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Can Trump tame Putin and Jong-un?

By Simon Abah Port  Harcourt
14 April 2017   |   4:00 am
Has the United Nations lost its relevance? Why can’t anyone stop Bashir Al-Assad from killing people in Syria? The latest of which involved the killing of women and children with chemical gas.

US President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference on February 16, 2017, at the White House in Washington, DC. Trump announced Alexander Acosta as his new nominee to head the US Department of Labor, after his first choice, Andrew Puzder, withdrew from consideration on February 15.<br />Nicholas Kamm / AFP

“The only thing that is going to save mankind is if enough people live their lives for something or someone other than themselves.” – Leon Uris.

Sir: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin warns of a possible World War 3 and sends war ships to Syria to ward off further U.S. attack on Syria’s air bases. Here is a president of a country where only seven per cent of the population control close to 80 per cent of the wealth of that country. Shouldn’t that leader be interested in the distribution of wealth in his country? Here is a president who pretends to be a democrat but acts like a communist but yet doesn’t answer to a politburo and the military and is as personalistic a ruler as Adolf Hitler.

I watch the horror movie that Syria has become and ask what indeed the functions of the United Nations are besides deliberations daily with no concrete resolutions. These talks go on permanently and for its sake. Has the United Nations lost its relevance? Why can’t anyone stop Bashir Al-Assad from killing people in Syria? The latest of which involved the killing of women and children with chemical gas.

Isn’t it true that the UN was established to increase the capacity for humanity, social connectivity amongst member nations and prevent fratricidal wars?  Never in the history of the United Nations and in the age of television have we seen horrendous massacres to the scale witnessed in Syria and unabashedly supported by Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. There doesn’t seem to be an ideological interdependence among the super powers. Saudi Arabia aligns with the United States (Saudi bombs Yemen) and Iran to Russia (both bomb Syrians). But to what end? The loss of lives of the innocent caused by the sortie of the irresponsible.

And so Putin hopes to, all by himself, end a war in the Persian Gulf that has raged on in the mind for centuries without the Arabs themselves taking the lead and without the United Nations. How ambitious. Where then is the sacrosanctity of the United Nations if it can’t stop Putin’s excesses? Especially with people buried in rubbles and the worst humanitarian crisis since World War 2. Need we discuss the belligerence of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s, Supreme leader?

Even big-brother China can’t  tame his excesses. China won’t because she doesn’t want the United States to have an influence in Asia, considering how closely allied the U.S. is to South Korea and to the South China Sea where other countries are claiming ownership of territorial waters and the U.S. acts as the adjudicator leaving the Chinese peeved.

Sovereignty after all is not an end in itself. Responsibility comes before receptivity and leaders anywhere must not be told “good onya” for gross irresponsibility. Following from the above, can Donald Trump tame Putin and Jong-un? Joint efforts ended the Second World War because the prosecutors threw away their own interests, their advantage, to stand by man in time of stress. The problem of the world cannot be solved by the same type of parochial thinking that created them but by a new set of thinking which must increase vanishing points and learn from every man, honour every man and to overcome the primal instinct, that bestial proclivity to hurt every man.

Simon Abah. Port  Harcourt, Rivers State

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