There were the “Big Three” leaders: Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. They were ably supplemented by the supporting cast of Free French leader Charles de Gaulle, Australian Prime Ministers Robert Menzies and John Curtin, Canadian Prime Minister William Mackenzie King, South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser, Chinese leaders Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, King Haakon II of Norway, Greek government-in-exile Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, Polish government-in-exile Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski, All India Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia.

Out of the wartime armies and governments emerged a new set of leaders who would help create and nurture the United Nations and keep the post-war world from annihilating itself with nuclear weapons. General George Marshall would emerge as President Harry S Truman’s Secretary of State. General Dwight D. Eisenhower would be elected President of the United States and serve an eight-year term, passing the torch to a World War II Navy Lieutenant named John F. Kennedy. Soviet Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov would serve in the Soviet Politburo and as Minister of Defense. De Gaulle would see France through as its president during the upheavals of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Jinnah became the founding leader of Pakistan, while Mao Zedong became the founder of the People’s Republic of China. Papandreou battled against the Greek military’s influence over his country’s affairs until the 1967 military coup and the imposition of a dictatorship.

Three successive United Nations Secretaries General – Trygve Lie of Norway, Dag Hammarskjold, and U Thant – used their offices to promote peaceful dialogue over war. Hammarskjold would pay with his life while trying to negotiate an end to the Congolese civil war.

Whether they were former military commanders or wartime government officials, the post-war years produced the individuals who would help guide colonies to independence in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. The leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement would offer the world a third choice between the capitalist West and the Communist Bloc. At the 1955 Asia-Africa conference in Bandung, Indonesia, heads of state and prime ministers of newly-independent nations, exhibiting statesmanship and leadership, declared in a single voice that they would abstain from the “use of arrangements of collective defense to serve the particular interests of any of the big power.” That sent a clear and unambiguous message to Cold Warriors like US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that the non-aligned states would not be part of a ring of military pacts Washington was establishing around the world, including NATO, SEATO, and CENTO. For his part, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, was declaring that his country would not be a participant in the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact. Tito, along with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s President Sukarno, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro represented a third force and strategic buffer between the two nuclear superpowers of the United States and Soviet Union.

European and other leaders also showed their knack for diplomacy to tamp down the desire by some for nuclear brinkmanship and war. These included West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who established the policy of “Realpolitik” with the Soviet Union and East Germany. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Canadian Prime Ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau refused to have their nations drawn into the American-led war in Southeast Asia. French Presidents Georges Pompidou and Francois Mitterand continued de Gaulle’s policy of keeping France outside of the military command structure of NATO. Jimmy Carter put a new emphasis on worldwide human rights. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the policies of “perestroika” and “glasnost.”

After the end of the Cold War, something occurred that would severely diminish the leadership quotient in global politics. Instead of electing statesmen and effective political leaders to office, several countries began opting for entertainment and media celebrities, many of them buffoonish demagogues, to be their new leaders. Other bureaucratic leaders decided to be guided in their decisions by opinion polls rather than by the leadership instincts that guided the policies of those like Eisenhower, Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, de Gaulle, the early Non-Aligned Movement leaders, and others.

The age of the buffoonish strongman began in Italy when the country’s richest man, media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, became prime minister in 1994. But one can go back to the 1980s and the US presidency of B-movie actor Ronald Reagan to see where the blending of celebrity and politician began.

The elevation of the boorish Berlusconi to the head of the Italian government was likened to the sacking of Rome by Germanic tribes in the waning days of the Roman Empire. Berlusconi packed the Italian government with his political cronies, even appointing his personal tax attorney, Giulio Tremonti, as finance minister. Neo-fascist supporters of wartime fascist leader Benito Mussolini were commonplace in Berlusconi’s government. Berlusconi consistently lied to the Italian people with the belief that the truth was whatever he said it was. Berlusconi questioned the patriotism of anyone who disagreed with him. Disobedient parliament members of his own party were considered “traitors.” Berlusconi eventually became embroiled in financial and sex scandals, including the charge that he had sexual trysts with underage females at his infamous “Bunga Bunga parties.” Amid a financial crisis in Italy, Berlusconi was forced to resign in 2011. In July 2019, Berlusconi’s political career resumed with his taking a seat in the European Parliament.

Berlusconi led the way for other right-wing media-savvy celebrities taking power. In other cases, right-wing politicians began fancying themselves as comedians. In the first category, the world saw Jimmy Morales, a television comic who liked to appear in “blackface,” elected president of Guatemala in 2016. Morales ran on a platform of clean government. It was not long before he faced charges of accepting illegal campaign donations.

This year, Volodymyr Selensky, a Ukrainian comedian, was elected president of Ukraine. It is no joking matter, however, that the Jewish president of Ukraine governs with the support of neo-Nazis who honor such Nazis as Stepan Bandera and Adolf Hitler.

Icelandic comedian Jon Gnarr was elected mayor of Reykjavik in 2010 and he may be in line for a role in national politics in the future, including as president of Iceland. Italian comedian Beppo Grillo, as head of the Five Star Movement, controls one of the two major parties in the Italian coalition government. Grillo’s comedic acts featured a lot of profanity – something he shares with Berlusconi and a certain reality television star who now occupies the White House.

Marjan Šarec is the prime minister of Slovenia. He is also a well-known comic and impressionist, whose specialties included Osama bin Laden and Fidel Castro. Another comedian, Hayk Marutyan, is the mayor of Yerevan, Armenia who is talked about as a future national leader.

US Democratic Senator Al Franken, a former television comedian, was run out of office by New York Senator and presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand in a melodramatic “#MeToo” jihad designed to boost Gillibrand’s presidential hopes. In what could some from a TV soap opera script, Gillibrand made no mention of her family’s connection to a criminal New York woman sex slave cult called NXIVM.

Today, former Daily Telegraph and Times of London journalist and London mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is the prime minister of the rapidly disintegrating United Kingdom. Johnson’s full name could have been featured in a Monty Python sketch. Johnson’s unkempt blond hair and political views have resulted in him being called “Britain’s Trump,” even by Donald Trump. Johnson can be summed up by what his political opponents have called him: jester, toff, self-absorbed sociopath, wannabe comedian, serial liar, oafish, nasty, horrid, right-wing elitist, Donald Trump with a thesaurus, and a friend of criminals.

Finally, we come to the leader of the so-called “Free World.” Donald Trump and his circus clown celebrity friends around the world, who also include a politically refurbished Berlusconi, Nigel Farage, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, and Binyamin Netanyahu, are in their own world, one of constant insults, personal threats, gaslighting, projection, and buffoonery. During a recent White House meeting with another celebrity, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, a famed cricketeer, Trump said of the Afghan conflict, “If I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth… It would be over in literally, in 10 days… I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.” Khan was not laughing, and, except for Trump’s circle of clowns, neither were the rest of us.

The summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) came and went in Isla Margarita, Venezuela, virtually invisible to Western corporate media.

NAM nowadays congregates every African nation except South Sudan; most of Latin America – except Brazil, Argentina and Mexico (they are observers); and most of Asia and the Middle East (China is an observer).

So what this formidable collection of globally representative nation-states came up with? Apparently not much – except a long final document that few will read, calling for traditional NAM themes such as non-interference and pledging global peace and cooperation.

After Iran passed the baton, Venezuela now chairs NAM for the next three years – which will be rocked by extreme social/politico/economic turbulence (this is a good summary of where we stand). President Nicolas Maduro went no holds barred to denounce a Washington offensive in Latin America and particularly against his administration, bent on regime change via an «economic war». His diagnostic is essentially correct.

And that nails the problem if you’re non-aligned in the digital, liquid modernity era; geopolitically, and geoeconomically, you’re an easy prey to all manner of algorithmic manipulations. Your nation doesn’t even have to be brought down to «order» – as in the Washington consensus – via a coup; it’s all essentially virtual.

The oil price war – conducted mostly by Saudi Arabia, and relying on electronic speculation – has devastated the Venezuelan economy, whose budget, to the extent of 96%, depends on oil exports. Food and medicine scarcity has reached alarming levels – as much as the inflation rate, arguably the highest on the planet at the moment.

In parallel meetings, Caracas has been desperately striving to find some consensus to freeze global oil production before OPEC’s next crucial meeting by the end of the month in Alger. The Venezuelan government has correctly identified that a politicized OPEC, during the Saudi-controlled oil price war, was bent on hitting Iran, Russia and Venezuela. Maduro now proposes that OPEC should stop operating in the free market because there’s significant overproduction.

Electronic manipulation rules. Yet politics, of course, still plays a role; in these oil market discussions as well as in the recent Mercosur decision to prevent Venezuela from exercizing the temporary presidency of the South American trade bloc.

So during NAM Maduro strove to find support among his few remaining allies, such as Rafael Correa from Ecuador, Raúl Castro from Cuba, Evo Morales from Bolivia and Hassan Rouhani from Iran. Yet none of these have much of a way of influencing Saudi Arabia’s – and His Masters’ Voice’s – game.

It was not only Venezuela. Quite a few nations at the summit predictably accused the Exceptionalists of «interference». But it was up to the Democratic Republic of North Korea (DPRK) to go no (surrealist) holds barred, actually threatening to blow things up with no warning.

Where’s the new Sukarno?

Those were the days of Nehru, Sukarno, Nasser and Tito in the early 1960s. Not to mention NAM’s seminal event – the 1955 Bandung Conference hosted by Indonesia’s Sukarno. That’s when a who’s who of the former «Third World», now Global South – including Sukarno, Nasser, Nehru, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai, Sihanouk, U Thant and Indira Gandhi – adopted a «declaration on promotion of world peace and cooperation» and collectively pledged to remain neutral in the Cold War.

The spirit of Bandung is somewhat alive – as NAM remains committed against imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, racism, foreign aggression/interference, occupation and hegemony. Call it NAM against the Empire. Yet the Empire, post-Shock and Awe, is way more subtle in its interference mechanisms, privileging myriad declinations of Hybrid War – from color revolutions to economic war to the latest institutional/parliamentary / judiciary / media impeachment/regime change farce in Brazil.

Cold War also persists, now rebranded Cold War 2.0, essentially pitting NATO against Russia, in parallel to the containment of China via the «pivot to Asia». Russia and China are the Pentagon’s avowed top two «threats» – which for all practical purposes should align their own strategic partnership with an extended NAM strategic partnership.

The spirit of NAM would prevent it from being aligned within a geopolitical/military structure; but as China advances One Belt, One Road (OBOR), the New Silk Roads, into which the Russia-driven Eurasia Economic Union (EEU) will eventually merge, that is progress according to the interests of NAM.

These – OBOR and EEU – are the only integration project in the world for the foreseeable future, centered on Eurasia, of course, but with multiple ramifications across Asia, Africa and even Latin America; the Chinese-proposed Atlantic-Pacific railway, for instance, from Brazil to Peru, can be seen as a South American Silk Road.

NAM’s holy trinity of multilateralism, equality and mutual non-aggression is also replicated by the BRICS union – which next month in their summit in Goa should be advancing practical development mechanisms such as the New Development Bank (NDB) – which, for all practical purposes, also will progress according to the interests of the Global South.

A way out for Venezuela from now on is to strengthen alliances with Latin American integration groups side by side with NAM and in connection with BRICS and the G20 – all striving for a multipolar world and away from the pathetically medieval punishment incarnated by Exceptionalist sanctions.

An extra key item was discussed at the summit; a «reorganization process», as Maduro coined it, of the UN system, especially the UN Security Council. In realpolitik terms, that’s not gonna happen. As it stands, Russia is the only permanent member open for this kind of discussion.

Realpolitik also dictates that NAM nations will continue to be marginalized – and ruthlessly exploited – by sophisticated neocolonial mechanisms embedded in the unipolar logic. So it’s NAM against Exceptionalistan; NAM against neoliberal globalization and its torrents of inequality; and NAM against casino capitalism.

It will be a long and winding road. NAM may not have much except a Jakarta-based Center for South-South Technical Cooperation, and a number of joint committees with the Group of 77 developing nations. But they do hold the moral high ground in the fight for a more equal, balanced and decent world.

Steering clear of the bipolar world's wrestling camps, the NAM peers, to varying extents, subscribed to the ideology of building societies on the foundations of justice and social progress, condemned the Western dictate, and, as necessary, even engaged with the Eastern bloc. The NAM internal mechanics changed following the collapse of the latter and the advent of globalization which replaced the neocolonial agenda with new imperatives. These days, the NAM seems divided, with many of its members – India, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. now solidly in the US orbit and others – Yugoslavia and Libya – undermined and ultimately destroyed by the globalizing world's leaders. Still others, Romania and Finland, for example, opted out of the NAM as their priorities drifted away from the alliance's program. From a wider perspective, the rejection of the socialist development model triggered an identity crisis in the NAM, prompting the majority of its members to search for alternative strategies and to switch to diluted forms of involvement with the alliance. The NAM continues to function nevertheless, holds congresses every three years, but is only a shadow of the influence it used to be internationally. The US diplomacy hastily wrote off the NAM as such, and the view that today's world holds no place for it is pressed by many of the world watchers, but that may prove to be an overstatement. The NAM convention in Tehran drew high-level representatives from 116 countries, among them – 36 presidents, vice presidents, or premiers, plus 80 foreign ministers and special envoys, which is indicative of the alliance's unwaning importance. By being able to host an event of such proportions, Tehran largely dispelled the US myth that Iran is perceived globally as a rogue country. In fact, at the moment Washington has to realize that its efforts to drum up support for a crackdown on Iran produced no result, considering that only a handful of countries outside of NATO would embrace a ban on the Iranian controversial nuclear program. In contrast, the broad NAM forum slammed the US over its hardline policies and reaffirmed Iran's right to a peaceful nuclear program including the full enrichment cycle. It is fair to say that NAM's taking a strong stance on the key issue alone made the conference an international highlight. Iran, it must be noted, is a signatory to the Nonproliferation Treaty and reaffirms commitment to it on every appropriate occasion, while Israel which threatens to bomb the Iranian nuclear installations, has not penned the Treaty and is known to have nuclear arsenals. Tel Aviv recently voiced a new round of threats against Iran, and German chancellor Angela Merkel urged the Israelis to exercise restraint, but the show should not obscure the developing world's unreceptiveness to the US foreign-policy agenda or eagerness to rely on its own vision in dealing with the Iranian nuclear program and beyond. It increasingly transpires that, as the unraveling of the conflict over Iran's nuclear program once again showed, the US should adopt a soberer approach to international affairs and at least become aware of the pervasive allergies to its tendencies towards unilateralism and whip-and-carrot games. 

A serious debate over Syria erupted at the NAM conference. Divided over the issue, the forum, despite Tehran's efforts, decided to say nothing about the current Syrian crisis in its final document. The speech delivered by Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi left no doubt that some of the country leaders buy the picture painted by the Western propaganda and fail to grab the essence of what is happening in Syria. In an emotional address, Morsi lambasted B. Assad and asserted that supporting the Syrian opposition was a “moral duty” for the NAM, stressing the continuity between the regime changes in Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen and the looming Syrian transition. As a result, the forum dynamics took a turn unfavorable to Syria. Morsi's statement attracted indirect criticism from Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Iranian parliament’s Middle East adviser Hossein Sheikholeslam told the Mehr News Agency that Morsi “committed a big mistake by availing himself of his position (as NAM president) and expressing the standpoints of Egypt while ignoring all NAM principles". Indeed, Assad's government is completely legitimate and recognized throughout the world, which puts Morsi at odds with the protocol, but it should be further taken into account that the Egyptian leader hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, a group with a curious concept of what liberty should mean for the region. Guerrillas from the Muslim Brotherhood are known to be fighting on the side of the opposition in Syria. 

The participation of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in the conference served to underscore the significance of the event. The US Department of State expressed reservations concerning Ban Ki-moon's plan to visit Iran, but the tour actually opened up opportunities for meaningful and, in part, unanticipated discussions. While in Tehran, the UN Secretary-General expressed concern over Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions and human rights problems. Speaking at the Iranian School of International Relations, he told about having demanded the release of Iran's political convicts during a meeting with Ayatollah Khamenei and also quoted the Iranian leader as saying that the country regards the pursuit of nuclear weapons as deeply sinuous and never had anything like that in mind, meaning that the sanctions slapped on Iran are absolutely groundless. The point made by Ayatollah Khamenei was that the ruthless treatment only reinforces the Iranians' belief in their cause. He also criticized the structure of the UN Security Council as undemocratic, irrational, and tantamount to a disguised dictatorship enabled to implement its policies “in a bulling manner”. Seeing the situation through Iran's prism certainly had to give Ban Ki-moon a freshly realistic perspective on the situation. For Tehran, having the UN Secretary-General attending reinforced Iran's claim to the NAM leadership, a position it surely deserves as the country spearheading the opposition to aggressive globalism. 

Tehran clearly accomplished its objectives by hosting the NAM conference which demonstrated that the informal alliance is in the process of overcoming its identity crisis. The sense of cohesion within the NAM is growing, largely on the basis of anti-Americanism, and Iran as the country constantly held at Washington's gunpoint naturally must be at the helm. Overall, the NAM present-day anti-Americanism reads as a wider anti-Western trend that will be gaining momentum as the world economic crisis rages on and attempts to impose US-style “democracy” on sovereign nations multiply. The forum's advocacy of Iran's rights in connection with its nuclear program reflected the position with utmost clarity. It was no coincidence that the NAM conference gathered in Tehran – the member-countries recognize Iran's leadership potential, and presiding over the alliance in the coming three years, Tehran will do its best to exceed the expectations. 

Russia's ambassador-at-large Konstantin Shuvalov represented Moscow at the NAM conference. The level of representation seems somewhat low to allow for full-scale interactions with country leaders in the framework, and chances are that, in the wake of the conference, Russia will dispatch a higher-level diplomat to the next forum.

NAM emerged as a body which could, to quote one of its founders Jawaharlal Nehru, “The preservation of peace forms the central aim of India’s policy. ‎It is in the pursuit of this policy ‎that we have chosen the path of ‎nonalignment.” Since its inception at Bandung in Indonesia in 1955, and its formalization in 1961 at Belgrade, the body has undergone dramatic transformations in the past six decades. At the time of end of the cold war, the movement apparently comprised members from every bloc, whether socialist or capitalist or neutral. It rose to prominence as one of conscience keepers in international politics despite criticisms from high quarters as ‘immoral’ or unethical or opportunist. In the post-cold war setting importantly it redeemed itself from the old task of maintaining neutrality and aimed at developing friendly relations with all countries with focus on a range of issues. The issues ranged from climate change, peaceful resolution of conflicts, democratization of international decision making process, giving voice to the poor countries at global high table. More so, its existence pointed to the imbalance and asymmetry in international power structure which needs to be addressed. 

However, in the sphere conflict resolution the record of NAM is not very propitious. From this point of view, NAM’s pronunciation on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict may not enhance its international stature; rather it may further dent its internationalist image. In the past there are many instances in which NAM mechanism as a conflict reduction mechanism received severe jolt. One of such case was the Colombo plan in 1962, mooted by the NAM member Sri Lanka along with some other members of the body to defuse crisis in relations between India and China which went to war the same year. The Colombo plan for peace faltered despite earnest attempts of the members to work out a peaceful resolution of India-China conflict. In this case, the realist national policy trumped over the ideals of peace and peaceful resolution of conflicts as propagated by the NAM. Despite its huge membership, the organization could not emerge as an effective international body mainly owing to difference among the members, contrasting agenda of the members, apathy by leading members like India, and also apparent lack of direction and vision on part of this international body.

In this particular case of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is an enclave within Azerbaijani territory but with majority Armenian population, the conflict is really a simmering one since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without going deeper into this conflict, it can be emphasized that it is one of the most volatile conflicts in the trans-Caucasus region. It has not displayed any signs of resolution despite interventions by the United Nations and other multilateral bodies like Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Hence, in this background the NAM intervention will not add anything positive as Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan, Elmar Mamedyarov has claimed, but it will further make another party to conflict Armenia further rigid in its position. Mamedyarov stated, “we are happy to see the Non-Aligned Movement’s member-countries’ unanimous support of Azerbaijan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and stability of its internationally recognized borders.” In contrast, his Armenian counterpart, Edward Nalbandyan observed that “It’s been one year only since Azerbaijan became a NAM member and in this short period has managed to start abusing its membership in attempts to mislead the other members of this organization inciting them against the positions of the international community.” It appears that the body has been used to further the objective of a particular nation, rather than actually helping to resolve a conflict. 

Azerbaijan joined the NAM club only last year. In that sense it was a new entrant. Armenia enjoys the observer status in the club. It appears striking as well that within one year after joining the group, Azerbaijan could muster enough support to let the 382nd provision of the NAM final document pass despite opposition from Armenia. While Armenia was interested to see the draft mentioning ‘Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,’ which stands as a conflict per se, Azerbaijan was interested to see it as a ‘Azerbaijan-Armenian conflict,’ implying that it is a conflict between the two states and, from Azeri point of view, the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh which exists within the territory of Azerbaijan should form part of this Caspian sea littoral state. The NAM document seems to have endorsed this viewpoint howsoever innocuously by accepting the draft favoured by Azerbaijan. While Azezi media went all gaga and extolled Azeri policies as just and fair, and cited the NAM pronouncement to lend credence to the arguments, the Armenian media went ballistic in denouncing the pronouncement and criticizing the body for being partial. 

Perhaps the summit meeting in Iran in coming August will rectify this lapse. It can emerge as a conflict-reduction mechanism when it can actually bring contrasting parties to a common dialogue table. At present it has neither that expertize, nor the willingness to do so, nor the resources to carry such activities. Instead of focusing on conflict resolution, it has many other pressing tasks to perform, which include raising the issues of reform of international bodies like the United Nation system, nuclear disarmament and clean and green energy, and a fair and just multipolar world order. The body comprises of nations representing more than half of the world’s population and that gives it the moral leverage which it can use to nudge international powers as well as regional powers towards a better international order. Regarding conflict resolution, NAM can play a moral guardian rather than a Samaritan to advocate the case of a particular country.