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Many are traumatised by the seismic changes that the people of the UK and the USA have wrought on the world through Brexit and the once improbable election of Donald Trump as US President.
Some say that while his opponents took Trump literally but not seriously, his supporters took him seriously but not literally. They hope that Trump didn't really mean what he said in the election and that he can be tamed in office.
The Trump victory has long been marinated in corrosive domestic and global resentments. Americans, whose living standards have been falling, long resented paying two-thirds of the Nato bill for freeloading Europeans, which has been summarised as Americans make the dinner while the Europeans do the washing up.
After the invasion of Iraq, I chanced upon a soldiers' rally in Boston where I talked with a bemedalled flag-waving veteran brimming with anger and insisting the UN should pull its weight. It echoed the old American divide between internationalism and avoiding "foreign entanglements."
On a tour with European journalists of the Pentagon a year after it was attacked by Al Qaeda, the Marine escort pointed to a memorial to the Second World War - "1941 to 1945, sorry 1939 to 1945," he quipped. It was a reminder that America was late to both great wars in the 20th century after weighing the merits of intervention. America's geography gives it the option to retreat into a huge internal market between two protective oceans.
The transatlantic alliance suited America's interests in preventing Soviet expansion and in protecting trade routes but Trump seems to oppose much of the architecture of international relations we know and generally like.
A real fear for the Baltic States is that Russia could exploit the apparent desire of Trump for a reset in relations with their strongman, Putin. America could abandon countries like Estonia to subordination, further sabotage, or even absorption into a Greater Russia. Estonians have been alarmed by prominent Trumpist and former Speaker, Newt Gingrich dismissing a Nato ally as "some place which is the suburbs of St. Petersburg," actually nearly 100 miles away.
But another senior Trumpist and former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton muses that Nato could become a global alliance which includes Japan, Australia, Singapore, and Israel. Maybe an independent Kurdish Republic could join one day.
President Obama told the world that his successor was pragmatic not ideological but Trump's foreign policy remains uncertain. He has vowed to smash Daesh, complimented the Kurds, praised Russia, and opposed the nuclear deal with Iran. No one yet knows how this all knits together.
We will see also see what key elections in France and Germany deliver next year. If the far-right French leader Marine Le Pen wins then we will get Frexit and the dissolution of the European Union. It seems unlikely but then so did Brexit and Trump. The EU may already be on the slide given its fragile base of a wide but shallow membership of nations with such different economies.
Before he was obliterated in 1979 by Mrs Thatcher, whose election and that of Ronald Reagan helped establish the now crumbling "neoliberal" settlement, British Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan said "You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of."
One prominent liberal optimist argues that “You’ve got to unpack, first of all, what bits of the so-called liberal agenda have failed and what bits haven’t,” and says that globalisation is driven less by governments than technological change which poses one big question: "how do we make that just and fair?" He believes the crucial distinction is between open and closed societies.
Many liberals agree with this but distance themselves from the author, Tony Blair, because they cannot forgive him for the invasion of Iraq. This is so often seen as the root cause of the mess in the Middle East although Kurdish leaders recently told British MPs that jihadism is home-grown.
We cannot allow differences over Iraq 2003 to obstruct solidarity with the Kurds and others in rebuilding their societies after Daesh is despatched and in preventing its reinvention. Nor can we afford to dismiss the contributions that senior statesman like Blair and his predecessor John Major are making.
Brexit and Trump are the results of this latest sea-change but the tides will shift again and navigating the new world order requires the sharpest ideas and policies to save the best and change the worst of the old order.
Gary Kent is the director of All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG). He writes this column for Rudaw in a personal capacity. The address for the all-party group is appgkurdistan@gmail.com.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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