with CHARLIE HARPER

TRADITIONALLY in the US, after a presidential election, the incumbent remains clearly in power until handing off to his successor on January 20. This is to clarify for Americans and foreigners alike who is holding the reins of power in Washington, lest there be any uncertainty.

Not this time.

Since his election last month, Donald Trump has received visits at his Palm Beach oceanfront estate from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the president of Argentina, and doubtless other leaders. He has travelled to Paris to attend the reopening of Notre Dame cathedral, where he met with French President Macron President Zelensky of Ukraine. He has met with Prince William of the UK.

It is reasonable to assume that he has had some communication with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. It seems likely that Trump has also been in touch with President Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

The media is reporting that leaders around the world are moving decisively to connect with the new American administration. Why wouldn’t they do so?

Back in the White House, the incumbent American president, who still has over seven weeks in office, has not been altogether idle. Joe Biden and his advisers have been moving in two directions at once. On one hand, they have reportedly been gracious in facilitating the transition from one administration to the next as usual - except of course for four years ago.

But on the other hand, the Biden team has been moving aggressively to shore up Ukraine’s defensive – and offensive – military capabilities to the maximum extent of their ability to do so.

The thinking in the White House is reportedly to commit as much assistance as possible against the possibility that Trump and Company will reduce American assistance to Kiev when they take office, either unilaterally to fulfill campaign pledges or to facilitate a ceasefire in the longest-running European war in 80 years.

An even more Biden team preemptive strike is reportedly envisioned domestically. There have been several reports in recent days that Biden is seriously contemplating blanket pardons for many if not most of the public figures associated with the January 6 commission that concluded that Trump had incited the infamous riots of that day four years ago.

Trump and his surrogates on the campaign trail have long railed against Trump’s “persecutors”, and the Biden team is supposedly taking their threats seriously.

It’s hard for most Americans to get their heads around such a startling possibility as actually turning the American justice system against political or personal opponents.

But Trump has said a lot of things over his decade in public political life and for at least 30 years before that as a tabloid newspaper favorite in New York City. What has emerged from the fog of disbelief over the past few years is that Trump very often means exactly what he says, hyperbolic or not.

Meantime, there is a sense among many observers of the American political scene that Trump’s choices for cabinet and other senior positions in his new administration aren’t actually so bad after all. It’s hard to argue that characters like Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, plus a few others are stupendously inexperienced, unqualified and even dangerous to even be considered for those roles.

But these dramatic nominations are proving to be the exceptions, not the rule. Perhaps expectations for Trump’s new presidency were so dire for so many during the election campaign that almost anyone with a shred of qualification or reasonableness would seem acceptable.

But while Trump’s choices for many key positions represent a major change in policy and style from the incumbent Biden officials, isn’t that why there are elections in democracies? Voters chose change. So there will be change.

There is a growing sense of reassurance slipping into the public consciousness. Naturally everyone is exhausted after the endless, brutal election campaign. Far fewer people are tuning in to MSNBC, CNN and even parts of the Fox news empire. But still. Maybe for liberals and other Trump opponents, this won’t be so bad after all.

Wishful thinking? This is what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had to say at a conference in New York recently: “Trump seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation and if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him. We do have too much regulation in this country.

“Trump is calmer and has grown in the past eight years since he was elected president for the first time.”

Newspaper owner Bezos was asked if he was concerned about the Trump’s aggressive stance toward journalists, including occasional suggestions that they should be put on trial for reporting on his verbal excesses and making him look bad.

Bezos said he hopes he can persuade the incoming president that the press is “not the enemy”. The Amazon mogul’s own Washington Post would be a leading target if Trump did go after the mainstream press.

Perhaps to persuade skeptics in the audience, Bezos asked his audience “Why be cynical? Let’s go into it hoping that (Trump’s reasonable) statements that have been made are correct and this has been done aboveboard in the public interest. And if that turns out to be naive, well, we’ll see. But I think it’s going to be great. I’m an optimist. It’s one of the reasons for my success.”

Maybe Bezos is convinced that in a second term when he cannot face an election for another term in the White House, Trump will turn to his legacy and actually think about leaving the world a better place than he found it. Maybe Bezos is just wishing and dreaming. We will see.

Meantime, another recent development is also reassuring. It was reported last week that Russian General Valery V Gerasimov, the top Kremlin defence official who devised Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, had called America’s military chief last month to quietly discuss how to manage escalating tensions between the two countries.

Gerasimov wanted the phone call with US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept quiet. Gerasimov last spoke with his American counterpart in October 2022; that call also came at a time of great concern that Moscow was looking to further escalate its war in Ukraine.

Two weeks ago, the two top military men “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine”, a Pentagon spokesman said.

The call came at a particularly tense time, since Putin was asserting that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities”. Putin was responding to Biden’s decision to allow more liberal Ukrainian deployment against Russian territory of US-provided weaponry.

“The regional conflict in Ukraine, previously provoked by the West, has acquired elements of a global character,” Mr Putin said in a rare address to his nation last month. He continued in an unusually pugilistic manner: “We are developing intermediate- and shorter-range missiles as a response to US plans to produce and deploy intermediate- and shorter-range missiles in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.”

Many observers were stunned when it was revealed last summer that the US-Russia hotline, a constantly monitored telephone link designed to allow the respective leaders to head off a devastating nuclear exchange by quickly and confidentially clear up any dangerous misunderstandings, hadn’t been used in a long time.

Together with the frosty US-Russia relationship generally, this news excited fears that veteran Cold Warriors Biden and Putin might actually stumble into some kind of dreadful nuclear exchange.

News of the chat between the nations’ respective defence chiefs was therefore very reassuring indeed.

And it’s especially important that the US and Russia are talking now. This morning, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is visiting Jordan and Turkey, to “meet with leaders to discuss developments in Syria, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and across the region. The Secretary will reiterate the United States’ support for an inclusive, Syrian-led transition to an accountable and representative government,” according to the State Department.

But Blinken also needs to reassure Jordan that the US won’t allow Islamist extremists to threaten its stability. And he will especially need to make sure the US and Turkey are on the same page as Syria tries to regroup.