While Russia may have donned the public-facing mantle for meddling and media manipulation, one is puts out of mind the Trump regime’s other cosy relationships at one’s peril.While debate rages on about the extent that Russia undermined the US presidential election or whether democratic institutions can be under siege from multiple fronts or not—some seem to have adopted the contrarian narrative that it can’t be both Russia and sophistry—other political strongmen in the Middle East have leveraged Trump’s compromising business-ties to achieve desired, measurable outcomes at the expense of alienating other regional partners and players for the appeasement and enrichment of the few whose tensions will pull the world into a fresh conflagration—not that the embers from before are not still glowing.