Anwar’s Trump flattery: A farce of moral amnesia

Kua Kia Soong

When Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim heaped praise on Donald Trump at the Asean summit as a “peacemaker” for allegedly achieving peace between Cambodia and Thailand, it was a crass case of moral amnesia.

To call Trump a peacemaker is not merely a distortion of history – it is a desecration of truth and decency.

The minor border flare-up between Cambodia and Thailand over the Preah Vihear Temple was indeed unfortunate, but it was resolved through Asean diplomacy and the International Court of Justice – not another orange-tinted deal by the US president. Trump’s supposed role is a myth only his own ego could invent. One suspects Anwar’s compliment had more to do with political posturing than historical accuracy.

Let’s not forget Trump’s comic opera quest for the Nobel Peace Prize – a grotesque parody of statesmanship. He lobbied openly for it, tweeting self-congratulations whenever his chaotic foreign policy produced a photo op. His aides even printed mock Nobel certificates to soothe his bruised vanity. When a far-right Norwegian MP nominated him, Trump strutted before cameras proclaiming, “Everyone says I deserve it!” Never has global diplomacy been so degraded by narcissism.

Yet for all his preening, what has Trump actually achieved as a so-called ‘peacemaker’? He armed the Saudis for the Yemen war, tore up the Iran nuclear deal, moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, and cut aid to Palestinian refugees. These are not the acts of a peace broker – they are the signatures of a warmonger.

His so-called ‘Abraham Accords’ were nothing more than a transactional circus – autocrats and monarchs exchanging handshakes for American weapons while Palestinians were locked in their open-air prison. Trump called it “historic peace.” The rest of the world called it what it was: bribed normalisation under the shadow of occupation.

During Trump’s term, Israel received $3.8bn annually in US military aid – the bombs, drones and missiles that turned Gaza’s skyline into ash and smoke. When Israeli forces levelled entire neighbourhoods, Trump’s White House did not flinch. Instead, it vetoed every UN resolution condemning the attacks.

And now, amid the ongoing Gaza genocide – with over 60,000 Palestinians slaughtered and tens of thousands more starved by siege – we hear Anwar serenading Trump as a peacemaker. The irony would be hilarious if it were not dripping with blood.

In recent weeks, the US has launched at least seven attacks against small boats in the Caribbean, killing dozens of Venezuelan, Colombian and Trinidadian people in a spate of extrajudicial killings justified by the enduring pretext of a ‘war on drugs’.

These assaults come amid a major mobilisation of military forces around Venezuela – an unconvincing pretext for a war that seeks to subvert the Bolivarian Revolution and gain access to Venezuela’s vast mineral wealth.

Colombia is also being threatened in this unprovoked imperialist offensive in Latin America.

Anwar once spoke eloquently about justice, about standing with the oppressed. But how does one square that with the glorification of a man whose policies empowered Israel’s military machine and silenced the suffering of an entire people?

Is this the same Anwar who decried the “double standards of the West”? Or is this a new version, comfortable with moral compromise so long as it flatters American power and enables deals to be made with the Trump administration?

Trump turned peace into a prop for his reality show – another episode in the spectacle of ego and deception. He was the first US president to treat the Middle East not as a region of human tragedy but as a potential backdrop for his Nobel photo opportunity.

For sure, Trump will never be remembered as a peacemaker. He will be remembered as the president who gave war its best marketing campaign.

And if Anwar insists on praising that record, he may find himself nominated – not for a Nobel Peace Prize – but for a Nobel Prize in Historical Amnesia.

So where is Anwar’s vaunted moral compass? How does he reconcile his denunciations of Zionist crimes with his flattery of the man who armed and emboldened the perpetrators? The contradiction is staggering.

Trump’s administration not only legitimised the occupation; it also criminalised Palestinian resistance, cutting off even humanitarian dialogue. To praise such a man as a ‘peacemaker’ is an insult to the memory of every child pulled from Gaza’s rubble.

History will not remember Trump as a peacemaker. It will remember him as the president who legitimised apartheid, armed oppression and sabotaged every avenue toward real peace in Palestine.

And if Anwar Ibrahim continues to echo that delusion, history may well judge him as complicit – not in the making of peace, but in the erasure of truth.

Dr Kua Kia Soong is a former MP and director of Suaram.

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