The nightmare of a Donald Trump presidency is upon us. The people of the world’s largest superpower have voted for a candidate who is profoundly ignorant of the rest of the world and delights in his isolationism and prejudice.
Throughout the campaign, he has made wildly contradictory statements, so the new certainty in global affairs is that the rest of the world cannot rely on Washington to be consistent or calmly analytical. Trump’s State Department will be emotional and vindictive, while keeping a close eye on what their president perceives to be America’s immediate economic interests.
The flash points of the world have just become a lot more dangerous. Places like the Korean border, east Ukraine and the South China Sea have become a lot more dangerous. In the Arab world, the Trump uncertainty will damage the hopes of rebuilding a safe and secure region based on nation states and the rule of law.
Trump has no interest in the Arab world and early in the campaign he threatened to reduce the desert to a glowing heap in his simplistic eagerness to end the threat from Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).
He may decide to send in American troops to support the Syrian opposition, or he may decide that his apparent friend Russian President Vladimir Putin can have free reign and the Americans will agree that the Russians will help the regime back to power and so end the civil war.
Such deep uncertainty over American intentions will not help the regional powers as they try to build some common ground between the warring factions.
It is not clear at all what Trump thinks about the slow disintegration of Iraq. The continued American presence in support of the fight against Daesh has to be under question if Trump sees such action is doing the Iranians a favour. He may well run out of patience with Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar Al Abadi’s continued refusal to adopt more inclusive policies and deliberate favouring of the Shiite population and willingness to work with the Iranian-backed militias.
Trump has already indicated his disdain for the nuclear deal with Iran and there is no way that he will go out of his way to maintain it. If he ever thought about it, he would dislike everything that the Iranian leadership stands for, which is reason enough for him to rip up the deal, but if Iran continues to interfere across the region, he will have all the more reason to end the deal and so start a new era of nuclear uncertainty.
His lack of interest in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states can give them no great confidence that their years of investing in the alliance with Washington will be repaid with any loyalty. His comments on Nato allies having to pay their way and continue equally to any defence mechanisms could easily be turned against the GCC states.
Painfully cobbling together
On the world stage, Trump will be firmly isolationist. He will trample on any multilateral institution in his eagerness to support what he sees as American interests. The United Nations will become even more irrelevant, Nato will suffer and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will be sidelined.
Trump wants to end the trade agreements that have been so painfully cobbled together, regardless that the greatest driver for prosperity in the last 70 years has been the huge growth in international trade sponsored by General Agreement on Trade and Tariff and then the World Trade Organisation, before it was forced aside by the current patchwork of regional deals.
It is a real danger that Trump’s Republican Party will also control the Senate and the House of Representatives, so he will have no restraint on his whims. Even the Republicans who were so profoundly sceptical of Trump as a candidate will now have to back off. Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator John McCain, to name only two of the mainstream Republicans who have lost control of their party, will have to concede that their approach failed.
It will be particularly damaging for the American Body Politic that Trump will not reach out to heal the wounds that he has caused.
He may carry out his threat to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, who will take the opportunity of trading insult for insult as she yet again goes through a legal investigation in the sure knowledge that she has not been found guilty of any crime despite many attempts to do so.
The decade of increasingly bitter partisan feuding between the Tea Party Republicans and the Democrats has set the scene for a vicious Trump Senate and House in which the Democrats will seek desperately to overturn any Trump initiatives. They will seek to deny the reality that because the president’s party controls both Senate and the House, he has far more room for manoeuvre than Obama ever had.
So America faces a bitterly divided four years and the world faces a profoundly narrow Washington that will base its policies on isolationism.
God save America. God save all of us.
