No doubt you, as well as I, have been watching the 2016 USA presidential election with a sense of appalled fascination — has ever a campaign been fought so viciously in modern Western politics?
But the Americans have made their choice (between the devil and the deep blue sea), and will have to live with it. I hope it works out well for them.
However, my focus is more on the implications for the rest of the world. As a post-Brexit Brit based in Brussels, these are many-layered.
From the Brexit perspective the Trump victory could be good for the UK — he appears to be more sympathetic to the so-called “special relationship” than Obama. He is also probably more likely to try to cut deals with Russia over Ukraine and the ongoing war in Syria than the ultra-hawkish Hillary Clinton could ever bring herself to do.
This can only be good for Europe, as the sanctions put in place after the US-backed Ukraine coup in 2014 are hurting European trade. Yet again, Europe has been caught between Russia and the USA.
Also, let us not forget the infamous quote from Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, who said in 2014 “fuck the EU”, when it came to decision making in planning the Ukrainian coup.
But my main point is the European establishment’s response to the Trump presidential victory. And let us not deceive ourselves here — this was an emphatic victory. The American people wanted a candidate for change, for a push-back against the perceived Washington political élite.
Perhaps the election could have swung in another direction towards another candidate for change — if Bernie Sanders had been the Democrat nominee. Alas, as we know from the DNC files leaked to and published by Wikileaks, his campaign was undermined by his own party in favour of Hillary Clinton, while promoting Trump as the Republican candidate that Clinton could beat.
Hubris is never a good look, just like “pant” suits.
What pains me most is the European mainstream media’s reporting of Trump’s victory: “liberal democracy” is under threat no less, and populism is on the rise.
However, those most worried about “liberal democracy” tend to be the technocratic Eurocrats such as European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. And they are the very people trying to ram through the thoroughly *neo*-liberal agendas of CETA and the Trans-Atlantic Trade Investment Partnership — otherwise known as TTIP, widely resisted across Europe as a rape of our democracies.
TTIP, if passed, would eliminate any meaningful national sovereignty, replacing it with a global corporatist hegemony that could sue our national governments if they passed laws that could conceivably — sometime in the future — pass laws that could — conceivably in the future — inhibit the profit-making capabilities of the corporations.
That, and national asset-stripping, is the pure definition of neo-liberalism, and that is what our European overlords want to enact. Yet, at the same time, they are inveighing against the death of “liberal democracy” after the election of Donald Trump.
Am I missing something here?