Happy new year and welcome to the first Guardian Weekly of 2019 – our centenary year. This January marks not just the inauguration of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and – in theory – a vote in the UK parliament on Theresa May’s Brexit deal, but also the halfway mark of Donald Trump’s first term. Many will be hoping that it also means the halfway mark of his presidency and well … we’ll see. In this week’s big story, our Washington bureau chief David Smith looks at the first two years of the Trump administration and what his presidency has meant for the US and the world. Then, reporters Tom McCarthy and Sabrina Siddiqui analyse the two biggest threats to Trump’s job security – the newly Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and the quietly escalating Mueller investigation. It’s tempting to wonder what we will be saying about their respective roles come January 2021.
One Trump decision which will have global consequences in 2019 was one he announced in December: that the US was to pull its troops out of Syria. The decision shocked his own generals and diplomats and cost him the services of his defence secretary James Mattis. We are yet to see what the full consequences will be but, as Hassan Hassan reports on page 24, the loss of US personnel in Syria came as a year-ending boon to Bashar al-Assad, whose bloody war on his own people now looks like it will end in victory for the Syrian president. With the US-backed Kurds cast adrift by the removal of 2,000 American troops, the geopolitical crucible in Syria, featuring the Assad regime, the Kurds, Iran, Turkey, Russia and Arab powers threatens to become ever more complicated – with the main benefactor seeming to be Assad.
One of the UK’s biggest stories in 2018 was the attempted assassination of former Russian operative Sergei Skripal in the English cathedral city of Salisbury.
Skripal somehow managed to survive what many believe was a Putin-approved novichok attack – making him one of only two living GRU defectors. The other is Viktor Suvorov, who left the spy agency in 1978 and has been living in fear of a Skripal-like revenge attack ever since. Suvurov tells Luke Harding, our former Moscow correspondent who covered the Skripal case extensively, about the bungled attempted murder and the incredible story of his own defection.
A final highlight this week is Observer art critic Laura Cumming’s beautiful telling of the story of Rembrandt’s doomed marriage to Saskia van Uylenburgh. Images of their love form part of the Netherlands’ country-wide celebrations of the painter in 2019.
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