• Putin Has Taken Total Control In Russia
• Trump has established the ‘Cult of Personality

• By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

Iran is now using escalation to increase its leverage.

The regime and its allies are now holding sway over two major oil shipping routes.

The routes to export oil out of the Middle East have diminished.

The price of energy is soaring.

And Iran gulf neighbours could be about to endorse some measure of its authority over the Strait of Hormuz (NYT, Sept. 17).

Recently, Iran and its allies have used military escalation to upend any minimal sense of stability in the region, most dramatically in Yemen.

And this is shifting the momentum in Iran’s conflict with the United States to its advantage.

However, the shift may not be decisive.

The Islamic Republic remains under immense economic pressure, with the ongoing U.S, Naval blockade of its southern ports and increasing rounds of sanctions cutting it off from the world.

Even then, a series of recent attacks by Iran and its allies have expanded the scope of the conflict. And that may have given Iran even greater leverage, at least at this moment.

The Iranian-allied Houthis of Yemen captured a Red Sea island last Friday, giving them a perch to disrupt shipping in another crucial waterway for shipping oil out of the Middle East.

“The Houthi success in Yemen [where civil war still rages] has swung the pendulum back in Iran’s favour,” said Gregory Brew, a senior analyst at the Europa Group.

“Iran had managed to shift the status quo without bringing back a return to full-scale war. Which the regime likely doesn’t want at this time.”

While Iran backs the Houthis with weapons, cash and logistics, the Shi’ite militant group in the north and west of Yemen, is neither a direct conduit for Iranian interests nor fully independent of Tehran’s influence.

Russia

On Sunday, the ruling United Russia party won a commanding majority in the Duma, Russia’s parliament.

Five weeks before the election, the country’s Supreme Court struck Yabloko, the only anti-war party from the ballot.

“Even in such a rubber-stamped and stage-managed affair as a Russian election, the Kremlin is clearly taking no chances,” wrote Alexander Prokopenko in the NYT.

This is the first parliamentary vote since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In the intervening years, Putin has outlawed opposition, crushed dissent and forced countless citizens into exile.

Prokopenko writes that for the Russian elite, it has been a rude shock.

It had lost its capacity to influence politics long before 2022, to be sure.

But it still had room to manoeuver, the means to amass wealth and crucially, the freedom to leave.

Now, that room has all but disappeared.

Putin is in total control. 

According to Prokopenko, in Putin’s first term, the Russian elite agreed to live without real power in return for predictability and prosperity – the so-called Russian social contract.

The governors went first.

Presidential envoys were installed above them and then they were expelled from the Federation Council, the upper house, where they had used their votes to block laws they opposed.

In 2004, citing the fight against terrorism and in violation of a Constitutional Court ruling, Putin abolished gubernatorial elections outright.

The reconfigured upper house approved the move.

Governors stopped being politicians and became managers of regional economies.

Next, Putin took on the oligarchs.

The message was simple: Stay out of politics and what you acquired in the 1990s remains yours.

The 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky then Russia’s richest man and a big backer of opposition parties, removed any doubt that the new rules applied to everyone.

The lesion was renewed periodically: the job swap with Dmitri Medvedev in 2012 that allowed Putin to resume the presidency irrespective of term limits; the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, in 2015; the arrest of the economy minister, Alexei Ulyukayev, in 2016.

All these acts told the elite that, while it was free to take care of business, politics proper belonged to Putin.

The arrangement held for nearly two decades – until the invasion of Ukraine.

Since then, as the elite has suffered from Western sanctions and a squeezed economy, decision-making has been drastically centralized.

Budgets have been classified, with Parliament recently granting the finance ministry the power to spend at will.

At the Kremlin’s behest, governors have been recruiting soldiers and processing payments to the families of the dead.

War veterans, meanwhile, have been given governorships and senior posts.

Personally beholden to Putin, this group serves to further cement Kremlin control.

The elite’s property is no longer safe either.

Trump’s Cult of Personality

Trump’s midterm Republican Party convention was a bizarre spectacle.

It was less about the party than about the man at the helm.

The chairman of the Republican National Committee declared Trump to be “the greatest Republican messenger of our lifetime, the leader of America’s comeback” and “the best president this country has ever had.”(NYT, Sept 15).

One video even put it: “One June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

The basic story told at the convention was indeed familiar and bizarre at the same time.

The United States was on the verge of total collapse before Trump took over (Jamelle Bouie/NYT, Sept. 15).

Under him, there has been a glorious revitalization of the nation’s fortunes – a golden age of wealth and prosperity for all.

Democrats threaten this paradise, and the only way to protect the success of the past two years is to send Republicans back to Congress with their majorities intact.

The supporters of Trump’s regime are living in a fool’s paradise. Like Xi and Putin, Trump would like to rule without term limits, but according to latest polls, his days are numbered.

The writer can be reached at: shashimalla125@gmail.com

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