A sad image of the spirit of the times

ST. PETERSBURG (Dagbladet): One should have good nerves if you want to consider the year that is about to go out on a date in bird's-eye view. For what we see? Yes, we see a world order that is being systematically attacked and attempted to be undermined from several directions at the same time. Most aggressively come the attacks from the Us president Donald Trump. He attacks committed international cooperation in the eventually very concrete ways, and on a principle basis.

Trump will weaken the united nations, and he will make Nato a club where members must pay for the american service, and not to an organization that promotes common values, and that basically will build international stability. Last year, he tore in pieces the Pais agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, and in the year he tore in pieces atomavtalen with Iran. And he starts handelskriger in the east and the west.

Trumps slogans about "America First" after each of the very concrete consequences. He is not some nikkedukke for professionals, so some thought and even more hoped that he would become, when he moved into The white house nearly two years ago. No, he is just so erratic and willfully as there was reason to fear, if one had taken the time to read the biographies about him.

And sparkingen of both chief of staff John Kelly and defence secretary Jim Mattis just before christmas, shows that Trump now really starting to get hot in jersey in the role of president. He does as he will, and not as "the adults" Kelly and Mattis, who after all had a knowledge of international politics, would. How do we know that Trump (72 1/2) still in trassalderen.

But Trump's far from the only one that operates in a "me first" mode. In Moscow Vladimir Putin for several years - even before the Ukraine crisis began in 2014 - thought of in the same paths. He will, of course, weaken Nato, and the EUROPEAN union consider him as a talking shop for puslinger. Compromise is far from Putin's political temperament, and the EU is built on compromises. Also, do the EU that practically the whole of Europe to participate in the sanctions against Russia because of Ukraine.

And just Ukraine is the key to understanding Russian foreign policy. Bordingen of three Ukrainian navy ships, and the arrest of the 24 on board, when the vessels were on the way through the Kerch strait on the way to the Azov sea in november, underlines the confrontational thinking.

But despite an economy no larger than Spain's, is Putin more than a little when it comes to challenge verdensordenen as we've known it for 2. world war.

Some little is certainly not China's Xi Jinping. He challenges not verdensordenen in the same way as Trump, and is a dedicated supporter of free trade.

But he is an autocrat who, in reality, in the course of the year was president for life. He did everything right to break the rule that Deng introduced, that the chinese leaders just to sit in the two five-year periods.

This happens at the same time with that he cultivates a nationalist rhetoric, turning tougher down on the opposition and control the press and the internet, in a way no one has done since Mao.

Also, he has started a campaign for the suppression of the muslim uighurs in the Xinijang province in North-West China. Each 10. a muslim in the basically muslim province in the course of the last few years, been attempted to be brainwashed in something similar to concentration camps. China is one of the countries in the world where the conditions for human rights have become considerably worse in the course of 2018.

In the shadow of Donald Trump has there appeared a series of mini-trumper. Either they are brutal types with a nationalist agenda that Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, Brazil's new president Jair Bolsonaro, Egypt's president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is in the process of rolling back the Turkish democracy after the putsch in 2016.

Or they are tentative autokrater who are trying to destroy the democratic rules in the established democracies, as Viktor Orban in Hungary, and partieier Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland. Romania is also an EU country where the government has problems with the democratic spirit. And Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel has after that she went off as the CDI-a leader in the fall, no longer the authority she had to hold EU counterparts in the ears.

Attacks on the existing world order, liberal values, and human rights, are powerful and dangerous in it we go into 2019. Donald Trump was perhaps not a coincidence, but in his own way, typical of the spirit of the times.