In the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Soviet Union was collapsing like nine pins, western political thinkers were competing with themselves to analyse the significance of the momentous events happening from Moscow the capital city of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR, and coursing right across Europe and beyond. The city of London, served as the hub of the rapidly unfolding events in the western world with conferences, talk shows and workshops with leading personalities in attendance. The vast American Embassy located then at Grosvernor place was abuzz with more than its normal share of activities and as a Nigerian foreign service officer based in the United Kingdom, I had the privilege of monitoring and attending a good number of some of the events taking place to mark the end of the Communist Soviet order which for over 40 years, since the end of the second world war, had been the ideological foe of the western capitalist liberal order. Although there were different perspectives coming from analysts on the significance of the dramatic wounding up of the Communist order in Europe, there was one unmistakable conclusion however that ran through all the discussions; that the American led liberal democratic order had outlasted the totalitarian communist order led by Russia in the context of the Hegelian perspective of human social struggle and evolution being essentially a case of thesis and anti-thesis. The conclusion of western analyst at the time was that the collapse of the Soviet Union signified the victory of western liberal system over the rigid communist system in the long socio political struggle of human kind for the evolution and eventual establishment of a fit for purpose model for human development. One prominent analyst Francis Fukuyama whose publications on the collapse of the Communist based Soviet system featured as the star comment of the historical event, called it ‘’the end of history’’ in which he ventured to say that the triumph of the western liberal order had decisively closed all ideological struggles as there can be no more foreseeable opposing ideologies to compete and successfully upstage the western order. In his conclusion what he saw was that from the point of the collapse of the Soviet order the only challenge if it came to that would be how to apply the liberal western model to societies that still remained outside but not necessarily opposed to it. In other words what remained following the collapse of the Soviet order was how to bring the rest of world to accept and adopt the liberal western standard model for all countries and societies in the world. Fast foward 36 years later since the collapse of the Soviet order and the exultant proclamation of a world order led ad infinitum by the United States of America, what can we make of President Donald J. Trump, the leader of the western liberal democratic order found bound up in a catering truck apparently avoiding the reported cross hairs of an Iranian assassination team sent to bring him or his plane down? It is even more poignant when we consider that the leader of the country that is regarded as the bastion of the western liberal democratic order is compelled to take this unprecedented desperate and dramatic evasive action against a country that it could not defeat decisively in nearly six months of an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink war. In the context of the Iran war, objective analysts have tried to look beyond the unflattering image of the leader of the strongest country in the world cowering in a catering truck in the tarmac of the Ankara airport in Turkey. They have drilled down to the fact that the war on Iran, as with other policies of President Trump since he assumed office, has had the opposite effect of diminishing the economic, moral and strategic dominance and influence of the US in global affairs. The tariff wars even against close geographic and strategic partners like Canada, the military threats against Greenland, the constant haranguing of the European Union and NATO allies over matters like membership contributions and tariffs on goods hardly demonstrate the leadership the world expects and concedes to the United States. On the contrary it shows a country lagging seriously in moral standing and increasingly abdicating its leadership of the western liberal democratic order is supposed to be its role in the post-Soviet order. It is in the context of Iran war that these deep seated weaknesses of the US under President Trump had been ruthlessly exposed. Here not only had the formidable military might of the US been rendered largely ineffective, the Iran war has resulted in a fundamental degradation if not total derailment of US strategic superstructure in the Middle East. In its counter measures against massive US strikes, Iran has destroyed virtually all the vital American strategic assets in the region. With this Iran
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