AS the US presidential race enters the final lap, American voters and also governments, and the public across the world, are reminded of the choice facing them on who will lead the most powerful nation in the world during the next five years.
On one side, we have a replacement candidate lambasted by many quarters, including supporters of the Democrat party, as lacklustre and incompetent.
Challenger Republican candidate Donald Trump has described Kamala Harris as “stupid”, “weak”, “dumb as a rock” and “lazy”. He has also called her a “third-rate phoney candidate”, “more incompetent than her boss President Joe Biden”, and a “radical left lunatic” in an audio interview with techno billionaire Elon Musk that attracted millions of listeners.
More recently, Trump has derided her as “mentally impaired” in a rally at Butler in Pennsylvania where he earlier survived an assassination attempt.
The other side has Harris describing Trump as “increasingly unstable and unhinged”, with a “second Trump term … a huge risk for America”.
This damning assessment had earlier come from retired general Mark Milley, former highest-ranking military officer. In a forthcoming book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, he noted that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” in relation to national security risks to the United States.
The warning presumably also relates to global security issues that the incoming president has to manage.
The US’s many crises
What we are being treated to in the media front pages on the qualities of the two candidates is not just the usual shrill of political rhetoric accompanying the presidential election.
It is an intimation of what the world can expect from an incoming president that equal halves of the American public see as “unhinged” and have little or no faith in.
What we are seeing too is an American Exceptionalism in decline from multiple socioeconomic failings and crises that Democrat and Republican party leaders at federal
and state levels have been unable to manage or cope with, and which American voters want the winner in November to focus on.
Consider some key indicators that reflect the state of well-being of a nation: financial situation, health services, housing and poverty.
On the nation’s finances, the US has a runaway national debt of US$35 trillion (RM150.62 trillion), which is estimated to increase by over US$1 trillion every 100 days. The budget deficit for the new president to deal with is estimated at close to US$2 trillion for the financial year 2024, the highest figure outside of the Covid era.
On health, health monitoring organisations, including the administration’s health institutes, have sounded the alarm that the medical care system in the US is in crisis, with escalating health costs affecting coverage for millions of people.
A similar critical situation has emerged with housing. According to a Harvard Business Review article, the country “is experiencing a serious housing crisis, and has been for a long time”. Mortgage rates have reached a multi-decade high, tens of millions of households have to spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and unaffordable housing is now “a national scandal”.
On the poverty front, the US is also facing an unprecedented challenge, with the poverty rate recording its largest one-year increase in history recently. According to 2022 US census data, 12.4% of Americans or about one in nine Americans live in poverty.
The severity of crises in these and other sectors of American society and life provides a sharply different picture to that conveyed by the buoyant stock market – the latter due for a catastrophic fall that may well be the first priority the incoming president has to deal with.
What next for Pax Americana
If historical experience is a guide, countries around the world can expect Trump or Kamala to be little or no different in their pursuit of American foreign policy interests.
Strategies that they will employ will invariably be a mix of the following tried and tested:
Focus on external threats to distract from the inability to manage homegrown and domestic crises and entrenched divisions in American society and economy.
Intensified conflicts against regimes castigated as authoritarian or anti-democratic or seen as a rival in the economic and any other sphere.
Undermining BRICS and national, regional and international forces that may challenge US hegemony and the conception and articulation of a Western rules-based order propagandised as vital for the rest of the world, but that is in reality supported by a small minority of the world’s nations.
There may be one key difference in that unlike Harris and the Democrats, Trump has publicly declared that he will act to bring a stop to the war in Ukraine. Should he live up to this undertaking, it may herald a new direction in US foreign policy.
However, the official and deep state actors who see Trump as a threat to their interests will work to ensure that no such change in US foreign policy can take place.
For now, leaders around the world need to be reminded of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s famous distillation of American foreign policy: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
This statement by a scholar turned diplomat who is widely regarded as the most effective and influential US foreign policy official of recent times carries a warning, especially for US allies.
Asia, Australia, Japan and the Philippines can expect that whoever wins in November – Kamala or Trump – will call on them to fight the US’s old and new wars, and to help defend Pax Americana on the military, political and economic fronts with more money, weapons and bodies.
By doing so they will be upholding an archaic, broken down and hypocritical unilateral world order system in opposition to the multilateral one created by the United Nations and long abandoned by the US and its allies as is evident with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Lebanon.
Lim Teck Ghee’s Another Take is aimed at demystifying social orthodoxy.
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