CODA
The leader of NATO’s newest member state had a first-hand lesson in power dynamics at the alliance summit in Brussels, when he found himself pushed out of the way by US President Donald Trump.
Video of the interaction shows Trump grabbing the shoulder of Prime Minister Duško Marković of Montenegro and pushing him aside so he could get through to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. Trump then adjusts his jacket and answers a question from Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, as the flustered Marković smiles and nods behind them. Of course, the gesture comes naturally to Trump, who is a narcissistic bully with nonexistent manners.
Not that, as the latest member of the Western “democracies” club, Montenegro bears any recognizable resemblance to a democratic society. For nearly the last thirty years, while part of Yugoslavia as well as after “independence” in 2006, Montenegro has been ruled by the deceptively misnamed “Party of Democratic Socialists,” a reinvented off-shoot of the old Communist Party, but now with opportunistically adopted globalist policies and pro-Western rhetorical trappings devoid of any substance. Presidents and Prime Ministers of Montenegro may rotate and change, but the regime’s éminence grise since mid-1990s (occasionally even personally doing the honors in both top positions) has been the PDS party boss and Montenegro’s long-time shadow ruler, Milo Djukanovic.