George Orwell’s great novel 1984 is set in a world divided among the three great powers of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. They are in constant competition. Each has a dominant leader and their diplomatic relations are conducted in strictest secret and are subject to sudden reversals in policy.  

The cold war of our times, involving the US, China and Russia, has many similarities, and Orwell can be forgiven for failing to prophesy the manic nature of current global politics. The most obvious difference is that Russia is not a full superpower but, as they used to say about the USSR, more like Upper Volta with rockets. Even so, Russian armed forces are putting up a poor show in Ukraine, where a war that was expected to be over in days will soon enter its fifth year with no end in sight – and the Chinese are reducing Russia to an economic dependency and stretching their tentacles of activity and influence into Siberia and ex-Soviet central Asia.

Yet Donald Trump continues his quest for a Russo-American alliance, merely mumbling that he is “disappointed” by the sustained bombing of Ukraine. He is even inviting Putin to join his “Board of Peace” in Gaza. The Russians have form in stringing Trump along. In 2018, they secretly probed the first Trump administration with a proposal for a geopolitical pact of convenience: if Trump stopped causing trouble for them in Ukraine, they would let him do what he wanted in Venezuela. Trump notoriously conducts his talks with Putin in clouds of mystery, even sometimes refusing to take his own officials into the room.

Very probably, Trump and Putin have been discussing ways to strengthen their desired spheres of influence. Trump wants total domination over the Americas and nearby territories. The Venezuelans, since the abduction of former president Nicolás Maduro this month, have been placed under a regime of American super-governance for an indeterminate period – and the Americans are snapping the ties of the Russians and Chinese to Caracas. Trump has the ambition of taking Panama and Canada into the United States, just as in the nineteenth century, Louisiana and Alaska were purchased from the French and Russians, respectively or Texas and California were seized from Mexico by force of arms.

Greenland is an old obsession. In the late 1940s, there were........

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