The old alliances have been swept away, and foreign policy needs to reflect this new reality<\/p>\n
Friday 20 January\u00a02017, Washington DC: \u00adovercast skies with the threat of rain for the inauguration of the new president, Donald J Trump. All of Washington was there: former presidents, \u00adsenior \u00adpoliticians, supreme court \u00adjustices and, in the seats furthest from the action, the Washington diplomatic corps. But our viewpoint, on the uppermost levels of the temporary \u00adamphitheatre erected on the West Front of the Capitol, allowed us to see beyond the stage, all the way down the National Mall; and note that the crowd below looked rather smaller<\/a> than the 1.8 million estimated to have attended Barack Obama\u2019s 2009 inauguration.<\/p>\n Trump would say afterwards that the rain stopped, as if by divine intervention, at the moment he began to deliver his \u00adinaugural address. We diplomats in the \u00adgallery had exactly the \u00adopposite \u00adimpression \u2013 that the heavens opened just as the speech started, with Trump\u2019s opening words drowned out by the rustle of \u00adseveral hundred \u00adplastic ponchos being unfolded and donned (with George W Bush \u00admemorably failing to locate the appropriate aperture in his, and resorting to draping it over his head<\/a> like a collapsed umbrella).<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The old alliances have been swept away, and foreign policy needs to reflect this new reality Friday 20 January\u00a02017, Washington DC: \u00adovercast skies with the threat of rain for the inauguration of the new president, Donald J Trump. All of Washington was there: former presidents, \u00adsenior \u00adpoliticians, supreme court \u00adjustices and, in the seats furthest … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30836\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}