Low expectations may be the key to a happy 2017

Happy 2017 to all. And may it come with fewer unpleasant surprises than 2016. It is difficult to start the year with a sense of optimism, if only because we have yet to find out how damaging the likes of the Trump victory and the Brexit vote prove to be for their nations, their regions and indeed the world. The spectre of global trade disruption is still rising and the sense of insecurity among China’s leaders is no help either.

Even some of the better things that happened in 2016 may yet be undone by a Trump presidency. Obama has left a legacy of long overdue shifts in policies that owed far more to vociferous ethnic domestic interests than to US national interest: the beginnings of rapprochement with Cuba and Iran, and the end of the carte blanche that the US veto had given to the expansion of Israel. All these are soon to be at risk.

Taiwan’s Asian first – electing a woman who is not related to a former leader – is facing huge cross-strait and economic challenges.

Closer to home, the politics of Malaysia seem destined to get even worse before the nation can rid itself of a prime minister who should have been swept away by the evidence in the 1MDB scandal but hangs on through money power and stirring racial animosities. Thailand has a new king but no path forward. Indonesia is struggling to sustain its secular democratic system as cynical politicians try to exploit Islamist fervour. The Philippines elected a man who gives the appearance of being as accustomed to (prescription) opioids as the thousands of the victims of his anti-illegal drug killing spree.