It’s going to be a long four years of Trump’s presidency

The soap opera around US President Donald Trump will continue until early 2019 at best – even though a great deal of damage will have been done by then. Some of the damage will only affect the US.

Trump doesn’t often violate the constitution, but he breaks all the unwritten rules that regulate the behaviour of public officials: don’t use your office to enrich yourself, don’t give plum jobs to your relatives, don’t fire the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation because he’s leading an investigation into possibly treasonous behaviour among your close associates.

However, these are domestic American problems, and the Americans will survive them. In four years, or at most eight, Trump will be gone, and more-or-less normal service will resume. But the same recklessness, brought to bear on foreign affairs, may have far bigger consequences.

The Middle East is more frightening than north east Asia in this context, for half the countries of the regions are at war one way or another – and Trump has already launched a missile strike against the Syrian regime.

He justified it as retaliation for the alleged use of poison gas by the Assad regime – an allegation that has not been conclusively proved – but most people in the region take it as a sign that he is joining the Sunni side of a region-wide Sunni-Shia war. This alignment didn’t start with Trump, of course.

For more than half a century the US has seen Saudi Arabia, the effective leader of the Sunni bloc, as its most important ally in the Middle East. And for the past forty years it has regarded Iran as the root of all evil in the region.

Iran is the leader of the Shia bloc. In fact, it is the only big and powerful Shia country. Trump has already expressed hostility towards Iran, and his intentions to abandon the treaty that President Barack Obama signed to contain Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

And Trump is making his first foreign visit – to Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia and leader of the Sunni bloc.

Although Prince Mohammed is almost forty years younger than Trump, the two share striking characteristics. The Saudi Arabian leader (his father, King Salman, is 81 and not functional) is not as ignorant as Trump, but the two men are almost twins in temperament.

The Prince is just as vain as Trump, just as impulsive, and just as likely to start a fight he can’t finish. In an interview broadcast on Saudi TV he said: “We will not wait until the battle is in Saudi Arabia. We will work so the battle is in Iran.”

Why? Because, according to the Prince, Iran’s leaders are planning to seize Islam’s most sacred city, Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, and establish their rule over the world’s billion-and-a-half Muslims. This is paranoid nonsense. Only one tenth of the world’s Muslims are Shia.

The only three Muslim countries (out of 50) where they are the majority are Iran, Iraq and tiny Bahrein. In the 38 years since the current regime came to power in Tehran, it has never invaded anybody. And the notion that it could or would invade Saudi Arabia is simply laughable.

But what matters here are not the facts but what Trump and Prince Mohammed may believe to be the facts. It’s going to be a long four years.

Gwynne Dyer