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Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose commentary is published in 45 countries.
The Roman empire survived for four centuries despite having many rulers worse than Donald Trump (e.g. Caligula, Nero and Commodus), so we should not write off the United States just yet (250 years and counting).
We should not even give up hope on the current cohort of American voters. Economic illiteracy, which led them to blame the Democrats for the great wave of inflation just past, is universal among electorates. They all live in national silos, most not even noticing that COVID caused the same wave of inflation in every other country and was almost impossible to avoid.
The other big factor in Trump’s spectacular comeback, the virulent dog-whistle racism that so many older white males seemingly responded to, is more specifically American and deeply shameful. Older white men voted massively against the perceived threat to their status, jobs and privileges. However, it is due to a period of demographic transition that will pass.
The driving force of political change in democratic societies is generational turnover. That generation will be politically irrelevant in 15 years. The younger voters who will replace them do not fear those changes to the same degree, so we need not despair yet for the future of the American republic.
Let’s just focus on the nearer term, particularly for all the rest of the world (which got little attention in the domestic American debate). How much of Donald Trump’s radical agenda will become reality in the next four years?
Climate is the most important issue for all the world. Trump will likely pull out of the Paris Agreement once again, but that will have a limited effect on other countries. (The “aspirational” limit of never more than 1.5 degrees Celsius higher average global temperature was actually adopted in 2018 when he was in office.)
He has promised to “drill, baby, drill,” but you can’t sell more oil than people are willing to buy and the world demand for oil is going into decline. Moreover, the U.S. has not built a new coal-fired power plant in over a decade because coal is simply not competitive with solar and wind energy.
Trump has won the White House and maybe both Houses of Congress and effectively controls the Supreme Court as well, so he is almost a dictator at the moment. He will try to repeal the massive Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden’s big anti-global warming initiative, and there will probably be ugly federal legislation on social and religious issues as well.
The biggest of those issues is his promise (or at least his threat) to deport “maybe as many as 20 million” people whom he believes to be undocumented immigrants, or at least undesirable ones from his point of view.
In foreign affairs, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza will both end badly for the victims.
Trump will likely make Ukraine surrender to Russian demands by cutting U.S. military and financial support. He will likely let Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu devastate and maybe even annex the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but he will stay out of the war with Iran that Netanyahu also wants to drag him into. He might even let China have Taiwan.
The U.S. economy will probably be all right for a few years: Biden has already put it into recovery mode. Trump’s promised 20 percent tariff on all foreign imports (and 60 percent to 100 percent on Chinese-made goods) would slow world trade and drive inflation in the U.S., but this will all unfold slowly.
Nor will there be a big wave of Americans seeking sanity or safety elsewhere. (Where would they go? Everywhere else is foreign.)
Liberals lament the encouragement Trump’s victory gives elsewhere to autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and “illiberal” democrats like Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, but Trump isn’t likely to be much of an example for anybody. It would be different and very dangerous if Trump’s cognitive decline becomes so severe that Vice President JD Vance takes over.
Bad things happen to good people all the time. The rich have been getting richer and the broad middle class poorer in America for more than 50 years now under Republicans and Democrats alike, but that’s a problem only Americans can fix. In the meantime, the damage elsewhere can probably be contained.
