I spent most of the 10 or 12 days before writing this column in darkness. The storms that battered the Western Cape almost two weeks ago left my village without electricity.
About 24 hours into the dark, all cellular communications were lost. The rain and wind combined to keep me indoors for several days. There were a few days when I feared that my somewhat rickety container house would be blown off its posts.
Things in the fridge started to turn a few days ago. In search of levity I recalled how, in his inimitable way, Tom Waits sang about how “everything in your refrigerator turns into a science project”. But seriously, later today, weather permitting, I will drive to a place where cellular communication service is available and send this text to the editor.
The isolation has been extraordinary. I missed some of the nuances and details of the meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump. Playing catch-up, I read that the summit was inherently banal. No big deals were secured, no big decisions were made and no treaty was signed.
Yet, I did find that the most significant development was when Trump was introduced to the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. And with this the summit reached a definitive moment.
A photograph from the summit was of the US president sitting on a chair beside his Chinese counterpart looking completely lost. His suit looked two sizes too big and his face and general demeanour resembled a child in a room of adults, not knowing what to say or do, where to look or where to place his hands.
The scene was an almost comical reversal of the way Trump has seated visitors to the White House and spoken at them over about the past year. I could not help thinking that this was remarkably different from two previous epoch-defining summits between the US and a rival on a continuum of high-mast meetings that marked global power shifts ― at least the ones I followed closely.
Trump is increasingly unpopular at home. The wars in Western Europe and on the Steppe, marked by the imprimatur of Washington, are slipping from his control.
The first was the 1986 summit between then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and America’s Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, which had the potential to eliminate all nuclear weapons in a year. While that objective was missed, the two most powerful states in the world changed the politics and perception of the Cold War.
Three years later, in 1989, Gorbachev would meet George Bush on the island of Malta, where they declared the end of the Cold War. In both of these summits the US presidents appeared confident and somewhat in control.
While his legacy is mixed, Reagan was an actor who perfectly prepared a face to meet the faces he met, as TS Eliot wrote about the fictional character J Alfred Prufrock in about 1911. (Trump may be more adept at the social posturing than TS Eliot intimated at, but it’s difficult to imagine that he is sincere).
In Reykjavik, Reagan properly matched the aura of Gorbachev, who would redefine the Soviet Union’s place and time in the arc of history. At Malta, Bush strode with the confidence born from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall the same year.
The US projected triumphalism at the time. In Beijing last week Trump seemed politically and intellectually out of his depth, while Xi was composed and eloquent (and wildly popular at home); he recognised and seized the historical moment.
Trump is increasingly unpopular at home. The wars in Western Europe and on the Steppe, marked by the imprimatur of Washington, are slipping from his control. The political, economic and financial global shift continues to drift further from the Wall Street-Washington axis.
Trump has also disturbed Nato’s equilibrium, and with the notable exception of Britain his mere physical presence sometimes makes European leaders uncomfortable ― to the point where some have mocked him.
Whereas Reagan and Bush relied on some kind of moral authority and used it as a power resource in international bargaining, Trump projects a political power that seems to have no solutions to the problems that beset the world ― apart from ordering more bombings, invasions and sanctions against enemies real or perceived.
It’s hard to see any moral authority in brute force.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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