Today they offer their view of the event from 2017 with longer-term greater-than-anticipated consequence… 

ELIOT COHEN: NORMALISATION OF TRUMP BY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Not an event, but a series of sounds: the creaking of bending knees among conservative (or nominally conservative) American intellectuals, pundits, and politicians making the case that Trump was not all that bad, when you come down to it…

A vulgarian and a loudmouth, perhaps, but look at the tax cuts!

The dismantling of irksome regulations!

The willingness to call out deadbeat European powers on their feeble defense spending!

And one might not like the way he did it, but he did point to real problems at home, to include unchecked immigration and outmoded infrastructure.

This matters because it indicates the way in which Trumpism, in some form, will survive Trump whether he serves three more years or seven, or is taken off by impeachment, a 25th Amendment process for removal by the Cabinet, or suffers the effect of too many snack buckets from KFC and Macdonald’s. This in turn means the loss of an intellectual centre for a Republican Party that once stood for some basic ideas, and opens up the prospect of conflict and renewal, in the realms of both ideas and action.

A collapse of character rarely is rarely a singular event but in a year in which Trump showed absolutely no alteration in his fundamental character, the fact that so many Republicans in and out of government were willing to accommodate themselves to him, was noteworthy. Luckily, the story will not end there.

PAUL LAY: CHINA IN AFRICA

If democracy is difficult, slow and neglectful of the long term, dictatorship has its challenges, too, though short-termism is rarely one of them. While historians and theologians argue over the introduction of a new project at Oxford University looking at the ethics of imperialism, the People’s Republic of China gets on with the real thing, especially in Africa, a continent of immense potential, mineral wealth, corrupt governance and poor infrastructure.

January 2017 saw a major event: the opening of a $4.2 billion railway line between Djibouti and Addis Ababa, replacing a 19th-century French railway. It’s the East African section of China’s trillion dollar One Belt Road – a 21st-century Silk Road, crossing and connecting huge swathes of the developing world – which will eventually reach Rwanda (where it will replace Britain’s 19th-century ‘Lunatic Line’). The potential for trade is enormous, but increasingly there is a cultural aspect, too. This new Scramble for Africa is, by and large, welcomed by states that have found western aid too prescriptive in its demands.

China now has more diplomatic missions in Africa than the US and has a greater number of peacekeepers on the continent than any of the UN’s Big Five. A hard power is finally cultivating its soft skills, as it continues its global ascent.

VICTORIA SCHOFIELD: ‘RUSSIA-GATE’

The appointment in May 2017 of former FBI Director, Robert Mueller, as special counsel to the Justice Department enquiry into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 American Presidential election initially appeared to be an attempt to let the enquiry take its course away  from the media spotlight. The circumstances were similar to the appointment in 1973 of former Solicitor General, Archibald Cox, as special counsel to investigate the Watergate Hotel break-in.

But several indictments against Trump campaign advisers and members of his transition team have since indicated that Mueller’s probe is close  to penetrating the Trump administration itself. Indicative of how seriously Mueller’s investigation is now being taken was the unprecedented revelation in December by the White House (and confirmed by Vladimir Putin) that the US administration had shared intelligence with the Russians, thereby preventing a planned terrorist attack in St Petersburg.

In the event that the investigation implicates the White House leading to calls for Trump’s impeachment, a plausible explanation might then be mounted, suggesting that any contact with Russian agents was part of the new administration’s policy initiatives for greater intelligence sharing in the war against terrorism, rather than being a covert attempt to enlist the help of a foreign country to thwart the outcome of the Presidential election.

The parallels with the early stages of Watergate are unmistakable. The sequel could be as historic.

ALLAN MALLINSON: PRESIDENT MACRON

The election of President Macron – but in a perverse sense. His international profile is high, but largely by default. Mrs Merkel is distracted by Germany’s internal divisions; Mrs May by Brexit; and President Trump by himself. Some are saying therefore that Macron will become the de facto leader of the free world. There are several problems with such a leadership bid.

• First, reputation counts; and France has no record of leadership worth the name.
• Secondly, although young and telegenic in a country that rates these things, and although he has had one or two technocratic successes since being elected (especially trades union reform), he is not tackling “L´éléphant dans la chambre”: the question of national identity and Islamism. François Heisbourg, former presidential adviser on national security issues to both Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, has said recently “This is one where people are asking the question, ‘When is he going to speak?’ He will not be able to keep silent forever. It’s one of the deepest divisions in the public debate that I’ve seen in a very long time, and it’s very ugly.”

It wasn’t ugly enough for Marine Le Pen to be elected, but it certainly is for Sarkozy to make a comeback. Sarkozy back at the Elysée, chastened but experienced, and doubly determined, would mean the ditching of Euro-defence pretensions, a strengthening of Nato, and root and branch reform of the EU.

Perhaps more a prayer than a prediction, but a fervent one nevertheless.

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UnHerd also has our Politics Jury (reconvening for a second set of deliberations soon!).

Tomorrow the jury will reassemble to answer the question, “What “event” of 2017 will in the long-run prove far MORE consequential than currently supposed; and why?” (Added: Here are their answers).

ELIOT COHEN: TRUMP’S JERUSALEM DECISION

President Trump’s decision to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital produced the expected quotient of gasps, head-shaking, and finger-waving from the establishment. Even for those of us who loathe the man and are inclined to oppose anything he does simply because he does it, it has already turned out to be a forgettable moment. In so doing it is a reminder that is only when an absurd policy collapses that we can see just how silly it was all along.

Behind the unwillingness to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital lay not the unresolved issues of Israeli-Palestinian peace and sovereignty over territories occupied and administered by Jordan until the Six Day War in 1967. Rather, it originated in the original, and very dead, partition plan of 1947 which proposed an international status for the Holy City. Since Israel’s parliament, foreign ministry and prime minister’s office are all in the western part of the city – which everyone assumes will stay Israeli no matter what – the policy was senseless.

Indeed, what was striking was just how indifferent Cairo, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi (among other Arab capitals) were to what happened to Jerusalem. Perhaps what was important, though not consequential, was the manifestation of a simple reality: other conflicts and developments in the Middle East matter a lot more than whether external powers recognise a seventy year old fact.

PAUL LAY: BREXIT

Brexit will be of less consequence than one might expect from Britain’s obsessive media coverage, made worse by the Manichaean world of social media, where recriminatory wishful thinking marks the extremes on both sides. The UK and the 27 EU nations are friends, allies and – most importantly –trading partners, and will remain so.

The negotiations will be fraught, even unpleasant on occasion – that is democratic politics – but both sides have a fundamental interest in reaching a relatively amicable and reasonable solution. Once that is achieved, one hopes that the UK will finally address its deep-rooted problems: a poor technical education system and a crass public sphere. Similarly, the EU should concentrate on the challenges of immigration and the rise of far-right ideologies among the Vysegrad countries (and, to a lesser extent, in France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands). Germany faces an existential challenge, too: how does it transform itself – urgently – from a manufacturing powerhouse of hardware into one fit for the Fourth Revolution? It is a long way behind Silicon Valley, Israel and the other software pioneers, and it is not helped by the instability following Merkel’s unmasking.

If anyone will be harmed by Brexit, it is most likely to be the Republic of Ireland, though even that, in the long term, may result in a united island, which will be largely welcomed in Britain, but create anxieties, not least economic ones, in Ireland. Those six counties are expensive.

VICTORIA SCHOFIELD: MUGABE’S ‘END’

The fall of President Robert Mugabe will prove less momentous for the twenty million Zimbabweans (including four million exiles living in South Africa and the UK ) than at first anticipated.

For decades Africa watchers have lamented the iron hold which the 93-year old Mugabe retained on Zimbabwe since independence in 1980; supported by the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), he ran the country as a one-party state.  When news  broke in November 2017 of his forced retirement, brokered by the same military who had sustained his authority,  Zimbabwean politics appeared to be at a turning-point. There were high expectations that the people could look forward to a more democratic form of government, with checks and balances on presidential authority and a more harmonious relationship with the minority white population. The symbolic return of the  Zimbabwean white farmer, Robert Smart, one of several  thousand evicted from their lands during the Mugabe regime,  was indicative of a more benign approach.

But it now appears that the new government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who also depends on the support of the ZNA, will replace one style of dictatorial rule by another (Presidential ‘elections’ next September notwithstanding). There is to be no truth and reconciliation and no accountability for Mugabe’s excesses. Instead while the former President enjoys a generous retirement package at state expense, the same autocracy, nepotism and human rights abuses will continue.

ALLAN MALLINSON: NORTH KOREA’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS

A historian’s business is the past, not the future. That said, if journalism is the first rough draft of history, it’s perhaps legitimate to comment on how that draft is written.

“In the long-run we’re all dead” (Keynes), but let’s define the long-run as the next ten years. And in that time, despite the advances in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear weapons technology (specifically, miniaturisation of a nuclear detonator) this year, and testing of an “intercontinental” ballistic missile, I do not believe, as some fear, we shall see war on the Korean Peninsula. (I’d prefer to say “should not”, but the question to the jury isn’t phrased in the conditional).

Here’s why I don’t envisage a war. First, it’s not in China’s and Russia’s interests that the DPRK develops a credible capability, since that would change respective relationships with the DPRK to their disadvantage. Equally, it’s not in their interests that the US resorts to arms to prevent the DPRK developing that capability, for besides the law of unintended consequences, it would mean the ultra-long-term intrusion of the US into East Asia, and the border of an enlarged Republic of Korea on the Yalu River.

Above all, war isn’t in the DPRK’s – and specifically Kim Jong-un’s – interests. The DPRK’s forces are equipped and trained for conventional, not guerrilla, warfare, and would be as roundly defeated as were Saddam’s in the Gulf War. (And I do not think that, given the purpose for which the US would go to war, the US would shrink from using tactical nuclear weapons if necessary). Kim is not irrational. His nuclear programme is almost certainly based on the same logic as Nato’s during the Cold War: if conventional forces are too expensive, rely on nuclear. He has a growing middle class, and the universal vice – or virtue – of the middle class is materialism. Kim’s long-term aim is regime survival. He will probably not have much Latin, but he will know the import of “Sic semper tyrannis.” Certainly, friends in China will be able to tell him about the fall of the unassailable Robert Mugabe after Zimbabwe’s General Chiwenga visited Beijing for “consultations.”

I don’t rule out pre-emptive strikes, or some very nasty surrogate bloodletting, but regional war? No.

“With so much change and turbulence in global politics it’s good to seek more than one opinion and UnHerd’s new political jury provides readers with the perspective of four big-brained political observers from both sides of the Right-Left divide.” 

So wrote UnHerd’s editor, Montie, in September. And, starting from next Monday, UnHerd will have a history jury, too, to give “the long view” on the issues of the day. Or perhaps, we might say, to give the verdict of history.

The jurists are:

• Eliot Cohen, Robert E Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. He was a counsellor in the US State Department under Condoleezza Rice and, says Ruth Wedgwood of Yale (who surely needs no further introduction?), “is one of the few teachers in the American academy to treat military history as a serious field.”

• Paul Lay, editor of History Today the magazine founded in 1951 by Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s Minister of Information in the Second World War, with the simple aim of bringing serious history to a wide audience. Paul himself specialises – if that’s not a restricting verb – in the Early Modern period.

• Victoria Schofield, author, journalist and historian; one-time Alistair Horne Fellow at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, and President of the Oxford Union. Victoria is an expert on India and its neighbours, worked as an independent broadcaster for the BBC World Service in London and New York in the 1980s and 1990s, and is author of – among many books – Afghan Frontier: At the Crossroads of Conflict (2010).

• And, trusting that unlike the political jury there is no Right-Left divide, I shall have the pleasure of joining them.

Our answers to two opening questions will appear on Monday and Tuesday.