I naively harboured the hope that 2026 would be a better year than 2025 (in whatever way one might measure such things). And that harboured hope concerned the world as a global, political, conflictual entity, as well as the church at large, the church in our nation, ACANZP and life for me as bishop. We went into the new year with protests arising in Iran (potentially offering a better 2026 than 47 years previously for Iranians, but also full of dreadful possibility for a horrible crackdown on ordinary Iranians), and had scarcely gotten a couple of days into 2026 and ...
Trump's troops invaded/policed Venezuela, and kidnapped/abducted/arrested-and-removed its legitimate/illegitimate President and his (collaborating) wife, for reason(s) such as oil-for-America/denuding a marco-terrorist state of its despicable trade in drugs and terrorism/fostering democracy in order to install its recently democratically elected leadership (as a long-term plan)/dismissing its recently democratically elected leadership as incapable of actually leading the country forward (in the short-term, what was actually said)/boosting someone's ego/pour encourager le autres (i.e. put the fear of the USA's power into other countries such as Cuba and Colombia so they pull up their dishevelled socks.
OK. Things can get better. Maybe the worst has happened and the year ahead will be glorious. But there are big concerns: Ukraine is no better; Syria now seems worse after a crackdown on the Kurds; Iran, should it survive the protests, is breathing fire against Israel and the USA; Sudan continues to be bad; rumbles in Somalia/Somaliland; Trump's Venezuela gambit may embolden China re Taiwan; the global economy stutters and stammers; and the planet continues to heat up. Woe is us!
So, some initial thoughts about early posts in 2026 have gone out the window (for now). Momentous moments of mondiality move minds to memos!
Of course many commentators are commenting and I feel no need to add to them with much. Two quick thoughts.
First, "international law" has taken a hammering with Trump's disregard for it. Suppose there was a gang of drug traffickers operating in NZ and when the police went to stop them, their lawyers advised that, actually, the gang had cunningly found a workaround the current laws about drug trafficking so that they couldn't be arrested. Cue an urgent sitting of parliament to change/update the laws so that police had the necessary powers to stop the trafficking, arrest the criminals etc. When we go international on a similar scenario, there is no world police, no world parliament and no ultimate regard for international law because it has consequences such as arrest, trial and imprisonment. (Yes, I know there is the ICC etc). Trump's action (irrespective of whether it is morally right or wrong, or internationally legal or illegal) highlights that "international law" works by consensus and is non-sensus when the consensus is broken. Of course, we didn't need to have Trump highlight the weakness of international law, we already had Putin/Ukraine, Hamas/7 October, Netanyahu/genocidal actions and other recent actions between nations, or involving non-nations crossing national borders. Further, of course, we seem to have had Venezuela itself supporting drug trafficking on a significant scale without fearing the consequences of that support ... until a couple of weeks ago.
Secondly, not for the first time, Trump has thrown some of the moral calculations of world punditry into chaos, with some great questions being generated about whether our moral calculations have been well made previously. In this case, we have moralized that a nation is sovereign, its rulers legitimate (to some degree or another, even when normal democratic results are overridden), and thus we can do nothing about whatever may concern us about those rulers actions, even when those actions may lead to drugs proliferating on our streets. (According to one article I read, such proliferation in Europe may even involve this "sequence of evil": Venezuela sends raw drugs to Lebanon, Hezbollah refines them, sells them, buys arms for fight against Israel, and for power struggles in Lebanon.) Trump sends in the troops to arrest and take Mr and Mrs Maduro away, and, suddenly, it seems like respect for national sovereignty, at least in some cases, is not so morally privileged after all, because few wish to defend national sovereignty protecting this particular "narco-terrorist".
Yes, many questions remain, including, and relevantly for NZ and the Pacific, what precedent has Trump created for nations who think other nations, or at least the rulers of other nations, are bad people presiding over bad decisions? After all, Trump's point about Maduro being a bad dude, is basically Putin's point about Zelensky (albeit not involving narco-terrorism in the latter case). Here Down Under, in the Pacific arena, it is mind-boggling to consider what China might think it worthwhile to do if it played "the great game" according to Trump's rules ... and I am not just thinking about Taiwan. Even now, NZ is considerably under the thumb of China and on various matters "dare not step out of line." And where we do dare step out of line (particularly in respect of support for Taiwan), we get our knuckles wrapped. The prospects for Christian churches under China's yoke are bleak: may that yoke not further fall on our necks.
It is not as though considerations of international law are now much of a check to the growth of hegemony on a global scale.
Some pundits are even predicting a world of three hegemonic spheres. And NZ wouldn't be falling into the US or Russian hegemony if this comes to pass.
Let the reader understand.
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