After weeks of fevered speculation and agonizing uncertainty, Joe Biden has finally decided to pass the political baton on to his Vice-President, Kamala Harris. From a purely personal point of view, the manner of his going had all the makings of tragedy. Nonetheless, his departure has clearly altered the political landscape in significant ways.
Much focus will now of course shift to what happens inside the Democratic Party and whether or not they can turn the political tide which has been running against them over the past few weeks and months. They may well succeed in doing so. After all, on a number of big issues including jobs, climate and abortion rights, it would seem that their policies remain popular among a majority of Americans.
Yet for the time being, Trump and the GOP remain ahead in the polls and have a marginal lead in most of the key swing states. Three months is a very long time in politics. But based on current data at least – and what is true now might not be true in three months’ time – the more likely winner in November is still going be Trump. Which raises the intriguing question for those of us who do not have a vote in an election that will shape all of our lives going forward: What impact might a Trump victory and his particular brand of ‘America First’ politics have on the world at large?
Friends
The answer, quite simply, is a very great deal, especially for those friends abroad who, since 2020, have become accustomed to an administration which made building bridges to democratic allies a priority.
Ukraine clearly has the most to be worried about, and for good reason, given that not so long ago, Trump’s chosen running mate, Senator J. D. Vance, was telling an audience of Republican enthusiasts that it was no longer in the American interest ‘to fund a never-ending war’ there. This is hardly something Ukrainians are likely to agree with. Nor will most members of the NATO alliance who at their last summit in July pledged to continue support for Ukraine against Russia whose ‘brutal war of aggression’ was launched against Ukraine as a nation and the security of the ‘European continent’ more generally.
Vance of course does not speak for all Republicans. Nonetheless, the fact that he could become Vice-President in November has raised serious concerns in Brussels. Nor will the European Union itself be especially reassured by the possibility of a Trump victory given what Trump himself said in an interview with Bloomberg in July when he threatened to impose a 10 per cent across-the-board levy on all imports from across the Atlantic. Few in Europe approved of the way Biden got out of Afghanistan; his industrial policies have not gone down well either. However, a Trump administration which in the past has treated the EU with a degree of animosity verging on the hostile – in 2018 he called it a ‘foe’ ahead of Russia and China – presents a very different kind of challenge indeed.
Rivals
But if America’s friends across the Atlantic are becoming concerned – almost to the point of panic in some cases – what about America’s main international rival on the other side of the Pacific? How is the possibility of a Trump victory being seen there? There is no straightforward answer. The Biden White House may have dialled down on its anti-China rhetoric over the past year in an attempt to prevent the relationship going into freefall. But it has hardly proved to be a soft touch. Indeed, since his team took over in 2020, it has put the technological squeeze on China, called Beijing out over Taiwan and taken it to task for backing Putin over the war in Ukraine.
That said, Xi and his comrades in Zhongnanhai can hardly be looking forward to a new administration most of whose key people think the Democrats have been too soft on China and that the best way of dealing with it is by imposing a 60 per cent tariff on most Chinese imports. Nor can they have been too pleased to hear a senior Republican saying back in April that the United States shouldn’t just be managing the competition with China, but seeking to ‘win it’.
Of course what is said during the campaign and what happens in practice may be quite different, especially if US corporations with an interest in China weigh in on the debate. But no matter. Playing tough on China (and even tougher than the toughest of Democrats) would seem to play well to an American audience eight in ten of whom have an unfavourable view of China, and 42 per cent of whom see it as an enemy.
Gaza and Iran
All this still begs a much larger question: how will this impact an already unsettled international system in which the United States continues to have a massive stake?
Take the Middle East for instance, where US backing for Israel over the war in Gaza has already lost it a huge amount of support across the region while allowing its two main rivals, China and Russia, to make major inroads. How might a Trump victory change the dynamics in a part of the world where the US used to have a strategic near-monopoly?
The simple answer is probably very badly indeed. Biden may be bad enough in the eyes of many on the Arab streets. But given his views on Israel and Netanyahu, Trump is hardly likely to receive higher ratings. It was Trump after all who insisted that the US embassy move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It was Trump moreover who, in tandem with Netanyahu, scuppered the Iranian nuclear deal back in 2018. It was Trump too who, during his first term, slashed funding to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees and closed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington.
It is of course true that Trump did bring about the Abraham Accords between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Yet, as critics have pointed out, far from addressing the Palestinian problem, they effectively pushed it to one side, and may indeed have been a factor in bringing about the crisis that has engulfed the whole region ever since. Moreover, nothing either Trump or Vance have said during the current presidential campaign suggests they are likely to do anything that will bring order to what is already an explosive situation. There is also a very real chance of a further deterioration in relations with Iran. As Vance put it in an interview with Fox News: ‘A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran—but not these weak little bombing runs. If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard’, a statement of intent that hardly bodes well for the future.
The poor
If the future of the wider Middle East looks decidedly uncertain, what about the bulk of humanity living in that part of the world now regularly referred to as the ‘Global South’? There is no doubt that once poor countries (many now grouped into the ever-expanding BRICS organisation) have achieved levels of prosperity that would in the past have been thought unimaginable. Even so, the world remains a deeply unequal place, and fairly or unfairly, many within the Global South blame their condition on the West, whose ‘double standards’ on a whole range of issues from climate action to trade they have been criticising with ever-greater intensity over the past few years. Nor, it seems, is the Global South willing any longer to listen to what the West has to say. As the former Indonesian ambassador to Australia complained, why should we listen to what Western nations have to say, pontificating as they do from their ‘high pedestal’ on how the ‘rest of the world’ ought to behave? The Malaysian Premier Najib Razak agreed, adding that former colonial powers should stop lecturing nations they once exploited and start putting their own houses in order.
Nothing so far indicates that the growing gap between the South and the North is going to be bridged if Trump and Vance win power. Both seem to be either indifferent or ill-informed about the many challenges facing the countries in the Global South. Threats to impose tariffs on all imports are hardly going to improve relations either. Moreover, if Trump’s new team moves ahead and cuts foreign aid – as it is threatening to – then this would only confirm to people across Latin America, Africa and Asia that the United States is simply not on their side (and that possibly China is).
Nor can they take much comfort from the way in which Trump in the past has spoken about immigrants from the poorer parts of the world. Many Americans no doubt feel a great deal of sympathy for those still trying to get over the ‘Wall’ into the United States. But not Trump, who appears to regard all migrants (legal or illegal) as either fuelling violent crime or overrunning US social services. Either way, the clear message he is conveying is that the poor and the desperate should stay away, only confirming the Global South’s suspicion that the United States is no different, and indeed no better than any other great power that has sought to run the world.
The future?
We would thus seem to be at one of those great tipping points in American history. Of course, there is no knowing what lies ahead. The Democratic Party might still win. The Trump campaign could implode. Still, what might have seemed inconceivable only a year ago – a Trump victory – does not seem beyond the bounds of possibility as Americans get ready to vote in what could easily be the most consequential race for the White House of recent times.
But should the world be as worried as many seem to be about a possible Trump victory? Not according to some pundits, who insist that once in power he will be compelled to move back to the centre as the ‘adults in the room’ edge him towards a more balanced approach to international affairs. Some have even sought comfort by insisting that in the end there is still something called the ‘national interest’, and because Trump’s policies clearly run counter to the established rules that have guided America since the end of World War II, he will have to abandon his ‘America First’ strategy.
But interests as we know are not just a given; they are constructed by ambitious politicians who in an age of polarisation and disinformation are perfectly happy to appeal to an American electorate grown sceptical about the standard foreign policy mantra that it is up to the United States – this ‘indispensable nation’ as Madeleine Albright once called it – to lead the world and if necessary pay a price for doing so. During the Cold War, and even for a few years after it ended, that call to action appeared to work. In 2024, it no longer seems to be doing so. Liberal internationalism may not be dead just yet. But if Trump were to win in November a final nail may be struck into its coffin, destroyed not by its illiberal opponents abroad, but the successful takeover of the Grand Old Party by someone who transformed it in a matter of a few years into a more populist, nativist, avowedly protectionist and semi-isolationist party sceptical of immigration, free trade and military interventionism. The countries of the world will now have to wait and see what Trump’s success within his own party might mean for them. All one can say with some certainty is that if he were to win as many predict (though with greater confidence than is perhaps justified at this moment), an already unsettled international order could very easily, and very quickly, become more unsettled still.
Michael Cox is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics.
Agonies of Empire by Michael Cox is available to pre-order on the Bristol University Press website. Find it here for £24.99.
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