WITH the exception of a handful of countries, this world is ruled by small people. There is no great man in sight. In America, Richard Nixon was the last great president who made a trail-blazing visit to China, courtesy Gen Yahya Khan, and met Mao Zedong on a visit facilitated by Henry Kissinger’s secret dash from Nathiagali to Beijing.

As for the presidents in the 21st century, well, they thought they were elected to serve Israel’s interests.

That all governments in Washington have been responsive to Zionist pressure goes without saying, but they responded with dignity and diplomatic niceties. The 21st-century occupants of the White House, however, have been somewhat different. Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Donald Trump 2.0 have outdone each other in showing Benjamin Netanyahu that they are more Zionist than the Zionists themselves.

In a recent statement, the president-elect said he would mete out a punishment to Hamas unprecedented in the “storied history” of America if Israeli prisoners were not freed before Jan 20, the day he assumes office as president.

In contrast to the small people ruling the world, we notice four great leaders — statesmen in fact. They take orders from no one.

Among the ‘great’ leaders is a genocide expert.

The first statesman that comes to mind is China’s President Xi Jinping, whose greatest achievement in a totalitarian country has been to make his people accept ‘human rights development’ as a value the world community regards as sacrosanct.

Xi has kept the army under political control because he had learnt his lessons from the Soviet Union’s collapse. The USSR was a party dictatorship, and it was the party that controlled every state institution, including the armed forces. However, when the Soviet state structure neared collapse, there was no party in existence that could save the state from dismemberment. As Xi put it: “Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”

In terms of purchasing power parity, the Chinese economy is the world’s largest — 23 per cent larger than America’s — according to the IMF.

It would, however, be unfair to ignore Xi’s predecessors, especially Deng Xiaoping, who began the reforms by abolishing the communes, making land a family responsibility and turning industrial units profit-oriented. When criticised for deviating from party dogma, he quipped: “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice.”

Now we come to a statesman whose grandfather once cooked food for Lenin’s widow and occasionally for Josef Stalin and was apparently working for the dreaded NKVD secret service. Vladimir Putin is the undisputed king of an empire that stretches over time zones from the Pacific to the Baltic. Undoubtedly, Vladimir Putin has shown an enviable ability to live the transition from communist totalitarianism to autocratic democracy, as in Russia today. Putin enjoys Trump’s overtures, but has made clear both to Europe and to the US that he will remain China’s friend. He has nationalised industries and keeps an eye on what he calls the “near abroad”, his term for the former Soviet republics.

Our next great statesman is a Turk. Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a legend in a lifetime. He came out of prison to give Turkiye what it lacked most: political stability. He is now Europe’s longest serving statesman, having transformed Turkiye from a tottering economy into what it is today — Europe’s sixth-largest and the world’s 17th largest economy.

One achievement was his outreach to the Kurds, who until the 1990s were refe­rred to as the ‘mountain Turks’ since the word ‘Kurd’ was banned. The Kurds are now free to own newspapers and run TV in the Kurdish language. His successes in Libya and Sudan are a subject unto themselves.

However, among the ‘great’ leaders is a genocide expert without a conscience. Benjamin Netanyahu has turned the leaders of the world’s sole superpower into his obedient servants. The occupants of the White House and members of the Senate and the House live in fear of retribution if Netanyahu’s orders aren’t obeyed. After meeting him, his American interlocutors, including presidents and secretaries of state, issue boilerplate statements that dread mentioning the word ‘Palestine’.

A mass murderer, no doubt, Netanyahu has mastered the art of statesmanship. Israel’s tiny size and its small population notwithstanding, Western leaders, with rare exceptions, go to occupied Jerusalem to support him over issues that are unsupportable and are, in fact, criminal acts like the Israeli attack on Al-Ahli Hospital, which killed hundreds of people. President Biden dutifully reiterated the Israeli version that Islamic Jihad had hit the hospital, but international media giants later confirmed it was an Israeli attack.

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman and an author.

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2024