IS Donald Trump the Godot the world is waiting for, with apprehension and hope? But Godot, as Samuel Beckett’s 1949 cult play suggests, may not show up at all, ever. In fact, Godot, whoever he be or whatever power he may hold over his characters, could be no more than a figment of a deliberately absurd imagination.

More realistically, Godot perhaps symbolises ennui that beset a generation of intellectuals after the gory victory of Churchill over a gruesome Hitler. Many couldn’t tell the difference between the colonial racists, just as it is difficult for pacifists to divine Keir Starmer from Boris Johnson, or Trump from Joe Biden. For Estragon and Vladimir the two morose tramps conversing under a withered tree, their waiting itself was their life. They needed each other, and they were fed up with each other. At one point, they vented their spleen by cursing each other. “Vermin”, “Cretin”, “Moron”, the expletives climaxing as one silences the other with the ultimate insult: “Critic!”

In today’s living absurdity, the stakes are truly existential not just in an ideational sense. Biden and Vladimir Putin are posing a mortal threat to the planet, Biden more than Putin, as one is inclined to believe with the support of Douglas Macgregor, Scott Ritter, Theodore Postol and Ray McGovern among America’s leading security analysts.

Yet, much of the world seems to be waiting for Trump one way or another, mostly with apprehension, like passengers in a plane with engine failure, bracing for a crash landing, heads lodged firmly in the knees or thereabout. Others see him as the saviour they were waiting for. There are those who haven’t a clue what they are in for with Trump though they would like to see him as an ally as they saw Biden in many ways. This category includes Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi. Nato members fear Trump would embrace Putin and throw Ukraine under the bus. Putin sees in him an outside chance to win the war allowing him to focus instead with China on building BRICS.

Trump the dealmaker could put petrodollars in one scale and Netanyahu’s future in the other.

Those who see Trump as a saviour include Israeli settlers of the West Bank and potentially also of Gaza. For the Palestinians, it can’t get any worse. For them, the attributes ascribed to Trump as the ogre, have been usurped and enacted by the supposedly agreeable Biden and his advisers, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, principally.

Many supporters of Palestine, most of them Muslims in Michigan, voted for Trump as the lesser of the evils. It was a desperate gamble against extremely heavy odds. Biden feigned support for human life in Gaza by promising to stop the arms flow if Israel didn’t open the border for food and medicines to save the remaining women and children, and possibly the hostages too, from the visitations of arriving winter. In reality, Biden openly described himself as a Zionist, and continued to indulge Netanyahu’s sadism unleashed on Arab women and children.

Trump promised Netanyahu the world in his previous avatar but is likely to settle for his eviction if it strengthens Israel’s hand in striking a deal with Arab states. The dealmaker he fancies himself as, saw Trump turning his back when a leading Saudi dissenter was chopped into pieces on the alleged orders of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. He put two competing interests in the balance and concluded that $100 billion worth of arms to be sold to Riyadh held greater charm than beating the drums of human rights and personal liberty.

The Saudis are incipiently hostile to an independent Palestinian state fostered by Iran and Arab masses, but are in no position to disown it publicly. They may be wishing for Trump to deal a crushing blow to Iran but fear the risk to their own survival as greater. Trump the dealmaker could put petrodollars in one scale and Netanyahu’s future in the other and offer a state with municipal rights to the Palestinians.

Trump may not be the Godot Netanyahu sees him as. Because Iran would need to be placated too, possibly with the relaxation of sanctions he imposed on Tehran. Godot, if he exists, has no easy choices. Iran is a handful, and it holds a tricky prospect, given its nuclear threshold and capability with advanced missiles, to disrupt Trump’s dream for a great America.

As for Modi, Trump had the words to flatter his ego. “I remember India before... It was very torn. There was a lot of dissension, lot of fighting. And he brought it all together. Like a father would bring it together. Maybe he is the father of India. We would call him the father of India ... I think he has done a fantastic job,” Trump said before meeting Modi in New York. To India’s consternation he also met then Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan, and reportedly offered to mediate on the Kashmir dispute. A few things have happened to worry Modi under Biden’s watch. He was invited as a key member to the anti-China Quad, but the group is now considered dead in the water. The Anglo-Saxon AUKUS — involving Australia, the UK and US has supplanted it.

Two other events have threatened to queer Modi’s pitch internationally, and both occurred under Biden’s watch. His closest political advisers are struggling with a US indictment in an assassination plot targeting an American citizen, a Sikh activist. More worryingly, his closest associate in the business world, Gautam Adani, is wanted in the US in a case of high corruption.

Reports say Modi could bail out of the crisis with a lucrative arms purchase as the Saudis did. However, that could annoy his trusted friend, Putin. There are no easy answers for what Trump might do. The best hope probably comes from a theatre critic who described Samuel Beckett’s two-act work as “a play in which nothing happens, twice”.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, November 26th, 2024