Author: Ecaterina Cojuhari – 31/10/2024
Apero Geopolitique: “U.S. Presidential Election: What’s Next?”
All the world is observing now the upcoming presidential elections in the USA, the world’s leading power, which is now more divided than ever. On the one hand, Donald Trump embodies the deep, downgraded America, losing out to globalization and calling for a return to industrial protectionism to restore its economic sovereignty. On the other hand, Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, represents an America of large cities, minorities, and winners of globalization, anchored in new societal values. The 2024 US elections are unpredictable and could well redraw alliances, geopolitical strategies, and the international order.
During the Apéro géopolitique discussion on October 21 in Geneva, organized in partnership with SWISS UMEF University of Applies Sciences Institute, Dr. Daniel Warner – American-Swiss expert, former Deputy to the Director of the Geneva Graduate Institute, Brunson McKinley – Diplomat at the US State Department, Former Director General of the International Office for Migration at the UN in Geneva, and Hicheme Lehmici – a geopolitical analyst, secretary at GIPRI, discussed this hot topic and answered the most relevant questions.
Theatre campaign and chronopolitics
– Doctor Warner, why is the U.S. election so important for the U.S. and the world?
– I’d like to make two comments in answering your question. The first comment deals with everyone’s use of the term geopolitics. I don’t think this election has anything to do with geopolitics. The election is about chronopolitics. Chronopolitics is time. And Trump’s comment about making America great again, the election is all about again. It’s about Donald Trump in the 1950s representing masculinity, the dominant male, and dominant United States. He says that Kamala Harris is a communist and her father is a Marxist, we are returning to the Cold War and the era of Joe McCarthy.
On the other hand, Ms. Harris could become the first female president in 236 years of the United States. She is female, a woman of color. She has had no children of her own. She is a part of a reconstructed family. So in a sense, her very identity represents change, whereas Trump’s identity represents a return to a nostalgia for the United States as the dominant power after the Second World War.
My second point is about the role of democracy. I want to start by saying, what about the role of the United States? Quite simply, from October 22nd to October 24th, a group of countries met in Kazan, Russia, the BRICS+. In the Western press, there is no mention of this, as if all of those countries and the Global South don’t exist. I also point out that Africa makes up about 20% of the world’s population. President Biden just canceled his trip to Angola, and he has never in four years been to Africa. So the assumption that this election is that important should be called into question.
My last comment is, why do people love or watch the American election? It is the greatest theatre production anywhere in the world. So-called leaders of the free world talking about people eating pets and their golf swings… is an embarrassment. And I’ ‘m being very diplomatic.
– How would you characterize the election campaign and its dynamics by both candidates?
– When I was considerably younger, I helped run a campaign for president of the United States. It is the most adrenaline-filled job any young person can ever have. It is excitement. But it’s theatre. It’ s all about the mise-en-scène, about the lobby groups. If we watch the Democratic convention in Chicago, it was all staged. Everything is staged. There is nothing that is ad hoc.
In 1858, running for senator of Illinois, not president, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated for four days, six hours each day. The results of the debate were published and distributed throughout the United States. So the campaigns today are just for television. It is a theatre and entertainment. They are not serious politics. Real issues are never discussed. Climate and nuclear weapons are the most important topics for the U.S. and all of us on this planet.
– Hicheme Lehmici, may you explain the role of the swing states? What are the ratings of K. Harris and D. Trump now?
– We generally say that we have seven key states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There are others still, but these states are used to changing, depending on the electoral context, depending on the debate, which will determine, in fact, the rest. It is interesting to see that a certain number of these states constitute what we have called the Rust Belt, that’s it, so the rubber belt inside.
These are the territories that were formerly industrialized in crisis, and which have made choices that may seem surprising. For example, they voted for Obama because they considered that he was bringing them, precisely, at the level of his economic and social promises, a significant advance. At the time of Trump’s election, a Republican candidate, he supported his campaign a lot on the notion of defending popular classes who have been declassified, and in particular, what we called the small white electorate, that is to say, the so-called European Americans, by their origins, who have experienced a sort of declassification, the consequences of globalization. And today, this election is played around these states with themes that oppose, we can say, perhaps, two Americas, as it was presented at the beginning, and this is the heart of the election.
Regarding the ratings of Trump and Harris: if we take the popularity rate, a priori, Trump has a better popularity rate than Kamala Harris, but neither one nor the other has a popularity rate that is close to 50%. We are around 35-40% for Trump and around 30-35% for Harris. But that doesn’t mean anything, because it’s the vote of the territories, the vote of the states that will make the difference. The election is extremely tight, according to several indicators.
Trump’s intentions in “draining the swamp” and “blob”.
– Brunson McKinley, more than 40% of the US population believes it is important to focus on solving domestic problems (according to the Statista Research Department). What is the vision of resolving the key domestic issues by both candidates in the economic recovery and immigration?
– I think I’d like to start on a slightly different angle in commenting first on what Daniel Worner said. He has it right. The election is a bit of a joke. The campaign is a farce. The candidates are bizarre. But the election is very, very important. Despite all the strangeness of it, I think a lot of things are at stake, not just for the United States, but for the whole planet. I hope we can examine that aspect, the role of the United States in the world, and the interactions of the US with the other big powers. I think that is a very important, significant difference, possibly, between the two parties in this election. So we need to concentrate, I think, on the big picture.
But I’ve been asked first to look a little bit at the domestic side of things. It is true, that American voters are not going to vote about foreign policy, about China or Ukraine. They are going to vote about what’s happening at home. And the economy is a big issue. Immigration too. Crime, and education, are big issues.
For Donald Trump, the big issue is “draining the swamp”. He means that in America, the parties are divided between the two coasts, between the better-educated and the less well-educated, and between the workers and those who are profiting from globalization. There’s a heavy concentration in Washington of people who are on one side of that divide. Washington is right in the middle of the East Coast. Pretty much everybody who lives in Washington is a member of that certain culture and they’re mostly Democrats. 80% of the people who work for the federal government of the United States are Democrats. And they have ideas that they perpetuate. In the eyes of Donald Trump, they have led America in the wrong direction. So in wishing to make America great again, he wants to break the power of this group. He wants to “drain the swamp”.
Another expression you will hear is the “blob”. The blob means the foreign policy establishment: the National Security Council, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of State. These are the people who for years have run American foreign policy and intend, if they have their way, to continue to run it. These are the people that Donald Trump would like to bring down. Will he be able to do that? Interesting question. He tried in his first presidency, but he didn’t get very far. Maybe because of COVID-19, maybe for other reasons. He’s certainly going to try again this time. If he’s elected president, you can be sure that his first target will be to “drain the swamp”, and break the power of the “blob”. That’s why it’s significant, and not at all accidental, that he has Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Vivek Ramaswamy in his camp. These are people who are intellectually and politically strong and share Trump’s views, about the need to break the power of the current establishment and set off in new directions. So that’s his first priority.
Trump is going to do something about immigration, sure. Build a wall. Give new orders to the border guards. He can do a lot to cut down immigration, and he’ll probably do that because he’s run his campaign largely on immigration. Trump wants to revive the economy. His formula is tariffs. But tariffs have worked in the past. A hundred years ago, America was tariff-protected. But that was in a period when America’s industries were new and growing. We’re in a different situation now. He won’t be able to get away with a large-scale tariff regime protecting the whole of the American economy. There isn’t that much left to protect, to be very honest, in some ways.
On the Harris side, she will do what Biden has been doing. Harris is the continuation of the Biden presidency. She will do some of the opposite things to Trump. She will leave the border open. She will spend money on new government programs that support those constituencies that have supported her. Women who are better educated, the coastal elites, etc. So green energy will be pursued. Plus maybe the abortion issue. Harris has made that a big thing in her campaign. But I don’t think she can get very far with it.
Scenarios for Ukraine and the Middle East
-Doctor Warner, what is the strategy of D. Trump and K. Harris toward war in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza? How do you see the impact of the victory of one or another candidate in Ukraine and the Middle East?
– Donald Trump is a New Yorker. I say this frequently because I’m a New Yorker too. New Yorkers tend to speak sometimes in hyperbole. Trump has said if he is elected president, on November 6th, the war between Ukraine and Russia will end. We also learned that he had certain phone calls with President V. Putin about COVID-19 and everything else. He considers Putin to be, if not a friend, someone he can work with. I’m sure there are lots of people in the State Department, like Tony Blinken, who have no idea what that means. As far as the Middle East is concerned, we do know that Trump’s children have very good relations with certain leaders in the Middle East and Trump considers himself a great fan of Israel.
On the other hand, Harris is married and the first gentleman, if she is elected, is Jewish, David Emhoff. Every time Harris is asked about the Middle East, she always begins by saying, “Israel has the right to defend itself. But we have to reduce the suffering”. So I don’t think the United States at this moment, either Harris or Trump, has a clear vision of what to do. There has been more and more pressure, we are told, on Prime Minister Netanyahu from the American government, to quickly make a hostage deal and to stop the bombing. But for the moment, absolutely nothing has happened with all of these threats, which again is a case study of the diminishing power of the President and the United States. One would think that as the main supplier of money and weapons to Israel, the United States would have a certain influence. Why is that happening? The argument on both Harri’s and Trump’s minds is that there is an important Jewish lobby in the United States. But over some time, since October 8th, there are more and more members of the Jewish community, wherever, students, etc., who are against the Biden administration’s policy. So there’s no guarantee that just because they say that we want this to stop, Biden or Harris or whatever will change that.
Now, coming to Russia and Ukraine, the answer is quite simple. There are not enough Ukrainians in the Middle West to have a strong influence on the United States. I think if Trump were elected, there would be a relatively quick deal between Russia, and the United States. Eventually, Zelensky will have to understand that Ukraine is not going to go back geographically to the way it was before. Regarding Harris… You sense in Biden a nostalgia, somewhat anti-Soviet, anti-communist. You sense that also in Biden, a certain nostalgia for the role of the United States in helping to create the state of Israel. But for the moment, we have seen no difference in Harris’s declarations about the United States and ironclad support of Israel.
– Hicheme Lehmici, what is your prediction – who will win the US elections, and what could be the consequences for the world?
– I would say it’s quite indecisive, in the sense that if we had the case of Joe Biden and Trump, I would have said Trump wins largely. But today we are in a case of a figure that is very different with the local dimension, national dimension, and international with the Ukraine issue and the relationship between Israel, Palestine, and the United States.
Ukraine is a problem for the democratic electorate. The expenses allocated to Ukraine do not go to middle-class Americans, do not go into investment in infrastructure, etc. It is a problem in the balance sheet of the democratic administration today. While Trump on his side puts forward the fact that he was able for four years and it is still quite remarkable in the recent history of the United States to have engaged in no new conflict. He can talk to Putin and he would be able to put an end to the conflict quite quickly, even if I, from my point of view, would be quite dubious.
The Israel-Palestinian question can be a “game changer”, an element that risks shifting the election to the disfavor of Trump. He is too involved in his support of Benjamin Netanyahu, that is to say that today it is not simply the question of Trump who supports Israel. In the United States, they have always had this consensus in supporting Israel. So this can shift the election in the future result.
Regarding the future scenarios in terms of international policy: either the third world war begins in Ukraine or it starts in Iran, which is a little bit provocative. But it is simply to highlight the fact that if Trump is elected, very certainly Ukraine will stay a point of fixation. And the fact of Trump’s proximity with Israel makes the risk of escalation in the Middle East higher.
Reshaping leadership of the USA
-Brunson McKinley, how do the candidates plan to restore or reshape America’s global leadership, particularly in the face of rising challenges from China and Russia?
– Things have changed and are changing because we are out of the unipolar moment. The US is no longer in a position to do what it wants. China has achieved economic parity with the United States, and in some ways, has a more sophisticated strategy in terms of geopolitics than the old American one. Russia is back; Russia is not as strong as either the United States or China, but it is not going to crack; it’s not to be pushed aside. It’s a big nuclear power with natural wealth resources, and a certain self-confidence. So the Unipolar moment is gone. BRICS is one of the manifestations of an attempt to organize an alternative to US dominance; whether that will work or not we do not know now, because between BRICS countries there are problems, like between China and India. But the unipolar moment is over, and Mr. Trump has understood that better, than Ms. Harris.
So if Mr. Trump is elected, he will inform the world that getting into this proxy war in Ukraine was not a very good idea and he will try to get out of it. Ukraine has a very sad fate but is not of vital interest to the United States. The United States can walk away from Ukraine as it walked away from Vietnam. The Democrats if Harris wins are kind of stuck on a different line because they have been supporting Ukraine and urging others to support Ukraine for quite a while under Obama, under Biden. It is going to be hard for them to do it, but at the end of the day, reality wins.
At the end of the day, the Republicans, the Democrats too are going to have to find some way to back out of Ukraine. What about NATO? NATO has followed the American lead very strongly, sometimes more strongly than America. Well, they are faced with some tough decisions. I don’t think that Donald Trump will pull the United States of America out of NATO. But he will downplay the American commitment to the defense of Europe and insist that the Europeans take more upon themselves. He also will do something about China, but what, that’s the big question. Interesting debates are going on inside the United States and of course all around the world – is the right approach to the containment of China with a ring of allies around it? Or to keep a strong engagement with China at the risk of letting China grow even greater economically with more military power? We will see how Mr. Trump comes out on that if he is elected president.
-Doctor Warner, a question about the “golden standard” of democracy, promoted worldwide by the USA. A September 2023 survey by the independent pollster PRRI showed that 75% of Americans believe that American democracy is at risk in the 2024 election. What do you think about it? Do you believe in a fair election? Do you see the probability of a civil war?
– The election will not end on November 5th. The only question is how much longer it will go on. There will be court cases, which will go on and on. The issue is, will it lead to civil war? I don’t think so.
The whole question of democracy has two meanings. One, it’s just the simple meaning of vote. The other is the spirit of democracy. And the question is, will technically this election be finished on November 5th? There I will predict no. If Trump’s elected, he is going to pardon most of the people who were involved in January 6th. I don’t see the left wing being violent. But I do think that there will be contentions in the courts and maybe in the streets as well.
-Hicheme Lehmici, American elections 2024: what’s next?
-There is a certain possibility of civil war. Many elements make us think that the tension is strong. The extremely strong political polarization. We really have two Americas from an external point of view. You have 370 million weapons circulating, it’s still an element to be taken into account. A particularly high rate of crime. Also is paradoxical to have an extremely rich country from a nominal point of view, with one of the highest GDP per capita in the world, the equivalent of the same GDP per capita as that of Switzerland. But in the USA there are hyper-rich and in parallel a good part of the population in the United States who live in an absolutely apocalyptic country in poverty. Or, regarding the life expectancy in the United States, today is 76 years. In comparison, a country like Algeria which has a GDP per capita many times lower than that of the United States, their life expectancy is 79 years. So there is a social crisis in the USA. All these elements can, from my point of view, compete with what may be a form of civil war. The weapons are there. The ideologies are there. What is missing?