M Santhananaban
March 2026 will be remembered as a month made miserable by a manifestly reckless and seemingly incapable master manipulator at the helm of the world’s most powerful nation.
HL Mencken, the journalist and satirist, seemed to anticipate this moment in his column in the Baltimore Evening Sun of 26 July 1920. Writing of the tendency of mass democracy to elevate the mediocre, he concluded that “on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
That day, it seems, has arrived.
Opposition to US President Donald Trump has many facets – Congressional members, the mainstream media and the No Kings protests – but none of that resistance has yet summoned the force needed to correct the current course. The quagmire with Iran and across broader West Asia deepens.
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The world is being made to pay the price. There is hyperinflation in some countries, widespread suffering and a corrosive sense of dread.
What we are witnessing is an unprecedented convergence of incompetence, financial recklessness and brazen disregard for consequence. It is a slippery slide into escalating violence, economic chaos, trade disruption and the possible unravelling of a functioning global system.
Fragile foundations
The decline of the Gulf region from its hard-won prosperity is now looking unstoppable.
This war has exposed the fragility of economies that receive little rainfall and depend heavily on desalination plants for their water supply. Those plants are now being talked of as potential targets.
The uncritical trumpeting of US military capabilities has blinded many to these realities.
The Gulf Cooperation Council economies are deeply vulnerable – not only to attack, but to the enormous financial and environmental burden of maintaining a high-energy, high-water-consuming American military presence on their soil.
Trump has tried to obscure these burdens, but the reality is inescapable.
Time for honest reckoning
It is time for the nations of West Asia to negotiate a sound and durable peace rooted in good neighbourliness – and to state the obvious to both Washington and Tehran. Third countries simply do not have the influence to broker a settlement between the US and Iran.
Iran is likely to secure greater home ground advantage with time, and its sense of internal legitimacy will only grow. Yet the Iranian leadership must adopt genuine reforms to make the country more responsive to its own people.
The US, meanwhile, has no clear upper hand, and the significance of its aerial superiority will diminish with time.
The international community must use the United Nations to press the US to step back from an untenable and aggressive posture.
An uneasy quarter has now passed – marked by troubling threats, tremendous disruption and an unending stream of inflammatory declarations from a deeply erratic Trump administration. One can only hope this damaging phase will end soon.
Dato’ M Santhananaban is a former Malaysian ambassador with 45 years of public sector experience.
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