It certainly has been an astonishing and harrowing year. This is one to put away as soon as possible to make way for the hope of a better result in 2017 – at least one in which we have more of a chance to survive and thrive.

Despite all the political upheavals, it could have been a great year if a dedicated team of research biologists had been able announce they had decisively unlocked the subtle biochemical triggers that are the fundamental cause of cancer – and that the way to reverse this doleful circumstance was something tucked away at the back of almost everyone’s kitchen cupboard. Or, if astronomers, poring over vast terrabytes of data from the Hubble and Kepler orbiting telescopes, had announced an astonishing answer to the question of SETI – because they had found the goods deeply encoded in the signals they had been examining and they had been there quietly for years.

And, of course, if one lived – or still tries to live – in Syria, Yemen, much of Iraq, northeastern Nigeria, Somalia, as well as a dozen other unfortunate places, 2016 has been a year where the manmade cataclysms came at people, one right after the other, unceasingly, and, increasingly, beyond human endurance.

For millions, the ever-elusive promise of an increasingly pacific, bountiful future has evaporated or been blown to smithereens by barrel bombs, IEDs and cruise missiles or just plain, garden-variety rifle fire. For yet others, their denouement came when the waters of the Mediterranean began lapping over the gunnels of a small, leaky, overcrowded boat, just before it sank beneath that wine dark sea.

It would have been good for the soul to be able to salute someone of the calibre of Pope Francis II for his unceasing global efforts to reorient an entire worldwide church, overlaid with layers of antiquated values and rituals, and nudge it in the direction of that church’s more authentic, original teachings. Sadly, however, much of that effort still remains one of anticipation and hope, rather than actual “service delivery”. So far, at least.

Alternatively, one could tip the hat in the direction of German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her continuing defence of policies that have given hope to hundreds of thousands of desperate, homeless refugees, at a time when she often seemed to be the only adult in a room filled with squabbling children masquerading as the rest of the world’s political leaders. This was important for the individual refugees, but her example has largely gone unheeded by so many others supposedly in official positions designed to make the world a more humane place.

Meanwhile, a nasty version of ethnic politics seems to have stolen a march in much of Europe as well. This has ranged from the Brexit voters remembering that imaginary kingdom, courtesy of Nigel Farage, when those awful foreigners didn’t tell doughty Britishers what to do; to French voters seemingly poised to send a message to their nation’s political nervous system via Marine Le Pen; to some formerly-fringe groups in Germany and the Netherlands that are now edging into mainstream politics. The defeat of one nativist-populist in Austria the other day still demonstrated that close to half of all Austrians were comfortable with such groups.

In Moscow, meanwhile, the increasingly authoritarian presence of Vladimir Putin has cast a shadow over the entire post-Cold War framework in Europe and, increasingly, in the Middle East. Struggling with a stuttering, faltering economy, Putin has apparently decided that recreating the old Soviet imperium, and, indeed, an even older Czarist empire is a logical pathway for the future and the way to hold on to popular, populist support. This has come as he has started to press now-independent states like Estonia and Latvia, and more aggressively still against Ukraine, and Georgia, to bend to Russia’s ideas of a new European order. Credit for the charnel house that much of Syria has become can increasingly be laid at the feet of Putin’s dream for empire as well.

But Vladimir Putin’s supreme achievement for 2016, so far at least, has been to help tip the scales in the most recent election in Donald Trump’s favour, whether this came about by direct efforts or from indirection. Of this result, and making no bones about the results, economist Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times argued,

“And when, as you know will happen, the administration begins treating criticism as unpatriotic, the answer should be: You have to be kidding. Mr Trump is, by all indications, the Siberian candidate, installed with the help of and remarkably deferential to a hostile foreign power. And his critics are the people who lack patriotism?”

Given Putin’s actions and Trump’s pronouncements, even before he actually moves into the White House for real, the result may well have already become a kind of informal co-dominium to be exercised by two national leaders who seem almost entirely uninterested in promoting civil liberties, human rights – and all those other values so painfully gained over past centuries. This partnership increasingly appears to be heralding an era of transactional politics, and international economics and international relations that will be virtually devoid of aspirations for anything other than “the deal”.

And as for Donald J Trump himself, his victory in the recent American presidential election represents a special kind of collapse in the belief in the promise of America. While it is factual that a true majority of the nation’s voters did not put an X beside his name, and even though his electoral victory essentially derived from some paper-thin majorities in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the fact is that there he was, at the end of it all, taking Hillary Clinton’s concession. It has meant that American elections increasingly have become about how much viciousness, crudity, appeals to ethnic animosity and hatred, and, ultimately, outright misrepresentation and bald-faced lying can be brought to bear – first to terrify, next to anger, then finally to sway voters.

Along the way the victor fed racial and economic class animosities, ruminated over the possibility of nuclear warfare and support for the further proliferation of these weapons, and encouraged a belief that a whole litany of minorities at home and many, maybe most nations abroad were on a course to destroy the United States. His campaign rallies sometimes seemed about to turn into the kind of savage, atavistic behaviour of mankind’s natural state as envisioned by William Golding in his Lord of the Flies, or back in Thomas Hobbes’ stark vision of Leviathan: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Chris Cillizza could write of this Trumpian victory,

“The simple truth is that Trump’s transition process has been a logical continuation of the campaign he ran: a total disregard for the established methods and the rules governing those methods. If you back Trump, you are undoubtedly thrilled with these moves, believing that he promised radical change in a broken Washington and is delivering on it. If you oppose Trump, you see his flouting of the established order as not only risky, but also deeply dangerous.

“I take no side in that fight. But I do think that it’s absolutely necessary to avoid using the old measures of success or failure to assess Trump. He has proved, repeatedly, that those metrics simply do not apply to him. To continue to analyse him and his moves as we would, say, President Jeb Bush or President Hillary Clinton, is to ignore the fact that any traditional analysis of the campaign Trump ran would never have put him anywhere near the White House.”

And Cillizza’s fellow columnist at the Washington Post, EJ Dionne, in contemplating the evolution in thinking that President-elect Trump has been undertaking as he slides towards that embrace of Putin and so much of what he stands for, argued,

“Trump and his top lieutenant Stephen K Bannon have openly allied themselves with the far-right forces in Europe that Putin has championed. In a timely article for the Atlantic, ‘Russia and the Threat to Liberal Democracy,’ Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution [hardly a hotbed of pallid lefty liberals], speaks of a ‘romance between far-right, anti-immigrant European parties’ and Putin. A Trump romance with Putin fits neatly into this narrative – which is precisely why Trump should want to dispel our fears rather than aggravate them. Diamond declared: ‘We stand now at the most dangerous moment for liberal democracy since the end of World War II.’ Why are we afraid? Because Trump gives us reason to worry he will not be on the right side of this fight.”

Still, the weight of Vladimir Putin’s impact could be restrained and tempered decisively by more resolute American leadership, especially a brand of leadership thoroughly steeped in the values that has made the country – despite all its too-visible imperfections and missteps – into a beacon of hope and optimism to so many millions around the globe for over two-and-a-half centuries. But, by contrast, the coming alignment with Putin’s Russia via Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision, even if it remains a tacit one, in order to push back against China’s economic efforts, moves the global needle on the scale to a place where the recovery of ideals will become that much harder in future.

Trump’s embrace of all these grim, angry positions at home (such as his public utterances over jailing political opponents and depriving dissidents of their citizenship if they dare disfigure a flag, even as his cabinet becomes populated by spiritual heirs of 19^th century robber barons) and those abroad now foreshadow the real possibilities of a very dark period in our lives – and lasting harm to the globe. And we are not even speaking of Trump’s plans to roll back the Paris global climate change accord or abrogate the P5+1 – Iran nuclear agreement.

A world where the opportunistic values of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin line up behind a Bashir al-Assad (as well as the pinched views of a Nigel Farage, a Viktor Orban, and a Marine Le Pen, among others in or out of power still, but pressing forward) is a world that is about to become a much meaner place than before. Maybe 2017 will yet be better for us. For this, let us pray, each and every one of us – even those staunch agnostics and atheists among us. We shall surely need the help. DM

Photo: A billboard by pro-Serbian movement shows the image US President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as a truck drives past in the town of Danilovgrad, Montenegro, 16 November 2016. EPA/BORIS PEJOVIC