follows the thinking in the ancient proverb that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

But the historical reality is much different.  Over the 500-year history of ‘modern’ Russo-Iranian relations, these two nations have fought each other several times, supported feuding proxies in the Caucasus Mountains region that largely separates them, and Russia even joined with Britain in 1907 in dividing weakened Iran into ‘spheres of influence’ that benefitted both London and Moscow economically. The Soviet Union included five Central Asian republics of strategic and territorial interest to Iran.

There is little prospect that Tehran and Moscow will develop the kind of mutually supportive and beneficial relationship enjoyed by the US and Western Europe. There is neither a cultural nor religious relationship that could serve as its foundation.

Basically, Iran and Russia are both international pariahs to some degree. Still, they have been pushed into each other’s arms by their own aggression and that of the US. Here are some excerpts from a recent discussion at the prestigious US Council on Foreign Relations that illuminate this subject:

“Frenemies is probably the best term to describe Russia and Iran at this point. Russia and Iran have had a complicated relationship for centuries. They’ve been rivals in the Caucasus and in the Caspian Sea region.

“That continued up until very, very recently.  These two nations drew closer after 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and incited a major break with the West. Both countries then became perhaps among the most heavily sanctioned by the United States anywhere in the world.  They realized that they had a common interest in, in a sense, cutting the United States down, finding a way to circumvent US sanctions.

“All that said, the relationship still has its friction points. It’s important to remember that when Russia signed a strategic, a comprehensive strategic partnership with Iran in January of last year, they did not include a defense clause the way they did when they signed a similar agreement with North Korea.

“So, this is not a NATO-style arrangement between Tehran and Moscow, wherein any attack on one of the signatories obliges the other to come to its partner’s defense.

“Again, historically grounded, they are rivals somewhat in the same neighborhood. They also compete for sales of oil and gas to China. So, it’s not complete harmony by any stretch of the imagination.”