Election 2020: America Votes
The Biden transition team gets to work, but Trump still refuses to concede.
Many global leaders have already congratulated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on their victory. Scroll down for FP’s round-the-clock coverage, with short dispatches from correspondents and analysis from around the world. This page is free for all readers.
International election monitors have proven ways to verify a disputed vote. Could they work in the United States?
Since Joe Biden was declared U.S. President-elect on Saturday, outgoing President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have doubled down on their baseless allegations that the voting process was fraudulent and that Biden is “stealing” the election with “illegal” votes. This is not unusual in certain countries around the world, where voting fraud is often alleged in problematic elections—with or without basis. In fact, allegations of vote manipulation are a classic characteristic of elections in struggling democracies and authoritarian states.
But election monitors in such countries have ways to verify the vote count that generally make it possible to detect any significant cheating in the aggregation of election results. This allows them to quickly assess the probability of any claims of voting irregularities or fraud—and their potential effect on the election outcome.
Leaving aside the fact that there is no basis for any of Trump’s claims of systematic fraud, could such techniques have worked in the 2020 U.S. election to assess the possibility of fraud, even if only to refute the claims? Unfortunately, highly effective techniques used to verify the vote count in other countries either do not work in the U.S. election system or have not been widely attempted.
Since the 1980s, election-monitoring organizations such as Democracy International, of which I am president, have conducted a form of vote-count verification known as parallel vote tabulations (PVTs). Also known as quick counts, PVTs assess the accuracy or verify the integrity of election results as reported by electoral authorities in controversial elections. The way they work is that local election observers at a sample of polling stations observe the actual balloting and counting, and then independently report the local polling station results. This enables the monitoring organization to independently assess the accuracy of the aggregated, reported results within statistically significant margins of error. While PVTs can’t replace a recount when the margin is razor-thin, they generally detect any systematic false reporting of the actual results, the main method in which elections have been manipulated in problematic elections around the world.
Could the United States deploy PVTs to increase trust in the voting process and prevent frivolous and destructive claims of election fraud from gaining traction? Unfortunately, there are several ways in which elections are currently different in the United States from most other countries in which PVTs are used. For one thing, because each U.S. state does its own vote count instead of having a single, nationwide voting system as in most other countries, there would need to be a separate, statistically significant PVT for each swing state. That greatly increases the complexity and expense. More fundamentally, PVTs work best for elections that use paper ballots deposited into physical ballot boxes. When elections are run using multiple technologies and highly automated vote counts, as they are in most U.S. states, PVTs would require significantly different techniques.
In the United States, there are extensive efforts by the national media to collect enough local information to “call” election outcomes. Since these calls shape public perceptions, this would suggest the possibility of problems if election authorities reported different outcomes. But unlike PVTs, these calls are not based on independent observation of the balloting and counting, but on a statistical analysis of the authorities’ preliminary results. Because media projections are, in effect, only reporting the aggregation of counts by local and state authorities, they don’t provide much information about whether there were problems with those local vote counts. And of course, the media’s calls are under attack from Trump as well.
Another way monitoring organizations around the world often draw inferences about election integrity is by looking at exit polls and public opinion surveys. In an exit poll, researchers ask selected voters from a sample of polling places about how they have just voted. The researchers can then compare the findings to reported results. (Some U.S. media projections use exit polling as part of their process as well.) In some cases, international observers have pointed to a divergence between pre-election opinion polls and the results reported by the authorities as a basis for questioning the latter.
The current elections in the United States, however, call into question the accuracy of pre-election polling rather than the other way around. No one is using pre-election polling numbers that favored Biden in order to suggest that the vote has been manipulated to favor Trump. Likewise, few would believe that exit poll numbers could be used to challenge the integrity of reported election results. Moreover, any polling or sample-based process would be too blunt an instrument from which to draw any inferences about the likelihood of fraud in the count in a very close election, as in most of the states where the process is currently under scrutiny, such as Georgia and Wisconsin.
To assess the legitimacy of Trump’s attacks on the vote count in the current election, Americans will need to trust the integrity of state and local election officials conducting in the count and to rely on the results of the counts and potential recounts as witnessed by representatives of both parties. Fortunately, we have no reason so far to question that process—and every reason to believe that these officials are fully committed to the integrity of the process.
Eric Bjornlund is the president of Democracy International, chair of the Election Reformers Network, and author of Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy.
Some leaders are breaking ranks with the majority of world leaders in the hopes that Trump will somehow cling to power.
While most world leaders have lined up to congratulate U.S. President-elect Joe Biden on winning the 2020 election, a handful of the world’s strongmen have been conspicuous by their absence. From Russia to Latin America to China, some leaders have so far held their tongues on President Donald Trump’s loss, a stark reminder of the friends he made along the way.
While Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first to congratulate Trump in 2016, the Kremlin announced on Monday that the Russian leader will not recognize Biden as president-elect until Trump’s spurious legal challenges to the vote have been resolved.
“We believe it’s correct to wait for the official results of the elections to be announced,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a call on Monday. After Putin was reelected in 2018 in an election that opposition activists say was marred by irregularities, Trump’s advisors left an all-caps note in his briefing materials ahead of a call with his Russian counterpart: “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” He did it anyway.
Peskov’s comments were echoed on Monday by the spokesman of the Chinese foreign ministry. Wang Wenbin acknowledged Biden’s claim of victory but added that Beijing would be watching that “U.S. law and procedures” were followed, according to the BBC. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was repeatedly praised by Trump, also has yet to recognize the results of the U.S. election. (On Tuesday, a day after this article was first published, Erdogan extended his congratulations to President-elect Biden.)
Meanwhile, the two largest countries in Latin America are yet to congratulate Biden. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, one of Trump’s closest allies worldwide who openly endorsed the U.S. president last month, has yet to congratulate either candidate, though he did appear to distance himself from the U.S. president on Friday, calling for “humility” and saying that Trump was “not the most important person in the world.”
The Bolsonaro administration’s first—and so far only—reference to the election results came from the official in charge of promoting Afro-Brazilian culture, who questioned Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s blackness. (The official also argued that Bolsonaro, as well as Putin and Xi, was right to not congratulate Biden, after calling the Democrat’s victory “nonexistent.”)
In Mexico, populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who refused to ever concede his own prior election loss in 2006, reportedly said that he will not congratulate the president-elect yet, as he wants to wait for legal matters to be resolved. His decision has worried key Latin America watchers in the United States, including Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, who serves as vice chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “This represents a stunning diplomatic failure … at a time when the incoming Biden Administration is looking to usher in a new era of friendship and cooperation with Mexico,” Castro, who is Mexican American, said.
Only one leader, populist Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, has gone so far as to congratulate Trump, doing so on Wednesday, long before the race was called by the Associated Press and television networks on Saturday. Since then he has doubled down, retweeting conspiracy theories and Fox News clips prompting allegations of fraud.
In Estonia, the country’s far-right interior minister Mart Helme announced his resignation on Monday after making a series of unfounded comments in a radio interview over the weekend alleging that the election had been rigged and that Trump would eventually be declared the winner. Helme’s son Martin, who also serves as finance minister, also alleged that the elections were falsified, but the younger Helme has not resigned.
Update, Nov. 11, 2020: This article was updated to reflect the fact that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had congratulated President-elect Joe Biden after publishing.
Amy Mackinnon is a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy.
Augusta Saraiva is a former intern at Foreign Policy.
A new administration points to a resolution of some thorny bilateral disputes—but could threaten Moon Jae-in’s cherished rapprochement with the North.
SEOUL—The first thing South Korean President Moon Jae-in tweeted on Sunday was diplomatic congratulations to the new U.S. president-elect, Joe Biden.
“Congratulations to @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris. Our alliance is strong and the bond between our two countries is rock-solid. I very much look forward to working with you for our shared values. I have great expectations of advancing and opening up the future development of our bilateral relations,” the tweets read.
“Katchi kapshida!” he added, which is the official slogan for the South Korean-U.S. alliance and Korean for “Let’s go together!”
And Moon does have a lot to be happy about when it comes to a Biden administration. The former vice president is a lot more popular than President Donald Trump among South Koreans, who according to Gallup Korea favored Biden 59 percent to 16 percent for Trump. And Biden would likely de-escalate the ongoing dispute over the shared cost of hosting U.S. troops in Korea.
“While there haven’t been any specific indications of where Biden leans on this issue, it seems likely that they will push for a quick and fair resolution—probably working with South Korea’s last offer,” said Jenny Town, a fellow at the Stimson Center and the deputy director of 38 North, a North Korea watching website.
Clearing up that dispute would remove a source of bilateral acrimony and secure funding for furloughed Korean employees at U.S. bases—a massive boon for Moon.
Where the headaches might come is from Biden’s stance on North Korea. He has ruled out following the same kind of open-arms outreach to Pyongyang that the Trump administration pursued, and will likely have enough domestic and foreign-policy challenges to deal with early in his term.
“The biggest concern is if North Korea is not high on Biden’s priority list, and these kinds of messages don’t get conveyed early and in an expedient and convincing way, it leaves room for North Korea to guess what a Biden administration will do and test its resolve early in likely counterproductive ways,” Town said.
Biden has said that he will not meet Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, without preconditions such as denuclearization. There are fears here that the United States might revert to former President Barack Obama’s approach of “strategic patience” when it comes to North Korea. The Trump administration did manage to set up summits and foster hope of progress in terms of the inter-Korean relationship, but didn’t derail North Korea’s weapons program. This fall, the country showed off its biggest, newest missile—one that can hit the continental United States.
But because so much of Moon’s political project is tied up with rapprochement and engagement with the North, he would not be interested in a return to the days of strategic patience.
“Moon’s near sole focus on North-South relations left both him and his party dependent on its success, which has not proven sustainable without international cooperation,” Town said.
Kim has yet to comment on the results of the U.S. elections, and there’s speculation as to whether or not North Korea will test the big new missiles. But given that there’s no interest from the North in denuclearizing, there’s little prospect of any further meetings anytime soon between Pyongyang and Washington.
That could give the South a more leading role in improving relations—or could simply mean going back to the waiting game altogether. While Moon congratulates Biden and emphasizes the alliance, he’s bracing for everything from early North Korean provocations to U.S. silence.
“As Moon’s legacy is so tied to North-South relations, he needs the process to continue,” Town said.
Morten Soendergaard Larsen is a freelance journalist based in Seoul who writes about geopolitics.
Preoccupied with domestic challenges and an impending contest with a populist rival, France’s government will benefit from the defeat of the far-right across the Atlantic.
PARIS—Subdued satisfaction was the most that French politicians offered to Joe Biden following the announcement of his presidential election win over the weekend.
President Emmanuel Macron summed up the mood with a low-key tweet about the Democratic Party victors: “The Americans have chosen their president. Congratulations Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We have a lot to do to overcome today’s challenges. Let’s work together!”
Macron is overrun with problems at home, not least the coronavirus pandemic, and events across the Atlantic are a very low priority right now.
The fact that we will be well into a very uncertain 2021 before Trump quits the White House, and that he will be fighting his eviction every step of the way, made the latest news from the United States even less inspiring.
Marine Le Pen—leader of the far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally, formerly the National Front) and currently Macron’s most effective rival—was spectacularly nonplussed.
She was the first in France to congratulate Trump and the Republicans in 2016, but this time had not a single word for the successful Democratic candidates.
Instead, her deputy, Jordan Bardella, suggested that untrustworthy liberal journalists had helped dislodge—somebody who shares Le Pen’s highly aggressive, reactionary outlook.
Bardella tweeted: “Regardless of who wins the legal action, it can already be said that there is an overwhelming loser: media ethics …Anti-Trump propaganda, by a system that believes itself to be all-powerful, has reached unprecedented levels. Very disturbing.”
Speaking of alleged fake news, ridiculous reports about the bells of Paris ringing out for Biden were among the low points of election coverage in France.
Social media users (who should know better) even claimed that the Eiffel Tower was putting on a light show for the president-elect.
The videos that accompanied these claims were circulated by thousands of people, giving the impression that the French Republic, and indeed the religious institutions within it, might celebrate the result of a foreign election.
In fact, the Eiffel Tower lights go on every night, even during a coronavirus lockdown when tourists and other visitors are not allowed anywhere near the monument.
As for the bells, there would be more chance of Quasimodo and Esmeralda absconding to Las Vegas to get married in an Elvis chapel than a Paris priest authorizing campanology on behalf of Biden (even if he will be the first Roman Catholic president since JFK).
Any ringing was because of automatic systems that had been left on since before the start of lockdown.
Some might claim that such fake news does not really matter, and that the beginning of the end of Trump’s America is what the French should indeed be joyous about.
In fact, such manipulated information has thrived across the world over the last four years, and much of it has emanated from the Trump administration. This was a president who once said that “Paris is no longer Paris” because of immigrants creating no-go areas—which of course is not true.
It was therefore sad to see his demise being marked with just the kind of lies about France for which he had become notorious.
During one of Trump’s anti-Paris outbursts, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris—herself an immigrant from Spain—had tweeted a photo of herself with Mickey and Minnie Mouse inviting Trump to France to “celebrate the dynamism and the spirit of openness of Paris.”
It’s doubtful that the invitation remains open to the outgoing leader, but Biden can look forward—bells or not—to a very warm welcome.
Nabila Ramdani is a French Algerian journalist, columnist, and broadcaster who specializes in French politics, Islamic affairs, and the Arab world.
U.S. defense cooperation with India is one thing Democratic and Republican administrations agree on.
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden is a known quantity in India. He has long championed strong ties with the country and, as part of the Obama administration, was instrumental in putting the relationship on a good trajectory in those years. As far back as 2006, in fact, Biden argued that the United States’ partnership with India was the one Washington most needed to get right—for its own safety.
As president, Biden will likely be able to deliver when it comes to India. In more ways than one, good ties with New Delhi enjoy a strong bipartisan consensus in the U.S. political establishment. From President George W. Bush to Barack Obama and then to Donald Trump, successive administrations on both sides have contributed toward a robust relationship—particularly because, as the center of global political and economic gravity shifts to the Indo-Pacific, India and the United States enjoy an unprecedented convergence of interests.
In all this, defense ties have been key. It was the Obama administration that named India a Major Defense Partner, and as a result of that India is now treated on par with America’s closest allies in the sharing of sensitive technologies. Obama also pushed hard for the signing of further defense agreements, which the Indian government was not ready to pursue until Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed power in 2014. The most recent pact, the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geo-Spatial Cooperation on the sharing of geospatial intelligence and information, was signed just last month. The importance of such agreements cannot be overestimated at a time when India is engaged in a higher number of military exercises with the United States than with any other country, and both are cornerstones of the Quadrilateral Group (made up of them and Australia and Japan) in the Indo-Pacific.
Meanwhile, defense trade between the two countries has been growing and has recently exceeded the $20 billion mark. As India continues to work to diversifying its defense supplies to reduce dependence on Moscow, and as the United States beefs up its partnerships with like-minded nations in the Indo-Pacific, both could benefit by working together. India is keen to ensure that major defense manufacturers set up production facilities in India as part of its “Make in India” initiative to boost domestic manufacturing, and American defense manufactures could profit, as well, from such partnerships.
After taking office, the Biden administration might find that defense engagement is the most robust element of an increasingly multifaceted Indo-U.S. partnership and will, in all probability, build on it. That might entail not only facilitating more robust defense cooperation in the Indo-Pacific but also ensuring that the defense industries of the two nations work more closely in sharing technologies and building capacities.
Harsh V. Pant is the vice president for studies and foreign policy at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi and a professor of international relations at King’s College London’s India Institute.
Bolsonaro needs Trumpism to rally his base, but he might need Biden’s America even more.
No U.S. presidential election in living memory has been so closely watched in Brazil as this one. Through social media meltdowns and televised debates, countless Brazilians came away from the coverage bewildered at the complexity of the U.S. electoral system and more appreciative of Brazil’s electronic voting system, which allows the Electoral Courts to reveal results within hours of polling stations closing. In the United States, the slow process of counting votes, incumbent President Donald Trump’s premature declaration of victory, his threats to take the decision to the Supreme Court, and rising case counts in the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to encapsulate what has been a disastrous year for the United States’ reputation in the world. “Who is the banana republic now?” the Colombian magazine Publimetro provocatively asked on its cover, amid Trump’s refusal to concede defeat.
Even more than the spectacle, Brazilians were rapt by the electoral contest because its outcome is likely to have significant consequences for domestic politics in Latin America’s largest country. That is because President Jair Bolsonaro’s political persona has been so closely modeled on Trump. Now, a victory by Joe Biden has robbed the Brazilian president of his main assets. His No. 1 ally is gone, as is his direct access to the White House. Since becoming president, Bolsonaro has largely operated in Trump’s slipstream, not paying much of a price for his government’s systematic attacks on multilateralism and its climate change denialism. But now, his calculations will have to change, especially with his domestic critics already starting to focus on the lessons Biden’s campaign offered for presidential hopefuls planning to challenge the so-called “Trump of the Tropics.”
Bolsonaro’s decision not to congratulate Biden until Trump has conceded represents the dilemma the Brazilian president will face in the coming years: how to establish a productive working relationship with the new U.S. president and preserve an important economic and political partnership (since last year, Brazil has been a major non-NATO ally) without betraying Trumpism, which is an important ingredient of the Brazilian president’s overall political narrative and which helped him mobilize his most radical followers.
For Brazil’s president, there is no easy way out. Pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups are already teeming with conspiracy theories about how the Democrats stole the election. If Bolsonaro decides to establish a pragmatic working relationship with the Biden administration, he will risk a backlash from his most loyal followers. Yet decrying an illegitimate globalist takeover of the White House is likely to cause a fierce reaction from economic elites, who are growing tired of the uncertainty created by Bolsonaro’s radical foreign policy. Already having lashed out at numerous key economic partners such as Argentina, China, and the European Union, cheered on by ardent anti-globalist Bolsonaro fans, offending the U.S. president-elect may be a step too far for Brazil’s president.
Oliver Stuenkel is an associate professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo.
Biden will inherit a tax system rigged to deepen inequality. He’ll need corporate America’s help to fix it.
Taxation was one of the most polarizing topics of the recent U.S. electoral campaign. The incumbent, President Donald Trump, promised to extend beyond 2025 the tax cuts he approved in 2017. Challenger Joe Biden, now the president-elect, instead put forth plans to hike taxes for both corporations and high-income individuals in order to fund education, health care, and other social programs. Although his proposal is far less ambitious than what his rivals to the left, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, suggested during their own presidential nomination campaigns, it would represent a first step to address inequality and restore fairness to an unjust tax system. However, without a Democratic majority in the Senate, Biden’s tax plan is unlikely to see the light of day.
Since the 1980s, the American economy has gone through a radical metamorphosis. In 1980, the top 1 percent income earners controlled around 10 percent of national pretax income, while the bottom half’s share was around 20 percent. Today, those figures are reversed. Globalization, skills-biased technological progress, and political cronyism are the usual suspects. But what is peculiar to the U.S. system among other Western democracies is the lack of progressivity of its tax system: The system fails to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes. In turn, taxation becomes an amplifier—instead of a leveler—of inequalities.
According to a number of studies by the University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, while the individual income tax is formally progressive—its graduated tax rate goes from 0 percent for the lowest earners to 37 percent for the highest—the very rich manage to avoid paying this kind of tax almost entirely. The bulk of their earnings come from dividends, which are not only taxed at a rate of just 20 percent but are also exempt from Social Security payroll taxes, which are levied on labor earnings only.
The other major source of tax injustice comes from the U.S. system of consumption taxes. In the United States, sales and excise taxes exempt most services, which tend to be consumed more by the rich than by the members of the working class. Country club memberships and lawyer fees, for example, are not subject to any sales tax, whereas purchases of food, clothes, and home appliances are. As a result, the average tax rate, instead of increasing along with income, is flat.
The flattening of the U.S. tax system is a relatively new phenomenon. Public opinion started to turn against tax progressivity in the 1970s, owing to the threat of capital flight, the emergence of an aggressive tax-dodging industry, and the intensification of global tax competition. Since then, average tax rates have declined for everyone, including the poor. But the rich have benefited the most—and massively so. The top marginal federal income tax rate has fallen from 70 percent to 37 percent. The corporate tax rate has declined from about 50 percent to around 20 percent. And estate taxes on large bequests have proved to be highly ineffective, owing to exemptions and deductions. (Not just in the United States: “Inheritance,” as the Guardian put it on Nov. 9, “not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.”)
Biden’s electoral platform envisaged the restoration of some degree of progressivity. He proposed hiking the top marginal rate on income above $400,000 to 39.6 percent from 37 percent, while increasing the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent. He also wants to eliminate tax breaks for capital gains and dividends, and he has released plans to subject incomes above $400,000 to payroll taxes. But a split Congress will hardly pass any of those measures.
If Biden is constrained in his ability to use fiscal policy to tame income disparities, then it will be up to corporations to mitigate inequality by closing the salary gap between the top and bottom earners within their companies. They’ve been resistant to doing anything of the kind, but with U.S. society emerging so fractured from this election, corporate America may yet start to feel responsibility to bring some fairness to the system—or else face even less amenable political circumstances later on.
Edoardo Campanella is a Future World fellow at IE University’s Center for the Governance of Change in Madrid and the co-author, with Marta Dassù, of Anglo Nostalgia: The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West.
From Cairo to Riyadh, autocrats are nervous about what a Biden administration might mean for their relationship with Washington.
When Joe Biden said on Wednesday night that “democracy works,” he struck a chord for many democrats around the world, not just for the Americans who voted him into office. But just as progressives inside and outside the United States have been rejoicing, relieved to see their faith in democracy validated, democracy’s opponents have been nervously following the U.S. presidential election and betting on a win for Donald Trump, which they did not get.
Authoritarian rulers to whom democracy is a threat, most notably in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are a case in point—and it is easy to see why Biden’s victory has frightened the two countries’ leaders. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, would have adopted undemocratic policies and overseen human rights violations whether or not Trump was in office, but his presidency allowed them to do this with more confidence and ease. They knew that they would not face a serious moral challenge from Washington no matter how far they went in their suppression of their citizens.
During Trump’s four years as president, proponents of democracy and human rights have been remarkably lonely and overpowered in an international arena that suddenly looked very different than it had prior to 2016. In the summer of 2018, for example, when Canada’s foreign minister called for the release of two political detainees in Saudi Arabia, Riyadh overreacted, expelling the Canadian ambassador, suspending flights to and from Toronto, withdrawing thousands of Saudi students from Canadian schools and universities, and freezing future trade and investment with the North American country. More shocking than the Saudi storm of punitive measures against Ottawa was Washington’s reluctance to come to the aid of its neighbor and longtime partner.
But Riyadh’s biggest prize from Trump came a few months later, when the former got away with the killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. He was dismembered with a bone saw in his own country’s consulate in Turkey, the world was shocked, and the CIA concluded that his assassination was ordered by the Saudi crown prince.
Despite the overwhelming evidence from his own intelligence agencies, Trump could not muster more than subtle and indirect criticisms from which he quickly retreated. Then he reaffirmed that Saudi Arabia had “been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran. The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region. It is our paramount goal to fully eliminate the threat of terrorism throughout the world!”
Another close Trump ally is Egypt’s Sisi, whom the outgoing president bluntly called “my favorite dictator” at the G-7 summit in France in 2019. Sisi had already begun a severe crackdown on opponents and activists when Barack Obama was in the White House. The estimated number of political prisoners in the country currently is at least 60,000.
Enforced disappearances are so frequent that they have become normalized. Jails are overcrowded, and there are numerous reports of torture in Egyptian prisons. While this crackdown was already in full swing before Trump was elected in 2016, its persistence with continued severity, since Sisi took power in 2014 and until now, is rare and worse than it ever was in the past few decades—even under Hosni Mubarak.
The regime had been largely politically isolated at the international level, especially after Sisi, then-Egypt’s military chief, oversaw the removal of Mohamed Morsi from the presidency in 2013. Back then, Obama was in the White House, and he responded to what his administration saw as an undemocratic move in Egypt by imposing a partial, temporary cut of U.S. aid to Egypt.
Eventually aid was restored in 2015, but bilateral relations remained strained after Obama had sent a clear message the he was not comfortable with being perceived as friendly toward autocratic rulers. At the time, critics saw his reaction as futile, but the world has now lived to realize its significance, compared with Trump’s policies and attitude toward Sisi, Mohammed bin Salman, and like-minded politicians from Brazil to Hungary to Belarus, where Aleksandr Lukashenko—another beleaguered leader refusing to step down—echoed Trump a few days ago, saying the U.S. election was fraudulent.
But it is not only about foreign policy. The cause of today’s anxiety among nondemocratic rulers is not just about whatever concrete differences that they expect between Trump’s and Biden’s policies. Dictators also fear the reinforcement of the powerful idea that “democracy works.” The Egyptians who are rejoicing today are happy to see Trump’s indecency go, but they are also inspired by democracy’s self-corrective mechanisms.
No matter how much Trump attempted to use the powers given to him by the U.S. Constitution to change the system in his favor (e.g., rushing to appoint Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court), the system still gave the American people the means to vote him out of office. That doesn’t happen in Sisi’s Egypt; when Sami Anan announced his intention to run for president against Sisi in 2018, Sisi put him in jail—and the matter was closed.
The Egyptian people did not give up. A year later, they marched in rare protests against Sisi’s rule even as they fully realized the risk they were taking under a president who has been rounding up protesters en masse and locking them up until they are forgotten about. Then they got arrested, and the protests were suppressed.
Biden’s election is rekindling hope. This is about America, but it is more than just America. If Biden really sees the United States as a “beacon for the globe,” and many Americans and non-Americans are eager to believe him, he should break with Trump’s policies toward autocratic rulers, including Sisi and Mohammed bin Salman.
This is not a call for an interventionist U.S. foreign policy. The United States is already intervening in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia by virtue of generous military aid, arms sales, and other means of leverage that have more or less persisted under subsequent U.S. administrations for decades. These are realities on the ground, and they can be, and have been, used as bargaining chips.
Nor is this a call for Biden to boss his counterparts around in a way or tone that could rightly bring criticism and valid accusations of U.S. neoimperialism, to terminate long-standing relations, or to dismiss the importance of the Egyptian state’s war against Islamic State affiliates in the Northern Sinai region. Rather, it is a call for Biden to be true to democracy and the democratic values that his election symbolizes. For instance, a release of political detainees in Egypt and Saudi Arabia is one achievable step that Biden should pursue.
It is important to prove now more than ever that democracy matters—at home and abroad—as these values were feared to be at stake under Trump. With him gone, it is time to champion them once again.
Sara Khorshid is a doctoral candidate at Western University in Canada, where she is writing her dissertation on the history of Egyptians’ postcolonial perceptions of the West as portrayed in Egyptian cinema during the Cold War. She previously worked as a journalist and columnist in Egypt for 15 years. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, HuffPost, Jadaliyya, and numerous other outlets.
In today’s Democratic Party, inheriting Obama’s economic legacy may be a burden, not a benefit.
As the transition to the next administration under Joe Biden begins, several lists of potential economics team members are already in circulation. Longtime Biden advisors Jared Bernstein and Ben Harris are in the frame. So too is Heather Boushey of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, formerly of Hillary Clinton’s transition team. Lael Brainard at the U.S. Federal Reserve is one of the most experienced technocrats of her generation. She is odds on to be the first woman to serve as U.S. treasury secretary.
These are the intellectual picks. At the other end of the spectrum are operators like the businessman Jeff Zients, Barack Obama’s Mr. Fix-It and the head of his National Economic Council. Zients is one of four co-chairs in the Biden transition team and a “staunch capitalist” vouched for by the Business Roundtable.
The economic agenda of the Biden administration will likely be defined by such splits in personal background and by the wider left-center axis that runs through the Democratic Party. At this stage, these divides seem much more pronounced than under Obama. The economics team of Obama’s early years was taken straight from Bill Clinton’s roster. When Biden’s team announced this year that it was taking advice from Larry Summers, Clinton’s last treasury secretary and a key figure of continuity in the Obama administration, it provoked a storm of protest from the left. Since then, Summers has removed himself from consideration for jobs in the Biden administration.
In truth, whereas the Obama administration inherited a narrative of success from the Clinton era, Obama’s legacy for Biden is more mixed. This reflects the slow recovery from the 2008 crisis; the failure to implement radical reform of the financial system; and the growing awareness of the problems of inequality and structural racism and the challenges of Big Tech, an industry that used to be seen as the salvation of U.S. capitalism. Today, it is no secret that there are huge differences within the Democratic Party on questions of wealth taxes and antitrust regulations, among others.
It is easier to agree on macroeconomics. There is general agreement that the Obama administration would have done better to push for a bigger fiscal stimulus in 2009. Faced with America’s current recession, that is also something on which Biden’s team can agree. The United States needs the largest feasible stimulus to make good on Biden’s promise to “build back better” and kick-start the country’s energy transition.
But getting a multitrillion-dollar package depends on control of the Senate—a prospect that seems likely out of reach for Democrats. If, come January, Mitch McConnell still controls the Senate, that will not only curtail any spending package designed by the Biden White House. It also risks exposing divisions throughout the Democratic camp. Compromise with Senate Republicans will be a bitter pill for the left wing to swallow, and it will force policy to focus on areas such as regulatory change that do not require congressional approval but on which it may be much harder to find agreement within the Democratic Party’s own increasingly diverse coalition.
Adam Tooze is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a history professor and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. His latest book is Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, and he is currently working on a history of the climate crisis.
The country is treating the outcome of the U.S. election as an opportunity—and a potential threat.
As U.S. President Donald Trump urged his followers to disrupt the counting of ballots, he provoked laughter from the leaders of countries to which the United States had long preached democracy. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted, “What a spectacle! One says this is the most fraudulent election in US history. Who says that? The president who is currently in office. His rival says Trump intends to rig the election! This is how #USElections & US democracy are.”
Trump walked out of the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and reimposed debilitating sanctions on the country. This “maximum pressure” policy punished the Iranian regime, but, as is often the case, it mostly hurt the Iranian people. The resulting absence of popular goodwill explains why Iranian Twitter so vociferously exploded with mockery at Trump’s post-election press conferences disputing the results; one Iranian said their own regime could never match the U.S. president’s success at undermining democracy on live television. Iranians were also quick to rejoice when Joe Biden was declared president-elect, expressing hope that he would restore normal economic relations.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani indicated his government was ready for talks, although in a well-calculated manner that guarded Iranian pride. He said he hoped that the last three years of pressuring Iran without much avail taught the United States a lesson that will make “the next U.S. administration follow the law and return to all its commitments” under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed when Biden was vice president. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, an Iranian American academic and political analyst, said in an interview that Iran expects the United States to fully comply with its obligations under the deal and “compensate for damages done due to U.S. violations of the deal.” Only then would Iran return to the table, Marandi added.
Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow and deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that while Biden has made it clear he wants to rejoin the agreement, the U.S. Senate might make it harder if it goes to the Republicans. “Nonetheless, there would be a very obvious opening between Tehran and Washington on the nuclear deal,” Geranmayeh said. “From the U.S. perspective, and frankly from Europe’s perspective too, Iran’s expanding nuclear program is the No. 1 threat to security that they need to deal with.”
She added that Biden intends on ending conflicts where Iran exerts influence over local actors, including in Yemen and Iraq, which would imply some further cooperation between Washington and Tehran. “Biden would look to stabilize the region, which would mean reaching some sort of direct or indirect settlement with Iran.”
But in an article in Foreign Affairs published in the spring, Biden added a caveat. He would renew commitment to diplomacy to strengthen the existing nuclear agreement “while more effectively pushing back against Iran’s other destabilizing activities,” implying curtailment of Iran’s funding of Shiite militias in the region, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah. (Lebanese President Michel Aoun, for his part, expressed hopes that Biden would “restore balance” to Lebanese-U.S. ties after the Trump administration newly imposed Hezbollah-related sanctions on his son-in-law Gebran Bassil, the head of the Free Patriotic Movement.)
Iranians are cautiously anxious about Biden’s plans for the region. But they may have to be patient. The president-elect’s most clearly stated priorities, the coronavirus pandemic and China’s rise, have little to do with the Middle East.
Biden will shift focus in the Middle East, but Israeli-Arab normalization will continue.
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden will inherit his predecessor’s signature foreign-policy achievement: the historic Abraham Accords that normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Quietly supported by Saudi Arabia, the pact represents a giant stride toward peace and stability in the Middle East. But it contains some built-in limits for Persian Gulf countries, which may find a chillier reception from the Biden administration next year.
Rather than the seductive tune of F-35 stealth fighter sales to the Emiratis that smoothed the road toward UAE-Israel rapprochement under outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump, the Biden administration will be talking about uncomfortable subjects like rejoining the Iran nuclear treaty, the region’s record on human rights, and the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents. As a candidate in August, Biden praised the Abraham Accords as a “historic step to bridge the deep divides of the Middle East.” Later, though, he said U.S.-Saudi ties require a reassessment, a step that could deter the biggest and wealthiest of the Gulf countries from joining the new diplomatic alignment with Israel.
This would be no surprise for Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed, the UAE’s famously pragmatic ruler who was quick to congratulate Biden on his victory on Saturday. Mohammed bin Zayed hedged his bets from the start, recognizing that Trump could be a one-term president, and knows Biden from the time the president-elect served in the Obama administration. The savvy crown prince stayed away from the White House signing ceremony in September, sending his foreign minister to shake hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the peace agreement predictably ignited condemnation from Palestinians. The UAE and Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, have a strong footing in Washington and have for decades nimbly managed productive relationships with both Republicans and Democrats in the Oval Office. While ties with Israel may not advance along the trajectory Trump greased with F-35 sales, the Gulf states have broad agendas beyond fighter jets—and will find ample opportunity for warmer ties with the Biden administration after what is likely to be a transition period.
In the meantime, the process of normalization in trade, investment, travel, and tourism will continue. With the once boycotted Israelis now welcomed in the Gulf, lift lines at Dubai’s indoor ski slope should be thick with Israeli tourists at Passover next year no matter what decisions the Biden administration takes.
Jonathan H. Ferziger is a Jerusalem-based non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former Middle East correspondent for Bloomberg News.
Trump’s brand of populist conservatism had little appeal north of the border, but leaves a legacy of U.S.-style race politics.
TORONTO—I am guessing that few readers of Foreign Policy need me to tell them that Canadians reacted positively to the election of Joe Biden as the next president of the United States. Those who quickly congratulated Biden include not only Canadian Prime Minister and Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau but also conservative politicians such as Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and national opposition leader Erin O’Toole. Outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump’s brand of populist conservatism has had little resonance in Canada and produced few cross-border coattail benefits for right-of-center Canadian politicians.
Just the opposite, in fact: During both Ontario’s 2018 provincial election and the national 2019 vote, Conservative Party politicians (including current Ontario Premier Doug Ford and former national Tory leader Andrew Scheer) had to fend off accusations that they were Trump’s northern imitators. Left-of-center Canadian politicians such as Trudeau, meanwhile, eagerly presented themselves as guardians of tolerant Canadian values, which many progressives here believe to be under siege from Trump-inspired xenophobia, racism, or even white supremacism.
In fact, one of the main effects of the Trump presidency here in Canada has been an increased fixation on race in all aspects of politics and policymaking—especially in regard to Black Canadians, despite the fact that only about 4 percent of Canadians are Black and that most of those Black Canadians are first-generation immigrants, not descendants of enslaved or otherwise mistreated Canadian forebears. And following the election, it’s notable that many Canadian journalists and politicians seem more interested in the ascendancy of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris than Biden.
These have been politically unusual times in Canada, a country whose political tribes have traditionally been defined by region, not skin color. And it will be interesting to see whether Canada reverts to that historical dynamic now that Trump is on his way out of office—or whether this new kind of U.S.-style race politics is here to stay and will continue to overshadow Canada’s traditional domestic debates over the economic underdevelopment of Canada’s Atlantic provinces, Quebec separatism, and the Western provinces’ alienation from the rest of the country.
Jonathan Kay is an editor at Quillette, a host of the Quillette podcast, and an op-ed contributor to the National Post.
Democrats on the continent are eager to have a U.S. ally again, but the new administration will have to deliver at home as well.
The United States is at its best when it serves as a symbol of democracy for the rest of the world. That symbolism isn’t always earned, and in fact at several points in U.S. history, it has appeared hypocritical. For the last four years, under Donald Trump’s presidency, that sense of hypocrisy bordered on farcical. The United States seemed to jettison many of the values it most wanted to promote overseas—rule of law, democratic norms, and respect for citizens’ voices. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Africa Reacts series captured, the decline of democratic norms in the United States was palpable, and it gave cover to leaders who willfully harmed their citizens.
Now, with Joe Biden as president-elect and Kamala Harris as vice president-elect, this moment could mark a reset. Within minutes of major U.S. networks calling the race for Biden and Harris, the world began celebrating. In Tanzania, Zitto Kabwe, a leading opposition figure who lost a parliamentary seat in the country’s recent flawed election, tweeted that the Biden-Harris victory represented hope for democracy at a time when its values are under siege. Many citizens across the African continent echoed Kabwe’s sentiment. For the moment, it seems, America, the symbol, might reemerge.
However, for the symbol to truly regain power and legitimacy, and for the Biden-Harris administration to regain credibility in sub-Saharan Africa, it must first deliver at home. Implementing expansive police reform and an agenda to improve the lives of Black Americans will be essential.
The new administration will have its work cut out domestically and globally. Nonetheless, democrats on the African continent are eager to have an ally again. In Biden and Harris, they hope to have an administration that will amplify the voices of civic leaders who are championing human rights and advocating for much needed reforms. They also hope to have an administration that reevaluates how (and to whom) the U.S. government provides security sector assistance, reprioritizes international accords, speaks with moral clarity, and no longer gives cover to authoritarian wannabes.
It’s unlikely that the new administration will meet all of these hopes and aspirations; however, if Biden’s statements and posture during the campaign are any indication, democrats on the African continent will get some much needed victories.
Kehinde A. Togun is the senior director for policy and government relations at Humanity United. He previously led democracy and governance programs in Eurasia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. He is a Truman National Security Fellow and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Centre for Democracy and Development.
It’s time the United States and Europe start taking their democracies more seriously.
“Life is a cabaret, old chum,” sang Sally Bowles in the musical Cabaret. And indeed, that’s how many Americans and others have been treating their democracies over the last several years: U.S. President Donald Trump and many others, of all ideological stripes, have treated it as a show. Yet under Trump, that approach took the United States to a cliff over which beckoned real authoritarianism and chaos. Now, Democratic candidate Joe Biden has been elected president, and the United States seems to have stepped back from that edge for now. But the election should be a wake-up call—and not just in the United States.
All over Europe, the reaction to Biden’s victory was instantaneous and ecstatic, with cries of “may America never have a child ruling the White House again” and a sense that a nightmare is over. The vast majority of Europeans, and many others, had been cheering Biden on—not because they particularly supported his policies, but because, like many Americans, they had been terrified by America’s course under Trump.
And yet, while decrying Trump’s vulgarity during the course of his presidency, many of the same people engaged in that very behavior: mudslinging, ad hominem attacks, name-calling. People of all political persuasions did it. Highly educated people who consider themselves experts did it. Some Americans—on both sides—engaged in violent attacks when they could have protested peacefully. Life was a cabaret, after all, until Election Day, when it dawned on plenty of people just how close to the edge of chaos the United States was. That democracy doesn’t survive on its own: People have to look after it.
In the 1930s, at the same time the fictional Sally Bowles sang her songs in Berlin, the real Austrian writer Stefan Zweig watched the events Cabaret depicts: their country’s imperceptible descent into the abyss, with people taking their well-functioning society for granted even as it was slipping away. And because they didn’t see it slipping away, he wrote, they didn’t act. The veneer between a functioning democracy and descent into Hobbesian free-for-all is very thin, indeed.
With the election of Biden, that veneer is now back in place. European leaders have a long wish list that includes a U.S. return to the Paris climate agreement (Biden has promised that will happen on Inauguration Day), a commitment to European security, and simply a negotiation partner who behaves like an adult. But there’s no reason for Europeans to be smug. A Trump could appear there, too.
Meanwhile, although Biden has said he wants the United States to heal, he can’t do it alone. Division and, worse, suspicion of the other side are rampant—perhaps not surprisingly after so many hours spent denouncing each other. During this election campaign, the two candidates for governor of Utah recorded a joint video pleading for civility, but they’re rare bridge-building voices.
In the end, it isn’t just the act of voting and the relatively smooth counting of votes that make a democracy. It’s also peaceful protest when votes really are stolen, as in Belarus, where protesters march week after week for fair elections. It’s engaging with the other side on Twitter rather than responding with demeaning gifs. It’s putting in the hard work to learn the ABCs of elections, as East Germans did ahead of their first free elections in 1990. Indeed, maybe it’s time for both Americans and the rest of the world to relearn what rule by the people really entails. Democracy isn’t only a cabaret, old chum.
Elisabeth Braw is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on defense against emerging national security challenges, such as hybrid and gray-zone threats. She is also a member of the U.K. National Preparedness Commission.
Right-wing leader Janez Jansa called the election early—for the wrong side.
Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa wasn’t as cautious as America’s decision desks about deciding a final winner of the U.S. presidential election. He offered his congratulations via tweet on Wednesday morning—to President Donald Trump, writing, “More delays and facts denying from #MSM, bigger the final triumph for #POTUS.”
Since his error, Jansa has been retweeting conspiracy theories and accusing the Democrats of mass voter fraud, in between attacks on the fierce protests in his own country. Picking up on Trumpist language, themes include condemning the supposed corruption of the mainstream media, calling it unfair that the election came down to votes in a handful of cities, and claiming that the courts will eventually decide in favor of Trump. News organizations that back Jansa, such as the far-right Nova24, have followed his lead, posting fictitious reports about voter fraud.
In some ways, the mistake was not surprising. Jansa is a far-right leader who has led a campaign against immigrants, served six months in prison after his second term as prime minister for corruption before Slovenia’s Constitutional Court overturned his conviction, and is a close ally of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban. He has been a strong supporter of Trump, endorsing him before the election, and leaning on ties to Slovenian-born first lady Melania Trump. It remains to be seen whether Jansa will eat his words and eventually congratulate the incoming president-elect, or whether he’ll continue to double down—not a recipe for friendship with the new administration.
James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
Trump withdrew from the WHO. Biden can rebuild ties with the organization and make the United States an influential player in the fight against COVID-19.
Joe Biden has just been declared the winner of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. And with him in the White House, and a strong global health advisory team supporting him, the world can finally look forward to the United States returning to a multilateral approach to managing global crises. Never before has an election meant so much when it comes to pandemic preparedness and response. Now is the time for the United States to cooperate with countries across the world to suppress the coronavirus in a coordinated way.
President Donald Trump has blamed his own administration’s failings to control the coronavirus on the World Health Organization and on China. The WHO has unfairly borne the brunt of this criticism, with Trump withdrawing the United States from WHO membership. This position confuses what the WHO can and cannot do. The WHO cannot point fingers, do investigations, or force countries to reveal information if they don’t want to. It is a member-state body that works through consensus, soft norms, and diplomacy.
If praising China in January was the price of getting ahold of the virus sequencing, and having access for a WHO mission in February to get crucial epidemiological information out, isn’t that what diplomacy is all about? The WHO works by trying to bring all countries to the table, rather than publicly shaming countries for bad behavior, whichever country that might be. In a world where no country—whether a dictatorship or a democracy—is likely to keep lines of communication and access open if it’s publicly excoriated, the WHO uses carrots in the court of public opinion for positive reinforcement and its seasoned health diplomats in bilateral meetings behind the scenes.
Biden has committed to rejoining the WHO on his first day in office and taking the COVID-19 crisis seriously. As economic performance in the first half of 2020 has shown, countries that dealt with the public health problem first, and then the economic fallout, have done better compared to those that pursued purely economic objectives.
In fact, COVID-19 harm and non-COVID-19 harm go together, and they can be minimized together. This is the message that governments should be hearing around the world, and the United States can play a crucial role in getting countries around the table to agree on a joint strategy, shared objectives, and a timeline. It also needs to show a real commitment to science and to educating its population so they do not fall for false information circulating on the internet. A Biden win is a win for global health.
Devi Sridhar is a professor and chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh.
The damage done to the U.S. reputation may take years to repair.
Latin American politicians and activists from Argentina to Mexico are celebrating U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s victory on Saturday. Argentine President Alberto Fernández was the first Latin American president to speak out, not only congratulating the president-elect but also praising the democracy of the American people. The Uruguayan president, Luis Lacalle Pou, also sent his congratulations and asked Biden to work with him for “the good of our people.”
The sense of relief in Latin American media is strong. Some are talking of the end of fascism, others of the end of one of the darkest periods in American history, and others say they hope that Biden’s victory will bring the desired understanding and respect for a region that has suffered from the neglect or malignity of the Trump administration over the past four years. Activists against racism and crimes against women in the region hailed the election of Kamala Harris, a Black and South Asian American woman, as U.S. vice president. Latin America has had several female leaders itself—but the presence of a woman next to, if not quite in, one of the most powerful jobs in the world is an inspiring sight.
But despite the sense of future unity and dialogue following the Democratic victory, the United States still must deal with a badly shattered image. Years of racist language and cruelty toward Hispanic immigrants are not easy to fix. For many Latin Americans, President Donald Trump’s baseless accusations of electoral fraud hit close to home; Latin American regimes have often disputed or even refused to accept election results. If Biden’s constitutional path to office remains unobstructed despite Trump’s ranting, that will, in itself, help prop up the image of the United States as still potentially a democratic leader.
Milagros Costabel is a visually impaired freelance writer and disability rights advocate living in Colonia, Uruguay.
European allies who regularly clashed with Trump were among the first to applaud the U.S. president-elect on his victory. Now even the president's closest friends abroad are joining in.
In the days since news outlets projected former Vice President Joe Biden has won the White House, world leaders have been reaching out to applaud the win—seen as a signal that the United States will be resuming its role as global leader—even as President Donald Trump refused to concede defeat.
European allies who regularly clashed with Trump over defense spending and trade were among some of the first to congratulate President-elect Biden when news of his victory broke on Saturday. French President Emmanuel Macron—whose close relationship with Trump quickly soured—addressed Biden and his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, in a tweet, saying: “We have a lot to do to overcome today’s challenges. Let’s work together!”
Leaders in Germany, where Trump has approved a major U.S. troop drawdown amid tensions with Chancellor Angela Merkel, were also quick to congratulate the new president-elect. On Monday, Merkel said she has “fond memories” of working with Biden during the Obama administration and looks forward to cooperating with him to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and climate crisis. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose country became the focus of a U.S. impeachment inquiry against Trump after the U.S. president tried to force Kyiv to investigate Biden by withholding military aid, tweeted that he was “optimistic” about the future of ties with Washington after Biden’s win. “Our friendship becomes only stronger!” he wrote.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg—who managed to get alliance members to increase their defense spending amid Trump’s questionable NATO funding claims—also applauded Biden as a “strong supporter of NATO and the transatlantic relationship.” European Council President Charles Michel welcomed the chance to “engage for a strong transatlantic partnership” with Biden, citing multilateralism, climate change, and trade as three key priorities. In Washington, a Reuters reporter snapped a photo of one reveler draped in a NATO flag as celebrations broke out near the White House on Saturday.
Some leaders seen as Trump allies also offered congratulations to the president-elect. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a Brexit champion whose government will negotiate a new trade deal with the future Biden administration, sent his congratulations on Twitter and cited climate change, trade, and security as key priorities. Polish President Andrzej Duda, who has drawn criticism for new political restrictions seen as moving the country toward autocracy, said he was “determined to upkeep high-level and high-quality” relations. The Trump administration inked deals to move thousands more U.S. troops to Poland after announcing a planned withdrawal of forces from Germany, a decision that could potentially be overturned by Biden.
Major U.S. allies outside of Europe also had praise for the incoming administration. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi applauded Harris—the first woman and Black and South Asian American elected vice president—for her “pathbreaking” success for Indian Americans. “I am confident that the vibrant India-US ties will get even stronger with your support and leadership,” he wrote.
Several world leaders who expressed support for Trump’s reelection before the vote did not initially issue public congratulations for Biden. The small European country of Slovenia may be in an awkward position, as its prime minister, Janez Jansa, appeared to be the only world leader to incorrectly call the race for Trump earlier in the week, bashing Biden and lavishing praise on the U.S. president — forcing another senior Slovenian official appeared to try to clean up the mess on Saturday.
But some leaders who expressed support for Trump’s reelection appear to be coming around. On Sunday, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte extended his “warm congratulations” through a spokesperson, noting that he hoped to work with Biden on “democracy, freedom, and the rule of law”—principles Duterte is known for undercutting at home. In a letter, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban—who had recently accused the Democratic Party of “moral imperialism”—wished the president-elect “good health and continued success in performing your exceedingly responsible duties.”
Some Trump allies in the Middle East also relented. On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted his congratulations for Biden and Harris, addressing the President-elect directly: “Joe, we’ve had a long & warm personal relationship for nearly 40 years, and I know you as a great friend of Israel,” he wrote—papering over tensions between Netanyahu and Barack Obama during his eight years in the White House. But Netanyahu, who has a close personal relationship with Trump, also thanked the outgoing president for “bringing the American-Israeli alliance to unprecedented heights.”
Another country that enjoyed cozy relations with the Trump administration, Saudi Arabia, also congratulated Biden in a cable sent on Saturday, according to the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been a close ally of Trump’s and is expected to come under closer scrutiny for human rights abuses by the new administration.
Others remain notably silent. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has refrained from issuing statements on the U.S. election over the past week, and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said he would not congratulate Biden until the Trump campaign’s legal challenges were resolved, drawing criticism from top lawmakers.
Though Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has yet to comment on the U.S. election, Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay seemed to indicate that he would go along with its results. In an interview with Turkish broadcaster Kanal 7 on Sunday, Oktay said “nothing will change for Turkey” with a new U.S. administration, and he committed himself to pressing Biden to cut support for Kurdish groups in northern Syria. Biden and Erdogan have a history of exchanging jabs: After Biden called Erdogan an “autocrat” in 2019, he was caught on a hot mic calling for leadership changes in Turkey. Erdogan blasted Biden as an “interventionist.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin—whom Trump has praised with effusive language throughout the course of his tenure—has not yet issued remarks on the election, a stark departure from 2016, when he congratulated Trump within hours of his victory. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has also stayed quiet. While Kim has exchanged gushing “love letters” with Trump, there’s no love lost between him and Biden—who called him a “thug” in the second presidential debate.
China has doubled down on its insistence to remain quiet on the U.S. election. On Monday, a foreign ministry spokesperson declined to comment on the matter, saying China would act in “accordance with international law.”
Update, Nov. 9, 2020: This article was updated to include statements and reactions from more world leaders.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Allison Meakem is an assistant editor at Foreign Policy.
For all his flaws, there has never been a better deal-maker on Capitol Hill, colleagues say.
The surprisingly close election between Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump has only deepened pessimism that America is a hopelessly divided nation. And even as he’s been officially declared president-elect, Biden has seen his acumen for the top job called into question for his entire career—never more than by Trump, who lambasted him for his 47 years in Washington, calling him “Sleepy Joe.”
But now is a moment when the old way of doing politics—Biden’s way—is about to confront the new. And at a time when it seems Republicans and Democrats can no longer communicate at all, it’s worth noting that in the past five decades no politician has been more effective than Biden at making deals across the aisle.
Unlike his former boss President Barack Obama, who remained somewhat aloof from Congress and was criticized on that score even by some in his own party, Biden was always the go-to guy in his time as a senator and vice president, relentlessly stalking and schmoozing and looking to make deal after deal, his former colleagues say. “As to Biden’s ‘methodology,’ it ranged from repeatedly buttonholing Members on the Senate floor (or in the Democratic cloakroom) to going down to the Senate gym when he heard that an undecided member was working out there,” said his former Senate aide Michael Haltzel by email.
These are different times, of course. Trump apparently still refuses to concede the election, and a substantial number of Americans—nearly half of voters—may have trouble even accepting Biden as legitimate. “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” the president tweeted from his motorcade on his way to the golf course on Saturday morning.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican in Washington after Trump, notably refrained from congratulating Biden after news networks called the election for the Democratic candidate late Saturday morning. And he has reportedly already pressed Biden to bypass progressives such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders for key cabinet posts and instead pick centrists like Lael Brainard for Treasury and Tony Blinken or Sen. Chris Coons for State if he hopes to work with a Republican Senate. McConnell will also fight fiercely against Biden’s plans to rejoin the Paris climate pact and the Iran nuclear deal. According to the Washington Post, upon his inauguration day 74 days from now, Biden plans to swiftly issue executive orders reversing Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization, repealing the ban on immigration from some Muslim-majority countries, and reinstating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that allows immigrants called “Dreamers” to remain in the country.
But McConnell’s dominance of the Senate remains unclear. Biden’s presidency will be, in fact, a test case of whether politics can still exist as it once did in the past or whether the polarization is too great to overcome.
Yet there is also a sense that many in the nation are tired of the anger, the divisiveness, and Trump’s tweet-a-minute presidency. They want action, they want calm, and, above all, they want an effective COVID-19 relief package. And if any degree of comity can be restored to Washington, it may be Biden who can do it—as even some of his former Republican Senate colleagues have said.
In an appearance in Wilmington, Delaware, Saturday evening after he was declared president-elect, Biden made an impassioned speech invoking the Bible and calling for a national healing, saying this was an “inflection point” for reclaiming “the soul of America.”
“I’ll call on Congress, Republicans and Democrats, to make those choices with me,” said the president-elect, who will be, at 78, the oldest president ever inaugurated.
Coming together will be no easy task, especially if McConnell—who once famously said his only task was to obstruct Obama and prevent him from getting a second term—becomes majority leader of the Senate again. As Obama’s vice president, Biden was often the one who was called on to reach out to Republicans—for example, obtaining the three votes needed to put Obama’s Recovery Act over the top. Obama was a president who “didn’t have the schmooze gene,” Jonathan Alter wrote in The Center Holds, one of his accounts of the Obama presidency.
Biden, by contrast, has for decades been one of the biggest glad-handers on Capitol Hill, and he and McConnell have spent hours negotiating budget, deficit, and other bills. As Politico noted, McConnell was the only Senate Republican to attend Biden’s son Beau’s funeral. Before he retired from the Senate in 2011, Sen. Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, even urged the Obama White House to bring Biden more into play. “They’d be very smart to bring him more into a role of managing and dealing with Congress,” Gregg told me. “They’ve not done a great job of dealing with Republican members, especially the leadership, Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, and Lamar Alexander. Clearly all three have a great personal relationship with Biden.”
These relationships go back many decades, Biden advocates say, especially when it came to forging a common front on foreign policy. “In the Balkan crises—Bosnia and Croatia in 1992-95; Kosovo in 1997-99—Biden’s GOP counterparts in leading the push for U.S. military involvement were Bob Dole and John McCain,” said his former Senate aide Haltzel. “Biden traveled to Bosnia with Dole and in subsequent years talked with him several times a week about the Balkan situation.” Haltzel also noted that when it came to NATO enlargement “nothing could be more of an indication of Biden’s bipartisan ability than the fact that the GOP asked him to be floor manager of the bill (March/April 1998) accepting Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary into NATO. That was simply unprecedented. It recognized, first of all, Biden’s unequaled expertise on the subject and, second, the trust they had in him.”
“He understands governance better than anyone else,” former Republican Sen. and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told me in an interview in 2010, saying it was he who advised Barack Obama to pick Biden as his running mate in 2008. “In particular, he understands Congress.”
In any case, for Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., a self-described regular guy who has spent most of his political career trying rather desperately to be taken seriously by his peers and the public, this is a golden and crowning moment. He has become only the sixth vice president in U.S. history to be elected outright (rather than succeed a deceased president), following John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, and George H.W. Bush. And his victory is a remarkable capstone to an improbable career in which his several bids to become president appeared to be done with four years ago when Hillary Clinton edged him aside—and ultimately lost to Trump.
Now he needs to do what he has said he will do: heal a badly broken country.
Update, Nov. 7, 2020: This story has been updated with Biden’s remarks as president-elect.
Michael Hirsh is a columnist for Foreign Policy. He is the author of two books: Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street and At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World.
President Trump’s legal team is challenging the results in several states.
Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States, according to projections from major news networks and the Associated Press, after carrying Pennsylvania and delivering a final blow to President Donald Trump’s electoral firewall of Rust Belt swing states.
Biden had trailed in early returns from Pennsylvania—seen as necessary for Trump to retake the White House—but his lead became apparent Thursday night as mail-in voters heavily favored the Democratic challenger, allowing him to carry the battleground state Hillary Clinton lost four years ago. The victory in the Keystone State gave Biden 273 electoral votes, just clearing the threshold needed to win the White House.
CNN and NBC News were the first networks to call the presidential race just before 11:30 a.m. on Saturday. They were followed by the rest of the major networks and wire services.
The news comes after a chaotic few days after Election Day when Trump and his surrogates repeatedly—and without evidence—claimed that fraudulent mail-in ballots had put Biden ahead in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia. With votes still being counted, Biden clings to a narrow lead in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, which could ultimately give him a large majority of the Electoral College.
Speaking on Wednesday evening, as his path to victory appeared to narrow, Trump drew criticism from Democrats and some Republicans in Congress for alleging from the White House podium that his opponents were “trying to steal an election.” Trump would become just the 11th incumbent U.S. president not to win reelection, and the first to lose in nearly 30 years, since George H.W. Bush in 1992.
But state officials found no evidence for those claims, and Trump’s legal efforts to stop the count, including lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan, were unsuccessful. Trump, who was at his golf club in Virginia when the call was made, did not immediately respond to Biden’s victory.
“I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” Trump tweeted before hitting the course.
In the days after Election Day, Biden, the former vice president, had appealed for calm but expressed confidence in the outcome as he overtook Trump in key swing states. Biden’s victory also carries historic significance: His running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, will become both the first female vice president and also the first Black and South Asian politician to serve in the job.
After the networks called the victory, Biden issued a conciliatory message. “The work ahead of us will be hard, but I promise you this: I will be a President for all Americans — whether you voted for me or not,” Biden tweeted in the minutes after the race was called.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared to be the first world leader to congratulate the new president-elect, tweeting, “Congratulations, @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris. Our two countries are close friends, partners, and allies. We share a relationship that’s unique on the world stage. I’m really looking forward to working together and building on that with you both.”
Biden’s projected victory sparked an outburst of jubilation in several major U.S. cities, including the banging of pots and pans and the sound of fireworks.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Bush assembled a high-powered legal team. Trump is relying mostly on cronies.
The Trump campaign’s legal challenges in Pennsylvania over ballot counting and mail-in deadlines have evoked memories of the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. President Donald Trump’s own lawyers have cited the case in their Pennsylvania lawsuit, which seeks to prevent voters from fixing problems with their absentee ballots, arguing that if only some counties were doing this, it violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
But there’s little chance that this race will end up like 2000, when the winning candidate wasn’t announced until Dec. 12. For one thing, legal experts doubt that the Trump team’s claims have much merit. Also, Trump’s legal team looks nothing like the formidable group assembled by James Baker, the architect of Bush’s legal strategy. According to a new biography on Baker, The Man Who Ran Washington by the journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, his reputation was so formidable that Gore’s supporters “knew they would lose the moment they heard of his selection.”
Bush’s legal team included three future Supreme Court justices—John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—as well as Ted Cruz, now a U.S. senator, and John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor.
But Trump has struggled to attract such an all-star cast. The New York Times reported that Trump has leaned on his family and on former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as he seeks to ratchet up his legal strategy, with son-in-law Jared Kushner casting about on Wednesday to find a “James Baker-like” figure to lead their efforts.
Trump’s current lineup of lawyers includes his personal lawyers, Giuliani and Jay Sekulow; former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi; and Sidney Powell, who served as a lawyer for former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The firebrand former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has become the public face of the campaign’s legal challenges in Nevada, although he is not a lawyer.
The Biden campaign, in contrast, assembled a team of hundreds of lawyers ahead of the election, anticipating that Trump would raise legal issues. Biden’s operation is overseen by his campaign’s general counsel, Dana Remus, and by Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel in the Obama administration. Other lawyers on the team include Donald B. Verrilli Jr. and Walter Dellinger, who are both former solicitors general, as well as Eric Holder, who served as Barack Obama’s attorney general.
Amy Mackinnon is a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy.
The Democratic nominee could win as many electoral votes as Trump did four years ago.
With the vote counting in five key swing states around the country entering its final stage, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden appears to be in a strong position to win the presidency—though it could be a day or more until a final call is made.
Biden pulled ahead on Friday in Pennsylvania, where a victory would vault him over the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to win the White House. He also has a narrow lead in Georgia, a state no Democratic presidential candidate has won in nearly 30 years, though state election officials said Friday that the race would go to a recount.
If Biden’s leads hold up in the four hotly contested states where he has a slight edge—including Arizona and Nevada—as votes continue to be counted, he could ultimately rack up 306 electoral votes, and a nationwide advantage of more than 4 million votes. But more than 100,000 provisional ballots in Pennsylvania that appeared to be breaking toward President Donald Trump—leaving him a small chance of victory there—have prevented news outlets from calling the race.
Trump, after a caustic speech on Thursday night in which he falsely accused Democrats of committing massive voter fraud with mail-in ballots to steal the election, was roundly condemned by members of Congress—even some from his own party—for undermining the sanctity of the elections.
Trump’s campaign issued a defiant statement on Friday morning insisting there was still a path to reelection. “This election is not over. The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final,” said Matt Morgan, the Trump campaign’s general counsel. He cited allegations of ballots being improperly harvested in the remaining swing states, but he did not provide evidence for these claims. “[O]nce the election is final, President Trump will be re-elected,” he said.
Trump has repeatedly declined to say whether he would peacefully transfer power if defeated. But the Biden campaign said there was no way Trump could cling to power once the results were certified. “[T]he United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House,” campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said on Friday.
Since election night on Tuesday, Trump has repeatedly called for election officials to stop counting ballots, but legal challenges in several swing states appear to have fallen flat. Some are still ongoing. Trump’s closest allies predicted he’ll continue to reject the outcome of the race—even if the major news networks call the election for Biden. NBC’s Hallie Jackson reported on Friday that Trump was in a “fighting mood” and would take that fight all the way to the Supreme Court, though it’s unclear if he will have any legal basis for a case to be heard by the high court.
Trump’s unwillingness to concede will make the transition to Inauguration Day in January exceedingly challenging. He reportedly wants to move ahead with firing top administration officials including FBI Director Christopher Wray, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and CIA Director Gina Haspel, who are not seen as sufficiently loyal to the president. Esper, whose relationship with Trump has chilled in recent months, has reportedly already drafted his resignation letter in anticipation of being asked to leave the Pentagon. Trump could also issue a flurry of executive orders to try to cement his legacy—though those could be overturned by a Biden administration.
Biden trailed in Pennsylvania in most early returns after Tuesday, but his advantage in the state became apparent when mail-in ballots from Philadelphia and other urban areas were finally counted. Pennsylvania had not held mail-in voting at this scale prior to the coronavirus pandemic and was not legally allowed to begin counting the early votes until Election Day.
Even before the results were called, Biden and his vice presidential running mate Kamala Harris already began to move toward a presidential transition, taking briefings on Thursday, starting a transition website, and getting a “national defense airspace” put over Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, to restrict flights.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Would Biden and Modi get along? While much is made of leaders’ personal chemistry, the larger trend is that the world’s two biggest democracies are growing closer.
Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, surveys have shown that people around the world have little confidence in his foreign policy. In January, for example, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 13 percent of adults in Germany and 8 percent in Mexico had faith that Trump would “do the right thing regarding world affairs.”
India is one of the few countries—including Israel, the Philippines, and Poland—where a majority of people surveyed expressed confidence in Trump. In India’s case, 56 percent said they trusted Trump. What does that mean for a potential Biden presidency?
There are several possible reasons why Indians warmed to Trump. For one, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quick to build a public rapport with the U.S. president, with high-profile joint events in Houston and in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Second, policies such as Trump’s travel ban may have found a sympathetic audience in Modi’s India. And third, Trump’s hawkish stance on China gave renewed impetus to the rationale for expanding U.S.-Indian ties on defense and intelligence sharing.
What might change under a Biden administration? Not too much. For all the hype around Modi’s supposed chemistry with Trump, the media said similar things about Modi’s relationship with former President Barack Obama. In other words, Modi has shown he can build relations with both Republican and Democratic leaders.
More substantively, analysts place perhaps too much emphasis on the personal chemistry between leaders. The broader trend remains that the U.S.-Indian relationship has progressed—in defense, intelligence-sharing, trade, and people-to-people ties—over the past two decades under leaders of all stripes. India is one of the few foreign-policy issues with bipartisan agreement in Washington.
It won’t all be smooth sailing under Biden. Salvatore Babones writes in Foreign Policy that New Delhi should be wary of how Kamala Harris might be tougher on India as vice president, putting human rights at the center of her approach. That may be the case, but I think the relationship between the two countries is robust enough to adapt. After all, Obama criticized Hindu majoritarianism when he visited India in 2015. Ultimately, the United States and India will find common cause in their hardening stances against China.
Outside of India, a Biden presidency won’t change much with regard to U.S. policies in other South Asian countries. As Ali Latifi wrote in Foreign Policy last week, Afghans know that the die is already cast for them: Biden is likely to continue the withdrawal of U.S. troops that accelerated under Trump’s presidency.
What about Pakistan and Bangladesh? The two countries are among the top five countries with the most Muslims in the world, and for that reason may find it easier to avoid dealing with Trump. And Islamabad will no doubt remember that Biden helped negotiate $1.5 billion in military aid to Pakistan in 2008, an effort for which he was awarded the Hilal-e-Pakistan, the country’s second-highest civilian honor.
Indian Americans in the U.S. election. I’d be remiss to ignore two more things about the U.S. elections relevant to South Asians, and Indians in particular. First, Harris is now poised to become the country’s first female vice president, first Black vice president, and first vice president of Indian descent. It’s a huge milestone for the Indian American community, which comprises more than 1 percent of the U.S. population.
Several other Indian Americans won their races for House seats. Democrats Pramila Jayapal, Ami Bera, Raja Krishnamoorthi, and Ro Khanna will return to the House for another term. But several other candidates failed, including Sri Preston Kulkarni, who ran for a House seat from Texas, and Sara Gideon, who failed in her bid to win a Senate seat in Maine.
Indian Americans were expected to play a larger role in this election. Once demographic data is released, we’ll come back to explore the impact they had.
Ravi Agrawal is the editor in chief of Foreign Policy.
Obama won hearts all over the world, but people have been burned twice now.
When Barack Obama won a landslide victory over John McCain in 2008 to become U.S. president, it was a boon for America’s global image. According to the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes poll, after years of falling under President George W. Bush, U.S. favorability ratings leaped back up to pre-Bush levels in much of the world, especially Western Europe and Latin America. In Germany, for instance, the favorability figure was 31 percent in 2008 and 64 percent in 2009; in Mexico, it was 47 percent in 2008 and 69 percent in 2009. (In some countries, such as Turkey and Russia, U.S. favorability remained flat or slightly fell.) Trust in the U.S. president himself to “do the right thing” in global affairs also leapt massively, often by 60 or 70 points.
Donald Trump’s presidency has seen U.S. favorability ratings—and trust in the president—plummet globally to levels even lower than Bush’s. Between the end of Obama’s presidency and Trump’s inauguration, U.S. favorability ratings dropped by an average of 15 percentage points, and trust in the U.S. president by 42 percentage points. Just 22 percent of the world had confidence in Trump to do the right thing. The sole exceptions were Israel and Russia—and, over time, India, where Trump’s favorability grew. The figures plummeted even further in 2020 as a result of America’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus under Trump.
Trust in Joe Biden himself if he takes office will doubtless be higher in most of the world. But U.S. favorability ratings are unlikely to see a boost on par with that seen after Obama’s election for several reasons. For one, this is the second time around. Bush might have been seen as an aberration, but Trump can’t be. The narrowness (in the Electoral College) of his defeat will only reinforce that image; fears that either Trump himself or a possibly even worse successor will return in 2024 or 2028 will remain. And while Biden might project normality and reassurance, his story doesn’t have the resonance that that of the first African American president did—a symbolic role so powerful that it won Obama the Nobel Peace Prize essentially just for his presidential victory. With the U.S.-China cold war taking shape, too, attitudes toward both superpowers are likely to sharpen—although a hugely unpopular Chinese President Xi Jinping still managed to poll above Trump in the global popularity contest.
James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
Right-wing Chinese American groups have already conjured up conspiracies.
President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud and conspiracies against him are dominating right-wing media as his supporters attempt to come to terms with an almost certain election defeat. But while the president and his fans are struggling to find a clear narrative, right-wing Chinese-language media has already settled on a clear culprit: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The fiction of CCP support for Joe Biden has been percolating through right-wing media for some time. In Chinese, it has been heavily pushed by Guo Wengui, the exiled Chinese billionaire who formed a media group with the far-right activist Steve Bannon. An attempt to promote a report that falsely claimed Biden had profited from his son’s ties to China dramatically fell apart when key claims about its provenance turned out to be a lie. In English, figures like Gordon G. Chang, the author of the 2001 book The Coming Collapse of China, and Robert Spalding, a former U.S. Air Force brigadier general who makes extreme claims about Chinese influence, have promoted the idea of CCP interference in the election, without citing any evidence or method.
In reality, there was little sign of foreign interference in the 2020 election, and most attempts to interfere could be sourced to Russia or Iran—not China. But hard-line opposition to the CCP in the Chinese diaspora has often aligned with the Republican Party, which is seen as more hawkish on Beijing. Conspiracy theories about Democrats have become more prominent after some CCP opponents latched onto Trump as a savior figure. That may be a strategic error: Anti-China policy is one of the few areas likely to see significant bipartisan legislative movement under Biden. Chinese media took a carefully neutral position on the electoral victor while jeering at democracy itself, but as Biden’s victory became clearer, some flattery toward Biden emerged. That will probably disappear quickly in the likely event he takes power; anti-Americanism is extremely dominant in Chinese politics under Xi Jinping, regardless of the identity of the occupant of the White House.
While the conspiracy theory is confined to a relatively narrow group right now, it’s quite possible that it will spread into the mainstream, especially if Trump himself adopts it. The United States faces genuine problems of CCP coercion and influence—but the idea that Beijing tried to help Biden win doesn’t hold water. To be sure, there were also claims of Russian interference in 2016—albeit with a great deal more evidence. But with Asian Americans already facing a surge in racist attacks this year, Trump blaming Beijing for a Biden victory could quickly turn toxic.
James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
Going digital would ensure faster results, easing concerns about legitimacy and providing a productive role for big tech.
The gridlock over the U.S. election results is frustrating for voters, embarrassing for Americans, and, perhaps most important, damaging to the spread of democracy around the world. As the world’s oldest democracy (the United States is the only country with a continuous constitutional democracy more than 200 years old) the country has a unique obligation to show the world that democracy works. Whether it has worked this week is debatable. Whatever the eventual result, the questions raised about the electoral process will long outlast current events.
The United States needs to revive its democracy through technology. Online voting can provide transparent, fast, and reliable results. It can also increase voter turnout: Less than half of eligible voters under 30 (an age group more comfortable looking at a screen than a polling booth) voted in the 2016 election. This time around, that turnout may be higher, but it’s still not especially strong for a Western democracy. A democracy that doesn’t capture the preferences of broad swaths of its constituents isn’t a functioning democracy.
To be sure, some commenters might fear that online voting would lead to worse accusations of (or actual) fraud, and fear of Russian hackers or Chinese cybercriminals fatally disrupting an election could be increased if the whole process went online. But the technology already exists to keep the process secure. We bank online and do not routinely go to bed expecting that we will wake up to find that bank has disappeared and our accounts have been emptied. The United States has nuclear submarines that are networked, and it has found ways to prevent them from being hacked and used against the country.
The same military-grade technology that makes those things safe can do the same for voting. Online voting is not even experimental: Estonia has implemented online voting for its entire electorate since 2005. Although the country has been targeted by Russian hackers, thorough testing and end-to-end verifiability have eased concerns about the integrity of the system. In the United States, West Virginia and Delaware have already provided online voting for primaries, with no plausible suggestions of fraud or hacks.
By embracing online voting, the United States can give voters confidence in the system; after all, voters would be able to see the counts in hours, not days (or weeks). Such a system would also allow both parties to connect with those who would not normally vote, and would put the United States in a position to again lead the world with an example of a political system that does what it’s supposed to do.
Online voting has one further benefit: It would allow Big Tech to find its true purpose in society. Increasingly, tech firms are quickly taking on editorial functions by suppressing or promoting stories. Their efforts—and their unique capacities—would be better spent providing the infrastructure to keep America’s democracy functioning. That infrastructure can be open to real-time audits by both parties as well as neutral observers. Perhaps the server logs could even be posted online, creating a truly open, 21st-century democratic system.
After this month’s election, it is clear that American democracy needs a reboot. At a time when many organizations are going through a digital transformation, it’s time for the United States itself to join in.
Ronjini Joshua is an author, speaker, and founder of The Silver Telegram, a tech-focused communications firm.
The pseudonymous leader of the conspiracy theory hasn’t posted for days.
As the first projections emerged declaring the U.S. presidential election for former Vice President Joe Biden, QAnon is wondering where their Q is.
On far-right and conspiracy channels, the legion of loyalists to President Donald Trump are ginning up any evidence they can find that widespread fraud delivered the election to Biden. Rallies are being planned in the states that are still too close to call. There is an emerging strategy to pressure Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Arizona, and elsewhere to ignore the results of the vote and send Republicans to the Electoral College anyway, in effect demanding that Trump be installed despite the official election results. Other followers are confident that the election results are all part of a plan devised by Q and Trump to smoke out the so-called deep state.
Generally speaking, however, QAnon hasn’t violently mobilized as many feared. Protests outside of state houses and county offices have been, in some cases, unruly but generally small. The only news of an extremist plot appears to have come via a pair of arrests in Philadelphia on weapons charges—researcher J.J. MacNab identified one suspected as an avowed QAnon believer. While promises that the coming weeks could “go hot” may yet be fulfilled, things have been relatively quiet.
QAnon’s unexpected malaise seems to correspond to silence from Q themself. The movement’s pseudonymous leader has not posted since the early-morning hours of Election Day, when they uploaded a picture of a massive American flag, a quote from Abraham Lincoln, and a promise that “together we win.”
Justin Ling is a journalist based in Toronto.
No one is more anxious about a potential Biden presidency than Mohammed bin Salman.
Over the last couple days, few capitals have awaited the results of the U.S. presidential election with as much anxiety as Riyadh, particularly its young and ruthless would-be king, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Even though he’s well aware that the U.S.-Saudi relationship may still be regarded as too big and important to fail, an impending victory for Joe Biden means the end of the zone of immunity the Trump administration crafted around Saudi Arabia. The country’s human rights record, its dealings in Yemen, and its reckless efforts to amass influence in its region are likely to emerge as sources of rhetorical tension, particularly with a Biden administration that isn’t looking to invest heavily in the Middle East.
The crown prince has every reason to be worried. He played U.S. President Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and pro-Saudi Middle East advisor, well, convincing them that Saudi willingness to buy billions of dollars in U.S. weapons, oppose Iran, and reach out to Israel mandated allowing the Saudis to do just about anything else in the region they wanted. But a President Joe Biden would be less likely to go along with Saudi Arabia: He has described the country as a pariah, called for ending the “disastrous war” in Yemen, and urged a reassessment of the U.S. relationship with Riyadh. “America’s priorities in the Middle East should be set in Washington, not Riyadh,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations last year.
Under Biden, those priorities, it seems, would be soothing tensions with Iran through reentering the nuclear accord while avoiding a blowup with Israel. In those efforts, there will also be a new rival for Washington’s affections—the United Arab Emirates’ Mohammed bin Zayed, who has already normalized ties with Israel, is less reckless than Mohammed bin Salman, and may thus seem to a Biden administration a more reliable partner.
Assuming Tehran is interested in rapprochement and is looking for an agreement on the nuclear issue, especially if it’s accompanied by a Barack Obama-like pledge to inject more balance into U.S. policy and stay out of Saudi Arabia and Iran’s regional games, U.S. regional efforts are likely to roil Riyadh. And with Biden mostly interested in not getting sucked back into the Middle East, the administration may not be prepared to invest all that much time or attention to Saudi Arabia. What impact this distancing might have on Riyadh is unclear.
It might push Saudi Arabia to expand ties with China, especially on the nuclear issue, or perhaps the country could borrow a page from the UAE and accelerate normalization with Israel in an effort to curry favor with Washington. Whatever it does, though, it’s fair to say that under a Biden administration, with its priorities elsewhere, Saudi Arabia won’t be Washington’s darling any longer.
Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former U.S. State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations. He is the author of The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.
Beijing may appreciate a less erratic U.S. administration. But it shouldn’t expect Biden to be more pliable.
A Biden White House is likely to oversee a steadier and more coherent China policy than the Trump administration, whose erratic approach careened from President Donald Trump’s fawning praise of Chinese President Xi Jinping—including reportedly condoning concentration camps in Xinjiang—to name-calling and fighting a failed tariff war. A consistent approach will bring more stability to a delicate and difficult relationship. But a more stable approach does not mean a soft one, since there is now a bipartisan recognition in the United States that China is a strategic competitor. Indeed, while Beijing may appreciate soon having a more predictable set of interlocutors, it should not expect them to be more pliable.
Helping Biden is the fact that much of U.S. foreign policy is the prerogative of the president and therefore less constrained than domestic policy by the legislative branch. But if Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell remains in control of the U.S. Senate, one of the first tests for the Republicans in the Senate will be whether they will cut off America’s nose in order to spite the new president’s face. The United States needs a robust economic stimulus, including significant investment in infrastructure, in order to make it to the other side of the pandemic and jump-start the economy. Republicans who want to be tougher on China must recognize that a strong U.S. economy is a strategic imperative.
Some commentators have suggested that the Trump presidency, and its undignified end, has emboldened Chinese government leaders and raised their confidence in the superiority of their own system. On Election Day, the editor of the Chinese government propaganda newspaper Global Times, Hu Xijin, gleefully posted on Twitter about storefronts being boarded up in U.S. cities, writing that unrest is usually a “complication of elections in poor countries, but people are worried it may appear in the US. The US is in degradation.” It should be noted, of course, that the Chinese Communist Party boards up its windows from the inside, metaphorically speaking, to keep citizens from seeing how the leaders of its authoritarian regime are selected.
We cannot deny or dismiss the damage done to the global reputation of U.S. democracy by Trump’s antics. But neither should we overstate that damage. In the end, the United States—a giant, multiethnic, multiconfessional, industrialized democracy—had an election where the result was unknown ahead of time. It generated record voter participation and was held with relatively few problems in the midst of a global pandemic. It delivered a defeat for the incumbent and a new president.
Biden will most likely lead the United States with a divided government. His administration will have to work with senators and representatives from diverse constituencies and make compromises in order to strike deals that equip the county to confront the challenges of the 21st century, including its strategic rivalry with China. It will be messy and challenging, and progress will not be linear. But this is not a new story—it is a very old one. Chinese leaders pride themselves on taking a long view. The United States faces plenty of foreign and domestic challenges today, including in its democratic institutions. But in the long view, its democracy is not a source of weakness; it is a source of strength.
Daniel B. Baer is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from 2013 to 2017.
A split government would make it harder, but there are many things a president can do.
With a President Joe Biden and a Republican-controlled U.S. Senate—the current scenario pending final vote counts and two runoff elections in Georgia—ambitious legislative action on energy and climate change will be significantly more challenging. Nonetheless, there will still be many options for meaningful climate action under a Biden administration.
First, there are several existing laws a president can work with without congressional approval. The most significant is the Clean Air Act, which gives the executive branch the authority to regulate emissions from sources such as power plants, cars, and trucks, as well as methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. A judiciary dominated by Republican appointees, however, raises risks that regulatory action under this authority may not withstand legal challenge. A Biden administration can also use its authority over public lands and waters to expand leasing for renewable energy projects such as offshore wind farms; use the procurement power of the federal government and military to drive deployment of clean technologies; curb agricultural and forestry emissions by rewarding carbon sequestration by farmers, ranchers, and landowners; and appoint a majority of commissioners at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which sets market rules for the electricity sector and can use them to favor low-carbon energy sources. As president, Biden could also support policies by U.S. states, for example by reinstating a waiver revoked by the Trump administration that allowed California to set its own vehicle emission standards.
Second, the executive branch has significant authority over foreign policy. Since 85 percent of global emissions are produced by other countries, putting climate change at the center of foreign policy is crucial. Rejoining the Paris agreement is necessary but far from sufficient. There is much else that a Biden administration could pursue, such as promoting collaboration on clean energy trade and innovation; spearheading a multilateral agreement to curb methane emissions and finalizing another to phase down hydrofluorocarbons; pursuing agreements covering carbon-intensive industries such as steel and cement; and working with allies to redouble efforts to phase out emissions from existing coal plants.
Of course, Washington’s international leverage would be enhanced by stronger climate action at home. A proposed global phasedown of coal use would thus have more credibility if domestic regulations limiting power sector emissions drive down coal use in the United States—enabled by cheap renewable energy and natural gas.
Finally, it may be wrong to assume no congressional action is possible with a Republican Senate. An increasing number of moderate Republicans—not to mention business groups that often support congressional candidates—have expressed interest in climate proposals such as a carbon tax, which could sharply reduce emissions in the power sector. Many Republicans also support subsidies for low-carbon energy sources such as solar, wind, and nuclear power, carbon capture, and investments in energy technology innovation, which could yield enormous economic dividends. A President Biden could aim to launch a National Energy Innovation Mission in concert with a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers.
Policies commensurate with the staggering scale of the climate challenge require ambitious legislative action, which will no doubt be more difficult with Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader. Yet using existing regulatory authority, pressing ahead in foreign policy, and seeking bipartisan agreement in narrower areas, a Biden administration can still make meaningful climate progress.
Jason Bordoff is a columnist at Foreign Policy, the co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School, the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, a professor of professional practice in international and public affairs, and a former senior director on the staff of the U.S. National Security Council and special assistant to former U.S. President Barack Obama.
Washington will not return as the champion of the global trading system. But it may stop being its biggest foe.
Under U.S. President Donald Trump, Republicans forgot everything they once believed about trade policy. The party of big business and free trade became the party of “America first” and high tariffs. If Joe Biden becomes president, moving forward on trade will mean cooperating with a Republican Party that now looks a lot more like the party of Sen. Robert A. Taft, the post-World-War-II isolationist, than Ronald Reagan.
In some ways, this will make life easier for the new president, whose own Democrats are split on trade. Biden has pledged to avoid any new trade agreements “until we’ve made major investments here at home, in our workers and our communities.” With Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell likely to remain in control of the U.S. Senate (though two runoff elections in Georgia could still change that), the chances of even minor such investments are close to zero. Were Biden to push ahead on trade deals regardless, he would risk a revolt from progressive lawmakers such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, who are still smarting over what they see as a sellout to corporate interests under the last two Democratic presidents.
That political hornet’s nest suggests a President Biden would do as little as possible on trade. But the world will not stand still. He would inherit a trade war with China, and any moves to ease U.S. tariffs would face significant congressional opposition. A hard line on Beijing is one of the few places where the two parties now agree. Europe would be almost as challenging: Biden is predisposed toward closer trans-Atlantic cooperation, but Republicans are likely to criticize any efforts to remove Trump’s tariffs on the European Union’s exports or revive the World Trade Organization. The lone Republican trade negotiating priority—a deal with a post-Brexit United Kingdom—would find little love on the Democratic side.
The good news for trading partners is they would no longer need to genuflect to Trump’s odd obsessions—from the dangers of bilateral trade deficits to his bizarre belief that China was enriching the United States by paying the tariffs charged to U.S. importers. Under Biden, Washington would not return as the champion of the rules-based trading system. But at least it might cease to be its biggest adversary.
Edward Alden is a columnist at Foreign Policy, the Ross distinguished visiting professor at Western Washington University, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of Failure to Adjust: How Americans Got Left Behind in the Global Economy.
With Kamala Harris in the West Wing, Modi’s opponents in India may suddenly gain leverage.
Indian Americans love Kamala Harris. The daughter of an Indian biologist who moved to the United States and became one of the country’s most respected cancer researchers, Harris embodies the values of hard work, intellectual accomplishment, and political engagement. As a U.S. senator, she pushed for immigration policies favored by the Indian American community, including a lifting of country caps on H1-B temporary employment visas and the retention of employment rights for spouses of H1-B visa holders. And Indian Americans are understandably proud to see one of their own rising to the top of the U.S. political system.
But good for Indian Americans does not necessarily mean good for the current government of India. On the contrary: The Biden team’s priorities (from what we know so far) are likely to drive a wedge between the United States and continental Asia’s oldest democracy at a time when Washington is looking for new allies in its strategic rivalry with China.
Harris may be a part of that wedge herself. As senator, Harris has been diplomatically circumspect in her few public comments about India’s government but has shown no love for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Last year, she even publicly criticized Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar while he was on an official visit to the United States. Jaishankar had refused to share a platform with U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the Indian American sponsor of a House of Representatives resolution calling out the Indian government for its policies in Kashmir.
Harris’s own family connection to India may color her attitude. Her mother hailed from Tamil Nadu in southern India, a state in which Modi’s BJP did not win a single seat in last year’s national parliamentary elections. The BJP is often described as a Hindu nationalist party, but it can also be seen as a regional movement centered on the Hindi heartland of northern India. That regional base has expanded in recent years, but Tamil Nadu—which is almost 90 percent Hindu but not Hindi-speaking—remains a bastion of opposition.
Harris herself has been critical of the Indian government’s policies in Kashmir and strongly suggested (without explicitly saying) that she would put human rights at the center of her approach to India—and the rest of the world. That sounds like political boilerplate until you realize that in India, “human rights” often translates as “anti-BJP.” Unable to beat Modi at the polls, his domestic critics have focused on what they say are policies and incitement directed against minorities, such as India’s 172 million Muslims. With Harris in the West Wing, Modi’s opponents in India may suddenly have much more leverage at their disposal.
Salvatore Babones is an adjunct scholar at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney.
A Democratic win could lead to political upheaval and another Israeli election.
The effects of Tuesday’s vote will ripple far beyond the shores of the United States. With Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden increasingly on track to a victory—barring unforeseen legal challenges—and a move into the White House in January 2021, Israel is one of the places whose political calculus stands to be impacted most directly and significantly by the impending personnel changes in Washington. The prolonged delay in declaring a winner hasn’t overly traumatized Israelis, who are accustomed to waiting weeks, if not months, after Election Day until the final picture emerges.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister since March 2009, heads a wildly unstable coalition government. Its key leaders feud incessantly and publicly about everything from the national budget and senior appointments to regional strategy and even the country’s response to COVID-19.
Conventional wisdom has been suggesting that Israelis are speeding toward an imminent election, which would be their fourth since April 2019. But the advent of a Biden presidency could precipitate a grudging cease-fire between Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who is slated to replace him as premier in a rotation next November.
The past four years have generated a diplomatic windfall for Israel. Netanyahu—a uniquely talented Trump-charmer among world leaders—has leveraged these gains domestically, fashioning himself as the Israeli politician most capable of shepherding his nation’s critical relationship with Washington.
That argument has been an almost impossible sell, however, when Democrats have occupied the Oval Office. Netanyahu’s dealings with Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were notoriously strained; in his December 2016 parting shot, after a rare U.S. abstention on a United Nations Security Council resolution censuring Israeli settlement activity, Netanyahu lashed out at the Obama administration, accusing it of having “colluded with [the U.N.] behind the scenes” in a “gang-up” on Israel.
Polls forecasting President Donald Trump’s defeat were not lost on Netanyahu. It was no accident when the prime minister chose to articulate last week that bipartisan U.S. support for Israel has been “one of the foundations of the American-Israeli alliance.” (That episode came on the heels of Trump’s clumsy Oct. 23 attempt to embroil Netanyahu in the campaign when he asked him, in front of assembled media, whether “you think sleepy Joe could have made this deal [with Sudan], Bibi?” Netanyahu dodged the bullet.)
Expectations are that Biden’s Middle East policy will place him on a collision course with Netanyahu and his right-wing boosters. A renewed U.S. focus on pursuing a “path of diplomacy” with Iran and jump-starting the currently dormant negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians—including a resolute U.S. commitment to a two-state solution—are certain to spark clashes between Biden and Netanyahu, about whom Biden once famously said, “I don’t agree with a damn thing you say.”
A depreciation in the value of Netanyahu’s stock on the world stage could make Israelis more amenable to considering an alternative investment. Netanyahu will seek to make a case for continuing as premier on the grounds that, if Israel is indeed destined to spar with the U.S. government, there is no person better positioned than him to wage those battles. That may not be enough for him to survive at Israel’s helm. Gantz met on Wednesday with Netanyahu’s nemesis, former Defense Minister Naftali Bennett, in a conspicuous sign that the vultures might already be circling and plotting the prime minister’s overthrow in parliament.
If the 14 members of Gantz’s Blue and White faction were compelled to break ranks and join together with the opposition in what’s known as a constructive no-confidence motion, it could be curtains for the incumbent.
Any attempt to eject Netanyahu from power will meet with formidable resistance. Netanyahu is a political master, and his rivals will surely encounter difficulties in resolving their own differences en route to mounting a unified challenge against him. He’s unlikely to make their task that much easier by rushing now to call a snap vote. That said, the same political turmoil buffeting the United States could soon propel Israel—where the situation is fluid—back into the vortex of yet another election.
Shalom Lipner is a nonresident senior fellow of the Middle East program at the Atlantic Council. From 1990 to 2016, he served seven consecutive Israeli premiers at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.
The former vice president contributed to a legacy of failed wars in the Middle East. Can he fix it?
U.S. President Donald Trump never seemed overly concerned about the deaths of thousands of Yemeni civilians at weddings, on school trips, and in their homes. He was more interested in getting to know the new young power in Saudi Arabia responsible for the bombing, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. On two occasions, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution to ban the sale of precision-guided missiles to Riyadh, hoping to wipe America’s conscience clean. Trump, however, vetoed it without compunction both times.
By contrast, in 2017 he claimed that images of dead “beautiful little babies,” killed in a chemical attack allegedly ordered by the Syrian regime, had compelled him to order strikes on regime territory. Many saw the contradiction as showing that his attack on Syria was just an attempt to score a point over his predecessor, who had failed to observe his own red line that a chemical weapons attack by Bashar al-Assad would trigger a military response.
Trump’s policies in countries afflicted by war were transactional and, at times, amounted to a betrayal of U.S. allies. He displayed unprecedented fickleness for an American president when he went back and forth on the decision to keep or withdraw American troops in northeast Syria. Dareen Khalifa, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, said Trump’s indecision undermined the position of the West’s Syrian Kurdish allies, “because any U.S. backing could end with a tweet.” The Kurds had to keep a door open to the regime in case Turkey, which sees the Kurds as secessionists and terrorists, intensified its attacks on their territory.
Trump failed to deliver on his promise to end America’s wars. Instead, he almost started one with Iran when he walked out of the nuclear deal and approved the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani. Desperate to show a victory before the election, Trump pushed for a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, but according to a U.S. watchdog there has been a 50 percent increase in violence in Afghanistan since the deal was signed in Doha, Qatar, earlier this year.
Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee who may be poised to win the presidency, intends to walk the middle path, somewhere between Barack Obama and Trump, to mitigate the damage unleashed by wars that started during his tenure as vice president and those in Iraq and Afghanistan that he signed off on as a senator.
“It’s long past time we end the forever wars,” Biden said in his first speech on his foreign policy in New York in 2019. He opposes the war in Yemen and is unlikely to veto if Congress decides to pass another resolution to stop the sale of weapons to Riyadh. But while he has been openly critical of Saudi Arabia, few believe that any American president can for long stop deals worth billions of dollars to one of its most prominent clients. He can, when he has the time and when Yemen figures on his long list of priorities, push the Saudis toward diplomacy and force Mohammed bin Salman to make enough concessions to the opposition, the Houthis, that an agreement can be reached. But it is unclear exactly how he would go about it.
In Syria, Biden has more to answer for. In its 10th year, the Syrian war has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and half the population displaced. Obama and Biden were criticized for not doing enough to help the protesters and washing their hands of Syria as the regime bombed cities.
Biden, unlike Trump, is certain to keep at least a small number of troops in northeast Syria to support the Kurds, maintaining a foothold in a country now predominantly in the Russian orbit. He wishes to retain the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration to squeeze the regime into making political concessions. The Biden campaign’s policy paper says he will press all actors to pursue political solutions, facilitate the work of nongovernmental organizations and, “mobilize other countries to support Syria’s reconstruction.” But it does not say how he would go about it, especially given he failed to do any of these when he was vice president. “He does not know how to do it,” said Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat currently in exile in the United States. “Biden’s team is split among those who talk to Assad, those who don’t see a point in it.”
The biggest difference between Trump’s and Biden’s approaches to the region is Iran. While Trump was obsessed with punishing Iran through his campaign of “maximum pressure,” Biden wants to reinstate the nuclear deal. Beyond that, it’s hard to judge the extent of Biden’s ambitions. The real prize would be to facilitate talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with a view to easing tensions between the Islamic powers, each vying for supremacy in a region fraught with fundamentalist religious doctrines. But Biden’s plate will be full enough trying to bring existing wars to an end, before he starts contemplating a lasting regional peace.
The president railed against “illegal votes” and “suppression polls” he thinks helped steal the election from him.
On Thursday evening, as votes were still being tallied in battleground states, U.S. President Donald Trump took to the podium at the White House to give a speech that was an incendiary mix of half-truths and outright lies as he sought to undermine the integrity of the electoral process.
Even by Trump’s standards, it was a crossing-the-Rubicon sort of moment, with the nation on a knife-edge, National Guard units on standby, storefronts boarded up, and the potential for violent unrest simmering in cities across the country. Police arrested two men from Virginia over an alleged plot to attack the Pennsylvania election center where votes are being tallied. Several networks, including NPR, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNBC, cut their broadcasts short with some opting instead to fact-check the president’s statements.
“I’ve read or watched all of Trump’s speeches since 2016. This is the most dishonest speech he has ever given,” CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale tweeted.
Below we unpack some of the most incorrect claims Trump made.
Trump began by falsely declaring victory, claiming, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win.”
At the time of his speech, no winner had emerged, but Biden has secured more than 4 million more votes than Trump so far, the most votes ever won by a U.S. presidential candidate. By Friday morning, Biden had squeaked ahead in Pennsylvania, which, if he wins it, will secure him enough Electoral College votes to win the election.
On Thursday, the Trump campaign announced it was filing a lawsuit in Nevada alleging that “illegal votes” had been cast on behalf of dead people and by people no longer resident in the state. It’s not clear what evidence, if any, the campaign has to back up its claim. The Trump legal team has churned out a flurry of legal challenges over the past two days, but legal experts say they have little substance and are skeptical that they could meaningfully impact election results.
Trump also railed against “late” votes being counted, a target of his and the Republican Party since before Election Day. In reality, almost two dozen states have provisions that allow absentee ballots to be counted after Nov. 3, so long as they were postmarked on or before Election Day. In Washington state, ballots that arrive up to 20 days after the election will be counted.
But Republicans have turned their focus to Pennsylvania, with its crucial 20 electoral votes. Republicans fought to ensure that the state could not process mail-in votes ahead of time, something other states did to expedite reporting. In October, the Pennsylvania Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether the extended deadline for counting ballots should be allowed. The court could revisit the issue after the election, but legal experts note that the court would probably be cautious about wading into a bitter political fight.
“[Chief] Justice [John] Roberts is perceived to be very protective of the court’s institutional reputation as an independent branch of the government,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
The delayed counting of mail-in ballots led to one of Trump’s other false claims: “We were winning in all the key locations by a lot, actually. And then our numbers started miraculously getting whittled away in secret.”
As counting began, Trump did in fact show a strong lead in a number of key states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, but experts described it as a “red mirage.” More Republicans turned out for in-person voting, while more Democrats opted to vote by mail during a deadly pandemic, and it takes longer to tally those mail-in ballots. And the votes aren’t being counted in secret, either: All vote tabulations are carefully monitored, and Republican officials are watching the vote count in Pennsylvania. The count is also being livestreamed online.
Trump also claimed that “media polling was election interference in the truest sense,” describing preelection polls that showed Biden with a lead in many key states as “suppression polls.” Most pollsters do seem to have overestimated Biden’s lead—especially in some states like Wisconsin—and the industry as a whole will face a reckoning after also failing to project Trump’s narrow win in 2016. But polls are a staple of election season in countless countries around the world.
Trump further claimed that “the voting apparatus of those states are run in all cases by Democrats.” In reality, key electoral roles in those states, including the secretaries of state in Nevada and Georgia, are held by Republicans.
In all, Trump painted a dark picture of the electoral landscape—one that he portrayed as marred by corruption, vote-rigging, and plots against him—but it wasn’t an accurate picture. In an almost 17-minute speech, Trump managed to make over a dozen false or deeply misleading statements.
Amy Mackinnon is a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy.
Trump claimed victory yet again and said he was being cheated—with no evidence. Biden, with a likelier path to victory, says, “Every vote must be counted.”
President Donald Trump took to the White House podium Thursday night to make baseless allegations that Democrats were committing massive voter fraud with mail-in ballots in order to win the presidential election.
The president’s claims appeared to be meant to further fan the flames of partisan rancor and undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election—particularly in the eyes of his most vocal supporters. They also carried the potential to trigger violence across the country.
Though the claims were presented without evidence and seemed specious, some might set the stage for legal and political battles in the remaining swing states that will determine the ultimate result. Election observers have found no pattern of irregularities with the counting of the mail-in ballots so far.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Trump said, seeming to suggest that all mail-in ballots received or counted after Election Day were invalid. That contradicted public voting data released by states and prompted several news outlets to quickly cut away to correct the record. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” Trump added. He did not take questions from the media.
Trump’s unprecedented speech came as Joe Biden continued to cut into the president’s lead in Pennsylvania on Thursday night. Thousands of mail-in ballots from Philadelphia and surrounding areas were breaking toward the former vice president at numbers greater than 70 percent, according to state officials.
Election workers in Philadelphia, an important Democratic stronghold within the state, are counting ballots while being overseen by dozens of Republican observers—though Trump denied they had sufficient access. The Philadelphia City Commissioners are also livestreaming the vote counts.
Biden spent much of the day gearing up for a possible transition to the White House by receiving briefings on the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic crisis along with his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris. In a speech from Wilmington, Delaware, he insisted that the states must be permitted to finish the counting. “In America, the vote is sacred,” Biden said. “It is the will of the voters—no one, not anything else—that chooses the president of the United States of America. So each ballot must be counted.”
Some Republican lawmakers began distancing themselves from the claims of the president and his inner circle, asserting that they should either present evidence of cheating or respect the democratic process. In a tweet following the speech, Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger implored the president to “present EVIDENCE” if he had legitimate concerns of fraud. “STOP Spreading debunked misinformation,” Kinzinger wrote. “This is getting insane.”
“Every legal vote should and will be counted—as they always are. Where there are issues there are ways to address them. If anyone has proof of wrongdoing, it should be presented and resolved. Anything less harms the integrity of our elections and is dangerous for our democracy,” said Michigan Republican Rep. Paul Mitchell.
Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, a Trump critic who voted to impeach the president in January, tweeted after the speech: “Counting every vote is at the heart of our democracy.” He did not mention Trump by name. Rick Santorum, a former Republican presidential candidate and CNN commentator, said Trump’s comments were “wrong and very dangerous” and called on Republican lawmakers to stand up to the president.
Yet Trump’s ire over the mail-in vote appeared to be selective. He condemned ballots counted late in Pennsylvania that cut into his lead there, though there is no question about their validity. At the same time, he praised ballots that were coming into Arizona and Nevada late that cut into Biden’s lead in the two western states. With 214 electoral votes according to a New York Times tally, Trump would likely need to hold all three states to win reelection.
The comments reflected an increasingly desperate tone from the Trump campaign as the president’s path toward reelection appeared to steadily narrow. Over the course of the day, Trump deployed some of his most loyal political lieutenants, including Richard Grenell, Pam Bondi, Rudy Giuliani, and Corey Lewandowski, to critical battleground states to challenge the legitimacy of the voting process, while his sons spread unsubstantiated rumors on social media that voting tallies had been manipulated.
The Trump campaign also ramped up legal fights, filing suit to halt the counting of ballots in Pennsylvania and demanding that Republicans be granted greater access to the vote-counting process. Similar lawsuits were thrown out by courts in Georgia and Michigan.
Just prior to Trump’s remarks, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat, said: “We just had the largest election in our state’s history. … We rolled out vote by mail for the first time in our state’s history. … The only irregularity we had was the president’s campaign rolling up in a clown car in downtown Philadelphia and having an impromptu press conference and saying ridiculous things and making up lies.”
Trump’s surrogates leveled equally unsubstantiated claims about the voting process. Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, said at a press conference in Philadelphia: “We’ve won Pennsylvania, and we want every vote to be counted in a fair way.” At the same time, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit seeking to halt the counting of ballots in Pennsylvania. In each case, Trump loyalists failed to present evidence to back up their claims of voter fraud.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Colum Lynch is a senior staff writer at Foreign Policy.
Under a potential Biden administration, protectionism may be more targeted and subtle—but it isn’t going anywhere.
The United States is emerging from this presidential election as divided as ever: geographically, ideologically, and economically. Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who for now seems to have the edge to secure the White House, would have needed a solid congressional majority to implement the ambitious fiscal and environmental agenda to rebuild America that he ran on.
Controlling the House of Representatives will not be enough. Thus curbed in his ability to pursue his broader agenda, Biden will likely at least try to shield the American middle class from global economic turbulence through trade policy. In short, whether Biden or President Donald Trump eventually triumphs, protectionism is here to stay.
Four years in power have allowed Trump to engineer the most abrupt shift in U.S. trade policy since World War II, marking its departure from the rules-based trading system that Washington had established over the previous seven decades. A Biden presidency would lead to a partial normalization in trade relations, marking a return to a more multilateral and less transactional approach. But even before messy electoral outcomes became likely, it was foolish to expect him to repudiate Trump’s protectionist legacy.
From the very beginning, Biden made clear that “economic security is national security.” In that framework, domestic issues, primarily the regeneration of the American middle class and small businesses, would always top his agenda, especially amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It makes sense then that protectionism has crept into his platform. The candidate’s “Made in America” agenda hides veiled forms of protectionism aimed at promoting goods and services that are produced domestically. Under the “Buy American” slogan, for example, he envisages $400 billion in government procurement investment that would target goods and services provided exclusively by U.S. businesses. And consider his proposed carbon adjustment fee against countries that fail to meet their climate and environmental obligations. That is nothing more than a tariff.
Even beyond efforts like these, which would actually reinforce protectionism, there is the simple political fact that, on entering the White House, Biden would have a hard time unrolling Trump’s protectionist measures or launching new free trade agreements.
Although Biden blamed Trump’s tariffs for hurting the U.S. economy, he would have to perform a complicated balancing act to lift them. This is especially true when it comes to China because he is backed by labor unions, which want jobs protected from Chinese competition, but also by farmers, who want to regain access to the lucrative Chinese market. In an attempt to build a common front against China, Biden might lift tariffs on aluminum and steel produced by European companies. That might look like a win for free trade, but such a concession would likely be made conditional on NATO spending commitments, a shared reform of the World Trade Organization, and reassurances concerning 5G deals with Beijing.
Finally, even if the political will were there to forge new trade agreements, it would take years to do so through the normal processes—even though Trump has had a habit of just declaring them. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, it takes on average one and a half years to negotiate a free trade agreement with the United States and then more than three and a half years to reach the implementation stage. More complex, multiparty agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (from which Trump withdrew) can take almost a decade.
In short, if Biden wins, Trump’s confrontational protectionism may give way to a more selective form—focused on specific issues like the environment, aimed at the protection of U.S. manufacturing, and targeted at real geopolitical rivals. But the days of free trade are over.
Edoardo Campanella is a Future World fellow at IE University’s Center for the Governance of Change in Madrid and the co-author, with Marta Dassù, of Anglo Nostalgia: The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West.
The U.S. presidential election came off with little evidence of outside interference—but plenty of internal confusion.
Preparing for the worst ahead of the United States’ presidential election, U.S. Cyber Command upped its game. To deter interference with the campaign and the vote, the command set up operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Even so, three-quarters of Americans worried that foreign governments would be able to meddle on Election Day. But Nov. 3 came with a big surprise: no significant foreign interference to note. The United States’ adversaries are clever strategists.
“We have no indications that a foreign actor has succeeded in compromising or affecting the actual votes cast in this election,” announced Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf on Nov. 3. His message stood in stark contrast to preelection warnings from the White House, the FBI, and the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which had all raised the specter of a combination of disinformation and hacking attempts by Russia, China, and Iran. Many analysts, too, predicted 2016-style disinformation chaos.
Sure, there have been hacking attempts, and the FBI documented Russian disinformation. But two things have changed since America’s rude election-interference awakening in 2016. U.S. authorities, election machine manufacturers, and social media companies are now acutely aware of the interference risk and try to limit it. U.S. Cyber Command, meanwhile, went on offense early with its Defending Forward strategy, where cyberoperatives signal to would-be attackers that they’ve been identified (and might be punished). In 2018, the cyber-warriors managed to keep the midterm elections clean. This time their added firepower—with units operating around the world to counter would-be perpetrators—paid dividends.
But it is too soon for self-congratulations. As Sun Tzu said, in more elegant words: Don’t try the same trick twice. The United States’ adversaries didn’t bet on a mega version of the 2016 playbook, because it makes no sense to attack in a manner the adversary is already familiar with. Instead, for the most part, they sat back and watched America harm itself.
Indeed, scores of Americans have shown themselves capable of discrediting their elections all on their own. If the leader of a country announces to his 68 million or so supporters that an election has been “a major fraud on our nation,” as President Donald Trump did, America’s rivals’ initial work is done. And they may have other plans for phase two.
Elisabeth Braw is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on defense against emerging national security challenges, such as hybrid and gray-zone threats. She is also a member of the U.K. National Preparedness Commission.
Experts say there’s little chance they could actually affect the results—but they could affect the nation.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign has filed a flurry of lawsuits in battleground states, raising fears that the protracted battle for the White House could be drawn out even further through the courts. But legal experts say that the cases filed in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are unlikely to have any material impact on the race. Rather, the cases appear to be an effort by the Trump campaign to muddy the waters about the integrity of the election.
“These do not appear to be very serious challenges, there’s not a ton of evidence being submitted with these complaints,” said Jonathan Diaz, legal counsel with the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan voter advocacy organization.
On Thursday, a judge in Georgia dismissed a case filed against the Chatham County Board of Elections less than 24 hours after it was filed. In his decision, Judge James Bass said that there was “no evidence” that 53 absentee ballots had been mishandled, as the Trump campaign’s lawsuit alleged.
In Michigan, a judge dismissed a request by the Trump campaign team to halt the counting of ballots, with the campaign alleging that Republicans hadn’t been granted full access to observe the vote tabulation process.
“These lawsuits are tinkering on the edges claiming potentially minor infractions; nothing which would reverse any electoral college win for Biden,” wrote the legal scholar Rick Hasen on his Election Law Blog.
The one case that could potentially have some legs is a Republican challenge to a decision made by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that allows mail-in ballots received by 5 p.m. on Friday to be counted, so long as the postmark indicates they were sent by Election Day on Tuesday. The Supreme Court refused to fast-track a request by Republicans to review the Pennsylvania court’s decision, but three justices indicated that they would be willing to revisit the issue in the future.
“But that lawsuit and the decision coming out of it would really only become a factor if Pennsylvania ends up so close that those ballots … end up being decisive,” Diaz said.
A lot of what-if scenarios would have to align for the case to come into play: Pennsylvania would have to become the decisive state in pushing one of the candidates across the finish line (it isn’t right now), and the margin in the state would have to be so tight that the tiny fraction of ballots received after Election Day becomes decisive.
While none of these lawsuits is expected to meaningfully impact the electoral map, they are likely to foment further strife as they give more ammunition to Trump supporters on the ground to challenge the legitimacy of a Biden win.
“I think that there’s maybe two separate things going on, one is a PR strategy using litigation trying to undermine confidence in the integrity of the result in order to stoke public distrust,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“Then they’re just throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall, coming up with whatever claims they can make up,” she said.
Amy Mackinnon is a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy.
Biden or Trump, Massive Immediate Spending Is Probably Off the Table
Whom the next president will be is still unknown. But we do have some clarity on one thing: A much-discussed $3 trillion economic stimulus is not in the offing this fall. With Republicans increasingly likely to hold the Senate, such massive government spending is off the table for not only the next six months but probably the next two years.
In the months and days leading up to the election, Republicans and Democrats had come to a deadlock on stimulus spending over a $300 million to $400 million disagreement. The Democrats wouldn’t budge on their $2.2 trillion plan, and the Republicans wouldn’t go above $1.8 trillion or $1.9 trillion. The most contentious discussions came over Democrats’ desire for an extra $600 monthly unemployment benefit and bailouts for states and the Republicans’ insistence that businesses be granted liability protections in case their employees fell ill with COVID-19.
Although President Donald Trump’s economic advisor, Stephen Moore, has said Trump would not pass any stimulus during a lame-duck period, likely Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has insisted that passing a bill before the end of the year will be a top priority. Trump has never appeared to share Moore’s distaste for debt, so odds are he’ll sign legislation for a stimulus if it gets to him this fall.
The question of what will come after Inauguration Day is trickier.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden has laid out what a potential stimulus under his watch would include, and it sounds a lot like the Democrats’ original plan—with an extended unemployment benefit and lots of aid for states—and also ensures free COVID-19 tests and vaccines. But given a likely Republican Senate, an uncertain course for the pandemic throughout the winter, and a lack of clarity on what the economy might look like in January, it is hard to say what the country will need and what compromises he could make with the Senate.
If Trump wins, meanwhile, he’ll still need to contend with a Democrat-held House, which means that passing a stimulus will necessitate comprise on his end, too. Odds are that he’ll want to follow through on his promise of more stimulus, but it would need to be more restrained to please people in his party.
In the center of the Venn diagram of possible 2021 stimulus plans under Trump or Biden is a pared-down version of something close to what was being debated at the end of October. For Democrats: some unemployment enhancement and relief for states. For Republicans: some liability protections. For both: a check for most taxpayers. The Democrats and Republicans were not too far apart—given the size of other spending, $300 million to $400 million isn’t all that much—and both have political reasons to stimulate an economy still ravaged by COVID-19.
Longer term, as the virus recedes and the economy recovers, the bigger differences between the two candidates emerge. Over the long term, Biden seeks a muscular Keynesian approach, bringing the government into the economy on a scale not seen since the Depression. He plans on infrastructure spending, universal broadband, clean energy, and addressing what he calls “environmental injustice.” Biden also promises much higher minimum wages (doubling it in some states) and, presumably to offset the burden that will place on small businesses, more help for them—though what help exactly is not entirely clear. He also plans to cancel the first $10,000 of student debt a student accrues and enlarge the amount of government-sponsored health care.
A Trump administration would take more cues from the private sector with lower corporate and income taxes but would still be more interventionist than a typical Republican one. Trump also favors large infrastructure spending and at one point suggested $2 trillion infrastructure spending, compared with Biden’s more modest $1.3 trillion. Both candidates plan to revitalize manufacturing and become less reliant on trade.
A Republican Senate would scale back both men’s spending. But big economic shocks are normally followed by large expansions of the government, so even with a Senate that is skeptical of larger government, odds are good that changes will come no matter who is president. Such changes often make sense following a crisis, but they tend to grow and persist far after the initial shock fades into distant memory.
Allison Schrager is an economist, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and co-founder of LifeCycle Finance Partners, LLC, a risk advisory firm.
America, unlike most democracies, maintains barriers to ex-felons voting, which affects millions.
As the world watches the United States stagger into the third day of vote counting, this year’s election is a reminder of another way the country stands out: criminal disenfranchisement.
Take Florida, a state some polls suggested Joe Biden could win, even though President Donald Trump carried the state handily thanks to a boost in Latino support. But due to a loophole in a 2018 amendment to the Florida constitution, Floridians with felony convictions must pay all their fines and restitution before they can vote. That measure, which most affects Latino and Black voters, kept an estimated 900,000 felons who have served their time disenfranchised—more than Trump’s expected margin of victory.
A report estimates that 2.23 million Americans remain disenfranchised after their release due to their felony convictions, and Florida has more than any other state. While many states have begun restoring voting rights to people convicted of felonies, states that maintain some restrictions tend to be solidly Republican. In the 2018 elections, where Georgia faced national criticism for widespread mismanagement and voter suppression, felony disenfranchisement prevented 211,511 ex-prisoners from voting. This year the state was again denounced for a mishandled primary election that included long polling lines and broken voting machines.
In comparison, only three other democratic countries—Armenia, Belgium, and Chile— have post-release restrictions on felony voting, though Germany, Norway, and Portugal also ban felons from voting based in rare cases that target the “integrity of the state” or the “constitutionally protected democratic order.” Italian and Polish courts are also empowered to ban certain people from voting after release.
Similarly, although only two U.S. states—Maine and Vermont—allow people in prison to vote, at least 21 democratic countries allow incarcerated felons to vote, including Canada, South Africa. and Ukraine. In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights found that a complete ban on voting from prison violated the European Convention on Human Rights. Two-time Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has called for the United States to extend voting rights to those currently incarcerated, but he has been met with widespread opposition. Accounting for the disenfranchisement of felons in prison, 5.2 million Americans have been prevented from voting in this election due to a felony conviction.
The U.S. practice has drawn international criticism. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. policies violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and that the country “should adopt appropriate measures to ensure that states restore voting rights to citizens who have fully served their sentences and those who have been released on parole.”
Darcy Palder is a former intern at Foreign Policy.
Claims of fraud, premature declarations of victory, and battles over Sharpies are par for the course—in Kabul.
KABUL—The ongoing U.S. election is starting to look awfully familiar to people here.
Going into Tuesday’s vote, officials in Kabul were already worried about the potential violence and disorder that could come from a disputed election, but at the moment, Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s responses seem to be straight out of Afghanistan’s much-contested 2014 and 2019 elections. To millions of people here, it’s as if both men were cribbing off current President Ashraf Ghani and his longtime rival, Abdullah Abdullah.
Though Biden still insists he will win, it’s really Trump who seems to have borrowed the most from the playbook of a country he was determined to leave behind until he was shown pictures of women in the 1970s walking the streets of Kabul in miniskirts.
The echoes began early. On Wednesday morning, with millions of ballots left to be counted and a half-dozen states in doubt, Trump prematurely declared victory in an election that is still too close to call 48 hours later. Both Ghani and Abdullah also insisted they won two elections in a row. Not only that, but last year they held dueling inauguration ceremonies on the same day, only a few miles apart.
Then came Sharpiegate, the claim that the use of marker pens had invalidated an undisclosed number of ballots in Arizona—a race that remains (for most news organizations) too close to call as of Thursday. Afghans have been there. During the U.N.-supervised audit of ballots in the June 2014 runoff here, I saw representatives from the election teams of Ghani and Abdullah argue that the use of a pen of any color other than blue or black should be invalidated. But it got even weirder as one election team argued that green is close enough to blue so votes cast in green ink should be accepted. Even worse, a few minutes later I witnessed those same representatives argue that the use of red in votes cast for the rival team should be trashed.
There are other similarities. Trump has called for a recount in Wisconsin and additional counting in Arizona and Nevada but demanded that vote counting be stopped in states like Pennsylvania that are tipping toward Biden as mail-in ballots are tallied. During the 2014 U.N.-monitored audit, Abdullah backed out not once but twice during the nearly two-month process.
While Afghans wait to see who will be commander in chief of the U.S. mission in their country, the joke that we may need to send the foreign minister to broker a deal between Biden and Trump—as then-Secretary of State John Kerry did in 2014—may yet come true. Ironic for a country that was a constitutional monarchy from 1963 to 1973 and then a republic thereafter—long before George W. Bush vowed to bring democracy to Afghanistan with the 2001 invasion.
Ali M. Latifi is a freelance journalist based in Kabul. He has reported from Qatar, Turkey, Greece, Washington, and more than a dozen provinces of Afghanistan. He has worked with Al Jazeera English, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and Deutsche Welle.
This was no repudiation of Trumpism, making it harder for the party to heal and return to its strengths.
If trends hold and U.S. President Donald Trump loses his chance at a second term by a margin roughly as narrow as that by which he won his first, what are the implications for Republican foreign and national security policy, and those Republicans who favor a return to the approach that successful Republican administrations have followed in the past? In the short run, very bleak. In the medium term, mixed. In the long term, hopeful.
In the short run—measured from now until Inauguration Day in January—Trump will have all the power to cause mischief and few fetters to restrain him. If he and his allies in the party had lost decisively, perhaps the rebuke might have had a chastening effect. But in the current scenario, he will be angry and likely keen to wield the considerable powers of his office to the max, settling scores at home and abroad and doing nothing to advance genuine U.S. interests. Should his efforts to challenge the election’s outcome succeed in securing him a second term, this bleak picture could last another four years.
In the medium run—from the inauguration until about the 2022 midterm elections—the effects will probably be mixed. A more decisive defeat would have created more political space for Republicans who see their future in a party no longer dominated by Trump. A clear repudiation of Trump and his allies would have hastened the healing process, allowing for more freedom to jettison what was bad about Trumpism while seeking to keep what positive things the Trump administration was able to accomplish. With victory having been so close, the Trumpist faction in the party will be empowered and in no mood to compromise or reform.
But in the long run—after 2022, with the 2024 presidential campaign in sight—there are reasons to be hopeful. A President Joe Biden will not be able to claim a strong mandate for pushing the most radical parts of the Democrats’ agenda at home or abroad. Instead, he will have the excuse to follow his more moderate foreign-policy instincts. Debates about foreign policy could well return to more reasonable terrain, and Trump’s bogus strawman—you either have to embrace his hyper-transactionalist “America first” agenda or you are an effete globalist selling out the United States—will lose its traction.
That kind of terrain favors the sensible strategies that successful Republican administrations—those that succeeded in serving a second term—pursued to the United States’ benefit in the past. With any hope, they will do so again.
Peter D. Feaver is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Program in American Grand Strategy.
An uncertain U.S. presidency creates the risk of opportunism, but the dangers are too high for Beijing.
As election officials across the United States were tallying votes Tuesday night, a Chinese Y-9 electronic warfare aircraft flew through the southwest quadrant of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ). For the eleventh consecutive day and the 27th time since Oct. 1, Taiwan scrambled fighters and activated air defenses. With tensions already running high in the Taiwan Strait, Taipei now faces a new uncertainty: the prospect of a prolonged contest in the United States over the outcome of the American presidential election. Will Beijing try to take advantage of a distracted, divided America to impose its will on Taiwan?
There are reasons for concern. It has been a busy few months for People’s Liberation Army pilots stationed along China’s southeastern coastline. PLA aircraft have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait—the tacitly accepted air boundary between Taiwan and China—at least three times since August. In September, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman openly disavowed that tacit understanding. “The so-called ‘median line,’” he said, “is non-existent.”
Far more prevalent, however, have been flights in Taiwan’s southwestern air defense identification zone, many of them passing much closer to the Pratas (or Dongsha) islands, home to a Taiwanese coast guard installation, than to Taiwan proper. In recent months, flights near the islands have included bombers, fighters, and various patrol aircraft. Chinese forces conducted a major exercise in August that may have been a rehearsal for a landing there. On Oct. 15, Hong Kong flight authorities ordered a passenger plane heading to the islands to stay out of the surrounding airspace (the Pratas fall within Hong Kong’s flight information region).
Taiwanese officials and foreign observers are rightly concerned that China is preparing to make a move on Taiwan—if not an invasion, then perhaps an attempt to seize one of its offshore islands. A contested election outcome in the United States—Taiwan’s ultimate security guarantor—might provide the opportunity President Xi Jinping is looking for to snatch territory and deal a blow to American credibility in Asia.
But it might not. Chinese leaders have little reason to be confident that election uncertainty in the United States would translate to inaction on the global stage. If legal battles drag on, President Donald Trump might welcome a confrontation with China, perhaps hopeful that courts would be more sympathetic to an incumbent president facing the prospect of or prosecuting a war. More fundamentally, Xi knows better than anyone that the American president can be unpredictable—recall the cruise missile strike on Syria while the two leaders shared “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake.” In present circumstances, that unpredictability should give Chinese leaders pause.
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Michael Mazza is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the Global Taiwan Institute, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He is the author of the recent American Enterprise Institute report, “Move the Games: What to Do About the 2022 Beijing Olympics.”
Conservative commentators dislike Biden, but they’re a minority.
Even as the U.S. presidential race drags on, at least some Japanese are already missing Donald Trump, whose reelection chances appear to be slipping as votes continue to be counted on Thursday.
“From FDR to Truman to Obama, nothing great happens to Japan under a Democratic president,” the conservative commentator Haruo Kitamura said on Japanese television. “At least Trump brought up the North Korean abductees at the U.N.,” he added, touching on the long-standing but largely fruitless campaign by Japan to get a clear accounting of Japanese kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and ’80s.
“We will be in big trouble when Biden wins, because he will suck up to China,” the well-known journalist Taro Kimura added.
Others have pointed out that U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy, who served under President Barack Obama, had tweeted against a controversial dolphin killing that takes place off the waters of a small Japanese town each year. Her high-level protest, raising a touchy subject, earned a rebuke from then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, who is now the country’s prime minister.
The pro-Trump mood is definitely not universal. At the Japanese foreign ministry, where the North American bureau had been known for its high stress and long hours, there is likely to be some relief that the former niceties of consultative policymaking and diplomatic courtesies may come back in a more organized State Department under a Joe Biden presidency.
Overall public opinion will also not be sorry to see Trump leave. A survey conducted in February and March by the national broadcaster NHK found that 57 percent of respondents thought that Trump’s reelection would be negative for Japan. Only 10 percent thought it would be positive. And yes, polls in Japan are considered accurate.
William Sposato is a Tokyo-based journalist who has been a contributor to Foreign Policy since 2015. He has been following Japan’s politics and economics for more than 20 years, working at Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. He is also the co-author of a 2021 book on the Carlos Ghosn affair and its impact on Japan.
By casting his lot with Trump, the U.K. prime minister now looks like yesterday’s man. He is in for a rude awakening.
LONDON—The United States’ cultural dominance isn’t always benign. The election of Donald Trump told trashy politicians across the world that they could lie continuously, tear up conventions, smash up their countries, and—far from being punished by their electorates—they would win.
Shakespeare’s Richard III complains he must “clothe my naked villainy” and “seem a saint, when most I play the devil.” Trump taught leaders from Brazil to Hungary they no longer needed to pretend to be saintly. However basely they behaved, their base would applaud them. No one learned the lesson better than Britain’s Boris Johnson.
With Joe Biden on the path to victory, the British prime minister now looks like yesterday’s man. The spirit of the age has left him behind, and he seems a relic of a discredited past. This change in culture will matter more than any political change in formal Anglo-American relations.
Living in the U.K., it has been dispiriting to watch how quickly Trumpian tactics were accepted as normal. Johnson suspended Britain’s supposedly sovereign Parliament in an attempt to push Brexit through, threatened the independence of the judiciary, and said he would break international law by renouncing a treaty he signed with the European Union if he did not get his way. Trump said of Johnson in 2019, “They call him Britain’s Trump and people are saying that’s a good thing.”
When then U.S. President Barack Obama warned Britain against leaving the EU in 2016, Johnson sounded like a birther, suggesting that Obama was no friend to this country because of his “part-Kenyan” heritage and “ancestral dislike of the British empire.” More recently, faced with a deadly pandemic, Johnson may not have embraced the pseudo-scientific claptrap of the U.S. president, but his failure to deal with COVID-19 has been almost as egregious.
One can exaggerate Johnson’s affinity with Trump. When it comes to foreign policy, the British Conservatives have been closer to the Democrats than the Republicans. They continue to support Obama’s deal with Iran, and say they are concerned about climate change, although whether they are prepared to take the hard decisions to combat it is another matter.
But ever since it started to become clear that Obama’s vice president was likely heading to the White House, something close to panic has gripped Downing Street.
The fantasy world of “the Anglosphere” has become the never-never land of the British right-wing imagination. Britain could leave the EU and join an English-speaking bloc led by the United States, or so the story ran, and build a pact with its true friends.
With Biden as president, Washington may not even give Britain the fast-track trade deal that Brexit supporters pretended could compensate for the loss of the vastly more significant trade with the EU.
Meanwhile, Biden and the U.S. Congress’s determination to stop Johnson building a hard border on the island of Ireland will mean that Dublin’s voice will carry more weight in Washington than London’s—a reversal of 800 years of English dominance of Ireland.
Britain will have abandoned its European alliance while failing to secure an American alliance. Its isolation will be painful—and painfully obvious.
Mature democracies don’t treat political opponents as wartime enemies.
There is no reason why the U.S. presidential election should be an existential battle in which the losers get obliterated. It is possible to work through deep ideological differences, but it requires hard work. Take a comparative case study from my own country, South Africa.
Ours was a deeply divided society given the twin histories of colonialism and apartheid. Since 1994, we have worked hard to build democratic institutions—and a political culture—that can help us live with and work through our bitter divisions. We remain a divided society, and our democratic institutions are under enormous pressure, but we are never quite at risk of our relatively young democracy imploding, even though there have been—and continue to be—very daunting threats to the political system, especially predatory political elites stealing from the public in cahoots with private interests.
What keeps South African democracy intact is an almost instinctive appreciation that our deep historical differences must be accepted as part of our enduring reality. We cannot wish divisions away by watching YouTube clips of Nelson Mandela on repeat. You must learn to accept deep divisions as part of your political DNA.
That is the project U.S. citizens need to sign up for now. Losing an election just means you lost the argument. And if you have a model of democracy that values core norms of democratic theory like deliberation and participation, then you must practice becoming a good democratic loser.
That means accepting that your arguments did not win this year. Equally, if you win, it is important to be magnanimous and recognize that the contestation of political ideas is not a perfect science. Showing some intellectual humility, rather than condescending to your political opponents just because your candidate becomes president, is essential.
And this is where U.S. citizens must challenge themselves. Despite the prevalent but false belief that the United States is the greatest nation in the world, Americans need to learn from other democracies about how to engage in political contestation in ways that are politically mature.
All of its citizens can yet make America great by humbly accepting they have yet to develop good democratic habits that can ensure that bitter divisions do not threaten the foundations of American society. If the United States reckons with this truth, then it will be ready to practice new ways of engaging political opponents, rather than seeing political contests as a zero-sum game.
If a still young democracy like South Africa can keep deep bitter divisions at bay, then so can a much older democracy like the United States. But success will require that Americans abandon the toxic habit of seeing their political opponents as wartime enemies.
Eusebius McKaiser is an analyst for TimesLIVE and host of the podcast "In the Ring With Eusebius McKaiser." He is based in Johannesburg.
Saudi Arabia went all-in for Trump—and might be about to reap the consequences.
As the U.S. election goes down to the wire, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince must be pacing nervously in his gilded palace.
Mohammed bin Salman bet big on Donald Trump’s reelection when he gave his tacit approval to the decision by his Emirati counterpart, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, to sign a peace deal with the Arab world’s supposed archenemy Israel. But if Joe Biden wins, the Saudi position, which came at the cost of offending Muslim sentiment globally, makes him look more isolated.
At the start of Trump’s presidency, Mohammed bin Salman wooed Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, and even referred to him—and by implication the U.S. president—as being “in his pocket.” The two 30-something novices on the world stage played statesmen and forged a close relationship. In strategic terms, that meant close coordination on Iran and the region and U.S. backing for Mohammed bin Salman’s rise to power. The crown prince in particular was emboldened by Trump’s support and took an ever more bullish position on Tehran, which Riyadh sees as the main threat to its unofficial position as leader of the Muslim world since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
In May 2018, Trump walked out of the nuclear deal that lifted sanctions on Iran. That deal, and the money that began to flow into Tehran’s coffers from oil sales, made it possible for the country to double down on its support for militias across the region, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah. So the reimposition of sanctions suited both Israel and the House of Saud.
Biden, however, has promised to reengage with Iran and reinstate the nuclear deal in some form. If that happens, and sanctions are lifted again, Iran would, in the Saudi view, have the funds to expand its arc of influence from Tehran through Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and as far as Yemen.
It is not clear if and how Biden intends to continue containing Iran’s ambitions in the absence of sanctions. That is a major cause for Saudi concern.
But more generally Biden described Saudi Arabia as a pariah and promised to treat it as such. He has also supported the findings of the CIA that the brutal killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was indeed ordered by the Saudi crown prince. Whether that makes a difference to policy toward Saudi Arabia in practice is one of the big foreign-policy questions arising from the election.
The continent’s populists have run out of momentum—and are looking for an unlikely boost from across the Atlantic.
The trans-Atlantic relationship has been declared dead many times, but Europeans’ behavior this week would suggest otherwise. While the Chinese indicated they had other preoccupations, Europeans have had the U.S. elections foremost in their minds. Glued to their screens, they have meticulously followed every move in this nail-biting election. Rightly so: The result greatly matters for European politics.
While most Europeans want Joe Biden to become president, Europe’s radical right is putting its cards on Donald Trump. On Wednesday morning, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa congratulated Trump right after the president had declared himself a winner—despite the fact that millions of mail-in votes, which could tilt the balance, had yet to be counted. And a far-right candidate in the Dutch elections next spring tweeted that Trump was the “moral winner.”
It is clear what Jansa and others are waiting for. Four years ago, Trump’s election gave Europe’s far-right a tremendous boost. And they want one again.
Together with the Brexit referendum, which happened months earlier, Trump’s victory totally changed the political mood in Europe. Then-UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage called it a “global revolution.” Frauke Petry, who led the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) at the time, said his win changed “the USA, Europe and the world.” This was the time when insulting on European Twitter really took off. By the end of 2016, centrist parties in Europe were pushed so much in the offensive that many pundits predicted the far-right candidate Norbert Hofer to win the Austrian presidential election in December 2016 and Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen the Dutch and French elections, respectively, in the spring of 2017.
None of this happened. Alexander Van der Bellen became president in Austria. Emmanuel Macron easily beat Le Pen. Wilders didn’t get the high scores some had predicted. These three losses for the far-right lifted the mood for many in Europe. Citizens marched through cities with European flags. Young activists set up new centrist parties. The Greens took off.
Trump’s methods didn’t seem to work in Europe, either. Steve Bannon’s ultra-conservative training academy for upcoming politicians in Italy flopped. A think tank in Brussels he was associated with went nowhere.
By the time European elections were held, in mid-2019, Brexit-related political chaos had erupted in the United Kingdom. Most Euroskeptic parties stopped calling for more exits. They started talking about “changing Europe” instead. Thanks to this change, their results were reasonably good. But the breakthrough that some had foreseen it was definitely not.
Then came the coronavirus. Devastating Europe, it rallied citizens solidly behind the flag. Even those critical of their governments mostly abandoned populist slogans and put their trust in the government. They had a concrete problem and wanted the competent authorities to solve it. Many governing centrist parties did extremely well during the first wave of COVID-19: The German Christian Democratic Union reached 40 percent approval. The governing Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and the ruling Danish Social Democrats shot up in the polls, too. The radical right suffered. The AfD sunk below 10 percent. Voters also punished the Lega in Italy, until it stopped criticizing the government.
But the second wave has now arrived. The tide is turning again. Farage has set up a party to lead the political fight against the government’s deeply unpopular coronavirus measures. The AfD, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Brothers of Italy, and others are all trying to surf on a growing wave of discontent, too. This may force many governments into the defensive once more.
This is why, at this very moment, it matters greatly for Europe who wins the U.S. elections. If Biden becomes president, the European radical right has nothing to boast about. If anything, centrists all over Europe will breathe a big sigh of relief. But if Trump returns to the White House, far-right populists will feel part of his victory—just as they did four years ago. Actually, it will give them a boost they haven’t had since November 2016.
Caroline de Gruyter is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a Europe correspondent and columnist for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. She currently lives in Brussels.
The options are either an ineffective pandemic response—or an utterly catastrophic one.
Regardless of whether Democratic nominee Joe Biden manages to secure election to the presidency—and survive the subsequent legal assaults from the Republican Party—his administration would almost certainly be checked by a Republican Senate. That means the COVID-19 pandemic will rage on, unfettered by any robust federal action and only slowed in a few states where governors are determined to adhere to their public health guidance.
Still, even that would be preferable to President Donald Trump winning reelection. He has vowed to opt for a do-nothing approach to COVID-19, biding time until an effective vaccine is found and put to use. Access to the vaccine might well require health insurance, offering the possibility of a deliberate class-based survival rate in the American epidemic. Whether the Trump policy is labeled “herd immunity” or not doesn’t matter: It will boil down to allowing the virus to spread, on the assumption that fewer than 2 percent of the infected will die of COVID-19, and most of them will come from racial minorities and retired senior populations. There will be an unstated notion of “expendable” populations, dying amid rising overall societal immunity.
If Biden is sworn into the presidency on Jan. 20, 2021, he will greet an epidemic that may have caused well over 400,000 American deaths by that time and that will continue to rage across all 50 states. He will do battle with the Senate on every pandemic effort: working with the World Health Organization (WHO), joining the COVAXX global access commitment for vaccines and drugs, guaranteeing affordable access to COVID-19 medicines and coronavirus vaccines for all Americans and people in middle-income and poor countries. There will be no effective global strategy for COVID-19 control save building a bridge to a vaccine, and then fighting to immunize as much of the world as possible.
If Trump is sworn in, even those standards will not be met. He will scoff at the entire United Nations system and all multilateral COVID-19 control efforts, making the “America first” motto the guiding mantra for every drug, treatment, vaccine, and innovation that shows promise against the coronavirus. The nationalistic stratagem will inspire similar action worldwide, threatening the already fragile alliance built by WHO.
In the end, the biggest winners are Fox News and the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Ratings for Fox now outstrip any other TV news operation, led by their most right-wing commentators. And the virus spawned 91,000 new American cases on Election Day. One of COVID-19’s victims was actually elected to the North Dakota state legislature on Tuesday, despite having died of a disease he, in agreement with Trump, claimed was no big deal. That vote, more than Biden’s election and ineffectual governance, could mark the most fitting end to a political era utterly subsumed by cynicism and fantasy.
Laurie Garrett is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer.
They may admire Trump’s pugilism toward China, but the former vice president may have more to offer.
As votes continue to be counted, a narrow victory for U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden looks increasingly likely. That outcome would likely be broadly welcomed around Asia—and all the more so the longer leaders in the region let the result settle in.
Many Asian strategists have had their doubts about Biden, especially in those countries, including Japan and India, that are most anxious about the rise of China. In many ways, Asia’s archrealists there had come to admire Trump’s pugilism. Seen from their perspective, a Biden presidency risks a return to mushy, softer tactics toward China. “Trump understood power, albeit instinctively,” as the Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan wrote in an Election Day essay that was typically critical of former President Barack Obama’s record in the region. After the Obama presidency, Kausikan argued, Trump “did much to restore the credibility of American power.”
But the more Asia’s leaders look, the more they will find much to recommend a Biden presidency. Instinctive multilateralists in capitals such as Canberra or Tokyo can look forward to a period in which the United States engages them constructively on a range of common concerns, from pandemic recovery to climate change. Those nations with formal alliances with the United States, such as South Korea, can expect more reliable friendship.
Meanwhile, leaders in Southeast Asia who have often felt neglected under Trump, in nations from Malaysia to Myanmar, can at least expect Biden to turn up to more of the many meetings that mark out the region’s diplomacy. And it would surely be reassuring that there would no longer be much risk of the United States suddenly striking some zany surprise deal with China that the region disliked, or indeed simply retreating into outright isolationism.
Even the region’s major powers—China and India—would surely see advantage in the return of a more stabilizing U.S. president, and especially one who would be largely distracted by tasks at home and thus less likely to have time or energy to spare on the other side of the world. After Trump, the United States will not be able to resume the dominant role it played in the region only four years ago, let alone a decade back. But that is hardly a problem when viewed from New Delhi, and especially from Beijing.
The United States is divided and will remain so. But Asia’s leadership is nothing if not pragmatic. If Biden wins, his victory will be far from overwhelming. But as the dust settles, it will become clear that it could offer a little bit of something for everyone.
James Crabtree is a columnist at Foreign Policy, the executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies-Asia, and the author of The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age.
Trump put unprecedented strain on the U.S.-South Korean alliance.
With the end of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration in sight, the overall sentiment in South Korea is relief. Under Trump, the U.S.-South Korean alliance came under an unprecedented level of strain. Trump demanded a renegotiation of U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, as well as an extortionate fivefold increase to South Korea’s cost contribution for stationing U.S. troops in the country. Many South Koreans sincerely wondered whether the alliance would survive another Trump term. The return of normal diplomacy under the steady hand of former Vice President Joe Biden would be a welcome change.
Some corners of Seoul’s policymaking community, however, remain skeptical of the likely Biden administration. Despite Trump’s unorthodox approach, the thought goes, Trump at least treated the Korean Peninsula as a major priority and tried a different method with North Korea. Although Trump’s photo-ops with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un did not create any substantive results, his diplomatic efforts were preferable to the “strategic patience” maintained under the administration of former President Barack Obama, which, in practice, amounted to doing nothing while Pyongyang built up its nuclear capacity.
The Biden campaign appears to be aware of this skepticism. In an interview with South Korean media, Biden’s advisor Brian McKeon said, “Joe Biden is not President Obama, and the world is different now four years later because the North Korean nuclear program has moved on.” McKeon also left open the possibility of Biden holding a meeting with Kim. Last week, Biden took the unprecedented step of contributing an op-ed directly to a Korean media outlet, in which he signaled his alignment with South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s agenda of inter-Korean peace by pledging “principled diplomacy … toward a denuclearized North Korea and a unified Korean Peninsula.” These words are a good start to rebuild the alliance. If a Biden administration follows through with deeds, even better.
S. Nathan Park is a Washington-based attorney and nonresident fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Lawsuits by the Republican Party are criticized as specious.
As former Vice President Joe Biden pulled ahead on Wednesday afternoon in the U.S. presidential election, winning the key battleground states of Wisconsin and Michigan, President Donald Trump’s campaign filed a series of lawsuits setting the stage for a bitter showdown in the days and weeks to come.
In Michigan, the campaign filed a lawsuit to halt the tallying of mail-in ballots, claiming members of the Trump campaign had not had sufficient access to observe the count. In the state’s largest city, Detroit, Republican vote challengers gathered outside of a convention center demanding to be let into the room where the vote count was taking place. Police were called in to push back the crowds clamoring to get in.
In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign said it would seek a recount even before Biden was officially declared to be the winner. Biden flipped the state, with 49.6 percent of the vote to Trump’s 48.9 percent as of this writing. Candidates are entitled to request a recount if the margin of victory is less than 1 percent. While recounts can lead to a readjustment in the vote tally, they rarely lead to a change in the overall results, the Wall Street Journal reported.
In Pennsylvania, which carries 20 Electoral College votes, the campaign is pursuing a multipronged legal strategy. It is suing to halt the vote count and asking the Supreme Court to join a case filed by the Pennsylvania Republican Party challenging a rule that allows votes to be counted up to three days after the election—so long as the postmark indicates they were mailed by Election Day. The campaign has also mounted a legal challenge over voter identification laws in the state. At a press conference held at the Philadelphia airport on Wednesday afternoon, the president’s son Eric Trump claimed, without evidence, that Democrats were “trying to cheat” in the state.
The campaign has also filed a suit in Georgia, asking a judge to ensure that proper procedures were followed in the handling of absentee ballots.
Sen. Mitch McConnell on Wednesday defended the president’s threat to challenge the results in court, saying: “In a close election you can anticipate in some of these states you’re going to end up in court,” he said, describing it as “the American way.”
International election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe criticized Trump’s allegations of impropriety in the vote count. “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions,” said German lawmaker Michael Georg Link, who led the delegation.
Amy Mackinnon is a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy.
If he wins, the Democrat will need all his skills to avoid political paralysis.
Democratic challenger Joe Biden edged closer Wednesday to amassing the necessary 270 electoral votes he needs to defeat President Donald Trump and become the 46th president of the United States—winning back two key Midwestern states that his party lost in 2016, Wisconsin and Michigan, in late vote counts.
But the incumbent Trump has refused to concede, instead sponsoring legal challenges to vote-counting in several battleground states. And it was clear, based on exit polls, that the nation remains even more bitterly polarized than pundits thought, posing titanic challenges for a Biden presidency. Voters were sharply divided based on race, ethnicity, and education, perhaps even more so than in 2016. Reflecting those divisions, a record number of Americans are believed to have voted in the presidential election, but the partisan divide is fraught with rage and even threats of violence.
Biden himself, in a statement late Wednesday afternoon, did not declare victory but said, “I’m confident that we’ll emerge victorious,” and that “when it’s finished, God willing,” he’ll be only the fourth challenger in the last century to unseat an elected incumbent president. The former vice president—who if he’s inaugurated Jan. 20 will be, at 78, the oldest president to be sworn in—also alluded to the difficulties ahead, facing a possibly still Republican-led Senate.
“The presidency itself is not a partisan institution,” Biden said, alluding to Trump’s tumultuous, highly divisive tenure, which made him the only president in the modern polling era never to have reached 50 percent approval at any point during his tenure. “We have to stop treating our opponents as enemies,” Biden said.
But that’s exactly the effort the Trump campaign has already launched, filing suit in Philadelphia alleging improper monitoring of ballots that Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani called “totally illegitimate.” At a news conference, the president’s son Eric Trump said, “The Democrats know the only way they can win this election is to cheat in Pennsylvania.”
Many thousands of votes remain uncounted in Pennsylvania, but even as Giuliani was speaking, Fox News joined CNN in calling Michigan for Biden, taking him up to as many as 264 electoral votes, according to the Fox count. Biden would then need only Nevada, a state where he is leading, to put him over the top, even without winning Pennsylvania. But the final vote counts remained uncertain Wednesday night.
To leave FP’s live election blog and read the rest of this article, click here.
Michael Hirsh is a columnist for Foreign Policy. He is the author of two books: Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street and At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World.
Many thought 2016 was a fluke. That’s impossible to argue now.
After days of seesawing vote counts and gut-churning uncertainty, the answer is finally in—sort of. Joe Biden has won enough electoral votes to make him America’s next president.
Chaotic as this week has been—with its Mad Max-style rolling caravans, major polling failures, and multiple unsubstantiated claims of victory from President Donald Trump—it would be a mistake to let all the bedlam and the legal battles likely to come obscure one of the most important takeaways from the race: just how close Trump got. Far from the landslide many experts predicted, the vote was a tight one.
Which raises the question of what the results actually mean for the country, beyond who becomes its next president. Pundits have tried to explain away Trump’s unexpected strong finish by pointing to lockdown fatigue or voters’ appreciation for his perceived success on the economy—at least until the pandemic cratered it.
But these rationalizations don’t tell the whole story. Most important, they don’t account for the fact that, after four years of scandal, corruption, and failure after failure, nearly half of all U.S. voters still endorsed an authoritarian, white nationalist serial liar who has spectacularly botched the most serious health crisis in a century. They also knowingly ignored, or willingly embraced, Trump’s cruelty, racism, and sexism; his lack of curiosity or knowledge about the government and the world; his disdain for traditional U.S. values such as fair play, rule of law, and freedom of the press; and his eagerness to tear down the institutions of governance at home and abroad—institutions that, while flawed, have provided so much peace and prosperity over the years. Back in 2016, some Republicans voted for Trump because they didn’t know much about him or because they hoped that the responsibilities of the office would transform him into a statesman.
No one can make that argument today. We all now know exactly who Trump is.
When you factor in the facts that Trump has now won some 7 million more votes than he did in 2016, that he improved his standing among Latino and Black voters, and that the Republican Party may well hold the Senate, you’re left with one conclusion: 2016 was no fluke. Biden may have won the election, but we’re all living in Trump’s America now.
Why do I say that? For starters, Trump and the Republican Party’s show of strength means that despite his defeat, Trump isn’t going away and Republicans won’t reject him. Before the election, Trump’s stranglehold on the party seemed to be slipping fast. More and more Republicans were arguing, quietly, that their party needed reform and that four more years of Trump would doom them at the ballots. Even stalwart supporters such as Sen. John Cornyn were starting to edge away from the president. Now that Trump’s supporters have done so well—especially those, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who glued themselves to their leader’s side—it’s hard to imagine many Republicans giving up on Trump or Trumpism anytime soon.
With his party and a large chunk of the public behind him, an empowered Trump—as de facto opposition leader, freelance tweeter, talk show star, or media baron—will continue to draw huge levels of attention and support, which he’ll use to hector and undermine Democrats, publicly shame Republicans into fighting Biden on everything, and to push the same peevish, counterfactual, us-versus-the-experts-and-everybody-else message that he has for the past four years. Thursday night’s speech, with its baseless claims of voter fraud and endless lies, shows what tone Trump will continue to set. As Brad Parscale, the president’s first campaign manager in this election, told the New York Times, “It isn’t like his Twitter account or his ability to control a news cycle will stop.”
Meanwhile, the “Never Trumpers”—former Republican officials dedicated to process, competent governance, the importance of institutions, and at least some basic form of national unity and who are desperate to reform the party—will remain marginalized or will leave the party altogether.
The results for the country will be dire. In the likely event that Republicans manage to hold on to the Senate, the policy paralysis of the past four years will continue. Even presidents who control Congress rarely get more than one or two big things done before their first midterm election, when they often lose legislative support. It’s hard to imagine that a President Biden, lacking full congressional support, will get even that far—no matter how good a dealmaker he proves to be.
That’s a recipe for big trouble ahead. While Biden may seek to change the tone in Washington, the years of Barack Obama’s presidency showed that despite Biden’s lifelong dedication to bipartisanship and his still cozy relationships in the Senate, so long as Republicans remain the party of no, the chances of achieving compromise are close to zero. Under a divided government, we’re likely to see more inaction on huge problems such as the pandemic (though Biden could make some improvements using his executive authority) and the economy (where he can’t do much without Congress). Should Biden fail to pass major pandemic relief and other government spending, markets will flounder, and financial instability will increase. Without coordinated action by all branches of the U.S. government, the pandemic will get much worse.
Thus Trump’s America—a country that has just spurned its best chance to resoundingly repudiate him—will mean more self-perpetuating dysfunction. Rage at the failure of the government to help, or Republicans’ rage at the government’s attempts to help, will only intensify the country’s already vicious polarization, further reducing the chances for cooperation and possibly leading to violence.
Biden’s goal of healing the nation’s divisions and governing in a way that brings everyone together seems like a very tall order now. Obama’s attempts to do the same only fueled Republicans’ obstreperousness and drove a large share of the public into the dangerous fantasy land of birtherism and other conspiracy theories (some of which ultimately morphed into QAnon). Now that Trump’s approach, for all its futility and ugliness, has been embraced by a large portion of the country, it’s hard to imagine a President Biden managing to do heal the country.
But it was impossible to imagine a President Trump even trying.
This story has been updated to include the latest election results.
Jonathan Tepperman is a former editor in chief of Foreign Policy and the author of The Fix: How Countries Use Crises to Solve the World’s Worst Problems.
Americans have no point of comparison for the coronavirus.
After what looks to be a narrow reelection loss for U.S. President Donald Trump and a worse than expected showing for Democrats in the House and Senate, several critics have bemoaned the fact that Democrats didn’t do better given the circumstances. At least 233,000 Americans are dead in a pandemic seriously worsened by Trump’s denialism and failed policies.
But this line of criticism doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Populist leaders in other countries that mishandled the coronavirus, such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, have seen sharp polling boosts despite the calamity. Trump’s callousness may have cost him that polling boost—but Western voters aren’t judging ineptness around the coronavirus harshly.
There are several reasons for that. People still seem to see the pandemic purely as a natural disaster, not as one worsened by policy failures. And natural disasters—like wars—tend to boost incumbent support. Many Americans have no point of comparison for such a global crisis, and even those who do are largely looking to European countries that, as their second wave hits, have failed nearly as much as the United States. The numerous examples of successful control of the virus, from Australia to China to Nigeria, are almost all in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa, and simply aren’t on the radar of Western voters.
On top of that, for many people, the impact of lockdown is being felt far more harshly than the virus itself. Only a minority of people have close friends or family who have died, but everyone has been economically and psychologically affected by coronavirus restrictions and lockdowns. Trump’s anti-lockdown messaging catered to Americans’ understandable desire that the pandemic’s impacts simply go away. Republicans also frequently pushed the idea that those who had died were weak, unhealthy, or unworthy, tapping into the ableism that remains one of America’s most potent—but least commented on—bigotries. It didn’t help that Black and Latino communities were disproportionately hit.
And finally, never underestimate the power of good old-fashioned lying—especially when backed up with the weight of the presidency. Trump has lied continually about the coronavirus. Perhaps as a result, roughly half of Americans believe—falsely—that the pandemic is under control. That delusion may end as the virus roars into brutal new life in the winter—but probably not.
James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
Trump’s most dedicated supporters are going into a spiral online.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s loyal online army of conspiracy theorists is enraptured by the tight results, just like everyone else. But in the world of QAnon, evidence of voter fraud is everywhere.
From discussion of a “magic” batch of Biden votes in Michigan to concerns that Sharpie markers have ruined the votes of Trump supporters in Arizona, QAnon followers in chatrooms, on far-right Twitter clone Gab, and on 8kun (formerly known as 8chan) have glommed onto Trump’s questioning of the results. There is, of course, no evidence of substantial or widespread voter fraud—a spike in votes in Michigan was the result of a clerical error; and many counties and officials have said Sharpies are fine for voting. Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, has been sharing a slew of unverified, misconstrued, or outright fake voter fraud claims to his his 400,000-plus followers. Torba promised that a “COUP IS UNDERWAY.”
Even still, there was cautious optimism among Q’s followers that things would ultimately break for the president. And there was some reason to celebrate for the delusional movement, which remains convinced that this election was a make-or-break moment for Trump’s supposed war against the child-trafficking deep state. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert both won their congressional races, meaning they will be the first QAnon-affiliated candidates heading to Washington.
Greene, who won her Georgia seat by approximately 50 points, had spent years endorsing deranged conspiracy theories, including the Pizzagate delusion that served as a precursor to QAnon, before ultimately embracing QAnon itself. Boebert, who won her race by about five points, appeared on a QAnon-sympathetic podcast and described herself as “very familiar” with the conspiracy. Both women have tried to distance themselves from the conspiracy movement since then, but the Q movement has still viewed it as a victory.
Justin Ling is a journalist based in Toronto.
The world’s largest democracy might have some lessons to offer the oldest democracy on how to conduct an election.
NEW DELHI—In India there are many reasons to feel gobsmacked by the U.S. elections. That tens of millions of Americans would vote a second time around for a racist, sexist, lying, and deluded president is just one of them. More curiously, how is it that the world’s oldest democracy, and the largest economy, finds it so difficult to conduct an election?
In 2019, the last year India conducted a national election, more than 614 million citizens cast their votes. By comparison, only about one-fourth as many Americans will have cast their vote in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. But if this were an Indian election, by now not only would the authorities have finished counting votes, the winning party would also have been distributing celebratory sweets to party cadres, journalists, and opponents alike.
Yes, our voting can sometimes be spread over a few weeks. This is mostly because of the sheer scale of our democratic process and the need to ensure security. But our counting of ballots is fast, seamless, and rarely disputed; our results are announced within a few hours on counting day.
This can’t just be because of the difference between paper ballots and electronic voting machines, which India mostly uses. With the different rules across U.S. states on how late ballots can be counted past Election Day, plus a sitting president who declared victory while millions of votes were still being counted, the United States has come across to the world as almost amateurish in some of its fumbles and stumbles. And now the result, delayed as it is, could head toward a recount and potential litigation.
You have to forgive us Indians for cracking a joke or two at America’s expense. Our Election Commission is on standby to send some international observers should the United States need it to supervise the polls the next time around.
Other than that, it’s been a fascinating election with echoes around the world. For liberals everywhere it is one more powerful illustration of how our storytelling has to be as compelling as our facts are. A Joe Biden presidency in these circumstances is in no way a repudiation of President Donald Trump’s politics. For mainstream politicians—not just in the United States but everywhere, including here in India—that is the lesson this election has brought home. It doesn’t matter how worthy your message is if you can’t mesmerize the public while sharing it. It doesn’t matter how egregious you believe your opponent to be; if you are seen as the status quo, you can never win resoundingly. From New York to New Delhi, the refusal to engage and talk across the ideological fence is dividing countries, neighborhoods, and homes. In the civilizational battle between left and right, the space for free thinking has been shrunk by competing dogma.
And for those of us who are journalists, the result is one more embarrassing lesson in humility: We really do inhabit echo chambers that prevent alternate realities from being considered. Indians will rightly wonder if the U.S. election might finally force elites around the world to listen more than they talk.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and founder-editor of the digital platform Mojo. She is based in New Delhi.
In younger democracies, disputes about the results may be more common, but in mature democracies like the United States, the loser should have reason to step aside.
The situation seems straightforward: Since one of the candidates for president has won a majority, the losing candidate should concede. But that doesn’t happen; instead, he blames his defeat on vote manipulation and hacked voting equipment and calls on his supporters to protest. Clashes erupt between the two candidates’ supporters. If you guessed Kenya’s 2017 presidential elections, you’d be correct. But the United States now seems perilously close to a similar scenario, and it’s one most seen in much younger democracies.
“We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” U.S. President Donald Trump declared to supporters on election night, long before all votes had been counted. But, he added, just as he was winning, “all of a sudden everything just stopped. … This is a major fraud on our nation.” Trump’s announcement that he would take the case all the way to the Supreme Court—should Democratic challenger Joe Biden be declared the winner—puts him in the company of a rather small group of contestants who have likewise refused to concede.
In the United States, of course, Democratic nominee Al Gore turned to the Supreme Court in 2000 hoping for a recount of Florida’s votes, which had resulted in a statistical tie. But as for obvious losers who have disputed the validity of the elections, the pool is somewhat more dubious: Kenya’s Raila Odinga in 2017 and Gambia’s longtime ruler Yahya Jammeh the year before, which also saw election contender Jean Ping refuse to concede in Gabon’s presidential elections. At the moment, Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is still maintaining that she won Belarus’s presidential election this August, which official counts awarded to President Aleksandr Lukashenko. (Tikhanovskaya’s claim that the election was unfair is supported by the European Union, among others.)
Indeed, most election result disputes take place in developing democracies. “[T]he most severe risks occur in fragile states and in transitional contests held during peace-building operations,” explained the political scientists Pippa Norris, Richard Frank, and Ferran Martínez i Coma in a 2014 paper. That makes some sense: With low trust in the system and immature and untested institutions, there’s less reason for the losing side to believe that it will have another fair bite at the apple. In mature democracies, with long-established parties, voter trust in the system, and independent institutions that organize the elections and report the result, the losing side understands that it is likely in its best interest to accept defeat and start organizing for the next round of voting.
Still, “democracies are not immune from electoral flaws,” warned the political scientists, citing the 2000 U.S. presidential race as an example. And the United States may be particularly vulnerable because its decentralized voting system—and the fact that unlike many other Western countries, the United States has neither a national population register nor a comprehensive voter roll—is imperfect. Add to that bitter partisan battles, and America’s democracy is under severe strain.
Should Trump lose and maintain that it’s the result of “major fraud,” he will drag the United States further into questionable company. This election has already done strange things to the country. “We are deeply concerned by reports of election irregularities,” tweeted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo the day before the U.S. election. He was referring to Tanzania. But for a moment, one could be forgiven for being unsure which country he meant.
Elisabeth Braw is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on defense against emerging national security challenges, such as hybrid and gray-zone threats. She is also a member of the U.K. National Preparedness Commission.
Biden’s ambitious domestic and international agenda will be stymied by a Senate the Democrats failed to win.
Let’s start with a positive note: It is a good thing that we do not know the outcome of U.S. elections before they happen. Democracy entails uncertainty—and that uncertainty demands a measure of humility from all participants in an election, winners and losers alike.
Now for a more sobering take: When all is said and done, it seems most likely that President Donald Trump will lose his bid for reelection—but he will still have received more votes than four years ago, despite a reckless and corrupt administration that has badly mismanaged a pandemic and seen a growing economy transform into a dire recession. For the United States’ friends overseas who have wondered over the last four years whether the 2016 election was fluke: It was not. It was a reflection of what was and is a divided country grappling with divided responses to its past and to the challenges of the 21st century.
The outcome of Tuesday’s election that will take longest for the United States’ partners overseas to process is the fact that Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell looks poised to retain control of the U.S. Senate. (While there are races left to be called, this is the most likely scenario for now.) Both domestically and internationally, the Joe Biden presidency that would have been possible if Democrats had won the Senate would have been very different than the one that he now looks likely to lead.
On a practical level, it will take longer to fill senior administration posts that require Senate confirmation. But, more significantly, the legislative agenda to lift the United States out of the current economic and public health crisis, strengthen its democracy, and tackle the existential challenge of climate change has become much, much more difficult to advance. On climate change in particular, the prospect of the kind of significant investment needed to transform the U.S. economy and meet emissions targets is greatly diminished. For U.S. allies and partners around the world, the United States will stop being an at times gratuitous antagonist, and the Biden-Kamala Harris administration will reinvigorate U.S. diplomacy, but Washington will remain a frustrating partner on important issues.
At a deeper level, the loss of innocence that happened in 2016 remains. Though the votes are still being counted, the 2020 election looks likely to produce a victory for Biden and Harris, but it is not the full moral victory that I and many other Democrats had hoped for. The task of making the case for democratic values, of demonstrating that democracies can deliver, and of pushing back against demagogues and authoritarians is not one that can be left to the United States alone. Democracies on other continents need to step up—for their own interests and for the cause of democracy itself.
Daniel B. Baer is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from 2013 to 2017.
In Israel, the uncertainty always lasts for weeks after balloting. Here’s how to cope.
A highly polarized electorate split almost neatly in half. A controversial, corruption-tainted incumbent fighting to maintain his grip on power. An election night that continues into the morning with no clear result—followed by a weekslong process to determine the outcome.
Dear America: Welcome to Israel’s reality.
Israel held three hotly contested election campaigns over 15 months, from December 2018 to March of this year. Not one was a simple affair.
In all three campaigns, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the long-serving incumbent, failed to win an outright parliamentary majority for his Likud party and its right-wing allies. But neither did his main rival, Benny Gantz, of the centrist Blue and White party. Backroom machinations dragged on for weeks as both sides attempted, in vain, to cobble together a working coalition government.
While Israel’s parliamentary system is more convoluted than the winner-take-all firehose of America’s Electoral College, some tips from the Israeli experience are applicable as the United States—along with the entire world—awaits the winner of Donald Trump versus Joe Biden.
Ignore victory speeches. In close elections, they’re meaningless.
Gantz delivered a rousing one in April 2019 after exit polls showed his Blue and White party leading Likud in the vote count. But he became a laughingstock hours later when the actual results made clear he had no viable path to the premiership.
Eleven months later, Netanyahu committed a similar blunder. Following a day of voting in March of this year, he crowed about his “great victory.” In fact, Netanyahu managed to secure support from only a minority of parliament members, forcing him to offer his rival—the very same Gantz—a power-sharing agreement.
Be skeptical when politicians cry foul. In functioning democracies, irregularities are the exception, not the norm.
In the April 2019 ballot, the pro-settler New Right party failed to pass the electoral threshold for entering parliament, falling short by 1,400 votes out of more than 4 million cast nationally. The results deprived Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc of three to four seats and a parliamentary majority.
The New Right alleged irregularities and moved for a recount. Party chief Naftali Bennett recruited a battalion of volunteers to scour election warehouses for lost ballots, but to no avail. After a week he conceded defeat. “We have found irregularities in the polls and beyond, but they do not, in and of themselves, nullify all the election results,” he said. “At this stage we are moving on.”
In the ballot earlier this year, Netanyahu and his Likud party refused to certify the results after suing (unsuccessfully) to have every poll station in the country recanvassed. But the Central Elections Committee, headed by a Supreme Court justice, declared the vote had been conducted fairly.
Be Patient. Democracy takes time.
The post-election process in Israel often takes weeks or longer to run its course—from the ballot counting, to the ceremonial consultation process between the president and the heads of the political parties, and up to the inevitable horse-trading required to strike a coalition deal.
In fact, the horse-trading—who leads it and how long it takes—is governed by law. In last year’s second election, in September, the process went on for three months and ended inconclusively—forcing Israel into yet another campaign. Americans should be thankful that a repeat election isn’t an option in the U.S. electoral process. Imagine going through it all again, and yet again, only to get the same results.
When Israel’s third election also ended in deadlock, Netanyahu and Gantz struck a rotation agreement, with each leader agreeing to serve as prime minister for half of the three-year term. One journalist at the Times of Israel, Raphael Ahren, jokingly advised Americans to at least consider the approach. “Yalla, rotation. Trump goes first for 24 months, Biden will be Alternate President. Then they switch,” he tweeted.
Neri Zilber is a journalist covering Middle East politics and an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the co-author of State with No Army, Army with No State: Evolution of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, 1994-2018.
The 2020s will be a decade of political evolution and realignment, no matter who wins this election.
As the results of the U.S. election become clearer throughout the day, they’re looking more and more like a narrow victory for Democrat Joe Biden with a closely divided Senate. Hardly the mandate Democrats were hoping for. In the best-case scenario, it seems, they’ll face at least another two years (and maybe longer) of gridlock and intense hyperpartisan fighting in Washington.
Back in September, I wrote in these pages that the 2020s would be a decade of major political evolution. My prediction was based on history. Every 30 to 40 years, the party system has gone through a significant reshuffling, a realignment that shifted the balance of power and the core issues of politics, as internal party tensions became overbearing and new problems to address arose. At the same time, around every 60 years or so, the United States has also gone through an era of major political reform, in which the fundamental rules of democracy shifted in response to public dissatisfaction with institutions. And I noted that both of these cycles were coming due for an era of upheaval in the 2020s.
Of course, history is not clockwork. There’s no guarantee the 2020s will follow the pattern. And the likely outcome of this election suggests more stagnation than immediate change. More and more Americans feel deeply dissatisfied with how the U.S. political system works and are exhausted by the trench warfare of national politics. The stakes are higher now, with the economy uncertain, the pandemic still raging, and climate change continuing to grow more severe and destructive. The pressure will continue to build, and hyperpartisan polarization will continue to intensify, fueling anger, distrust, and dysfunction.
At a certain point, something has to give. It is impossible to say what or how, exactly, but there’s one thing we do know: The way the United States is doing democracy is broken. There are alternatives. Some include electoral reforms that would expand the number of parties, thus breaking the zero-sum binary that is sowing division and hatred. New parties would offer a path for new coalitions to form, scrambling today’s escalating hyperpartisan warfare. Maybe that’s the answer, maybe there’s another one. But all signals point to turbulence ahead, and if the United States doesn’t have a plan, chaos will win.
Lee Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author of the book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.
The election has been called an “attack on the nerves”—and Trump’s statements have been dubbed an “attempted coup.”
U.S. President Donald Trump, in his campaign event at the White House in the early hours of Wednesday morning, sought to freeze the U.S. election in its tracks, declaring the counting of ballots to be “fraud.” As the ongoing vote count enters its second day, many Americans have their bleary eyes glued to Electoral College maps, where the race is neck and neck, with key battleground states like Pennsylvania not likely to have full returns until Friday. But as it turns out, international readers are also glued to the refresh button. Below, we’ve rounded up some of the morning’s leading headlines from newspapers and magazines around the world.
United Kingdom: Although the Times of London didn’t evaluate Trump’s claims in a headline on Wednesday morning—“Trump claims victory and demands end to vote count”—the paper clarified in the article that the race is “still wide open” in key states. The claims, the Times’ U.S. editor and Washington correspondent reported, amounted to a “baseless allegation.” Meanwhile, the front page of the tabloid Daily Mail, Britain’s highest-circulation paper, juxtaposed Biden’s growing lead in Michigan and Wisconsin with Trump’s unfounded allegations of “surprise ballot dumps.”
Ireland: “Fintan O’Toole: At 2.23am today, the US president launched an attempted coup,” reads the front page of the Irish Times. O’Toole, a columnist at the paper, wrote that “Close to half of Americans voted for him in the full knowledge that he was going to do it.” The irony of this, given incoming election results, is that Trump “behaved like an autocrat even when it was quite possible that he could still win by being a democrat,” O’Toole wrote. Elsewhere in the paper, the Washington correspondent reported that despite Trump’s claims of victory and fraud, the election is “too close to call.”
Germany: The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel prefaced its coverage of Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election—which it called “an attack on the nerves” —with two caveats. First, the contest’s results won’t be clear for a while. Second, and perhaps more jarring for a readership that gives Trump low marks, Spiegel reported that more U.S. voters have already cast their ballots for the Republican nominee than four years ago. The magazine added that this trend follows an overall uptick in voter turnout, conceding that “at least that is good news.”
By contrast, the Bild tabloid—Germany’s most widely read publication—went the clickbait route, quoting Trump’s unfounded claim that his lead “magically disappeared” and describing the election as a “thriller.” It also pasted a photo of the controversial new Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett to its homepage, with an all-caps title asking, “WILL SHE DECIDE THE ELECTION FOR TRUMP?”
France: “Donald Trump and Joe Biden neck and neck, the United States is tearing itself apart,” read the front page of Le Monde on Wednesday morning. The paper’s correspondent in Washington, favoring straightforward analysis, wrote that the race saw “echoes” of 2016, with the country’s fate resting on a handful of states. The main difference from four years ago, Le Monde reported, is the delay in the vote count.
Spain: El País, read widely throughout the Spanish-speaking world, declared that the United States is facing an “institutional crisis” on its front page. The paper’s lead election story focuses primarily on Trump’s accusations of fraud and assertions that he won, even though key swing states are still counting votes. “Election night has entered the most-feared scenario,” the early morning Wednesday story begins, quoting Trump at length throughout.
Lebanon: On the morning after the U.S. presidential election, Lebanon’s Daily Star said, “the rest of the world was none the wiser.” The paper referenced Trump’s “pre-emptive declaration of victory” overnight, citing civil rights groups that view the move as “trampling of long-standing democratic norms.” After reviewing international leaders’ mixed reactions to the too-close-to-call election, the Star rehashed Bush v. Gore, referencing Trump’s promises to bring the 2020 election before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Japan: As the presidential contest narrows, the English-language Japan Times notes that the U.S.-Japan relationship hangs in the balance—with the Japanese government yet to comment on the election. In Japan, concerns are rising that the “political crisis” in the United States sends a message of uncertainty to its allies. The results of the election are likely to shape new Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s first visit to the United States as Japan’s leader, the paper reports.
Singapore: “Too close to call, Biden bats away Trump victory claim,” reads the front page of the Straits Times, Singapore’s major English-language daily, which also points to the president’s lack of evidence of any fraud despite his late-night press conference. The paper’s U.S. correspondent notes the potential for online misinformation in the days ahead as Biden calls for patience with counting mail ballots.
Australia: The Sydney Morning Herald’s North America correspondent called Trump’s premature declaration of victory a “dark, disturbing moment in American history” in a dispatch from Washington, raising concerns about potential unrest and the integrity of U.S. democratic institutions over the next few days. “A nation with widespread gun ownership, a polarised population, tribal media outlets and a reckless president has to muddle its way through as all the votes are counted,” he reports.
Chloe Hadavas is an assistant editor at Foreign Policy.
Audrey Wilson is a senior editor at Foreign Policy.
Allison Meakem is an assistant editor at Foreign Policy.
Try as they might, pollsters can never account for one thing: human psychology.
Just like after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, American pollsters are under attack. Back then, they failed to predict the victory of Donald Trump. This time around, instead, Joe Biden is on course to become president with a much smaller margin of victory than originally expected. Immediately before Election Day, he was leading nationwide polls by more than 7 percentage points over incumbent President Trump, a lead that was almost three times higher the one enjoyed by Democratic Party contender Hillary Clinton four years ago. And in the final rush of polling, Biden also managed to surpass Trump in Florida, Georgia, and Ohio—all states that, in the end, appeared to have voted for the Republican candidate.
But polls are two-sided games. At one end, there are the pollsters, who ask the questions and are responsible for designing their surveys in a methodologically sound way. At the other, there are the interviewees, who are expected to answer faithfully. Obviously, biased responses in polls skew the data, leading to inaccurate predictions. And it is not unusual for psychology to trump statistics.
Since 2016, pollsters have worked tirelessly to improve the quality of the underlying methodology of their surveys. In particular, they tried to address the sampling bias that four years ago led to underestimates for turnout among specific demographic groups (white voters in particular) who were decisive for Trump’s victory. Websites like FiveThirtyEight also aggregate polls from different sources by assigning a rating to each of them, based on accuracy scores that are adjusted for the poll’s sample size, the performance of other polls surveying the same race, statistical biases, and other factors.
Of course, even the most statistically meticulous poll will always provide a partial view of reality. Each choice concerning its structure is subjective and discretionary. In the end, its accuracy will always lie within a statistical interval of confidence—that is, a specific margin of error, up or down.
And this interval might become especially wide if those interviewed lie or do not respond at all. While nobody can confidently say anything about those who might give fake responses, we know that this year undecided voters amounted to around 5 percent of Americans ahead of the vote. That’s a sufficient number of people to alter the outcome of the election. Some may have been genuinely unsure of whether to vote for Trump or Biden. But others, particularly moderate Republicans in affluent areas, might have simply not wanted to state their preference for a polarizing figure like Trump. In statistics, this is the so-called social desirability bias—the desire to appear to do what is perceived as the socially correct thing to do. For similar reasons, polls might have failed to fully capture the shift of Hispanic voters toward Trump in some key states.
And that is an important lesson: Even as technology and big data keep improving the quality of the polling on the pollsters’ side, at the other end the respondents will always be human beings, with their own psychologies, biases, and emotions. If we forget it, we will set ourselves up for new electoral surprises every time.
Edoardo Campanella is a Future World fellow at IE University’s Center for the Governance of Change in Madrid and the co-author, with Marta Dassù, of Anglo Nostalgia: The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West.
For the Scottish National Party, Trump is an easy target—and a way to bash Brexiteers at home.
For Scotland’s pro-independence leaders, U.S. President Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving.
Trump remains deeply unpopular in his mother’s homeland. Criticizing him—and by extension his British Brexiteer allies—is easy politics for the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP). After Trump early on Wednesday prematurely claimed victory, made baseless allegations of electoral fraud, and threatened legal action to stop vote counts, Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader and Scotland’s first minister, expressed fears for the “integrity” of U.S. democracy.
“Crucial hours and days ahead for the integrity of US democracy,” she tweeted. “Let’s hope we start to hear the voices of Republicans who understand the importance of that.”
Over the years, Sturgeon has made no secret of her contempt for Trump, this summer saying it is sometimes “hard not to conclude” that the U.S. president is a racist. As America began tallying its votes, the SNP saw another opportunity to link Trump to the party’s real opponents: Britain’s pro-Brexit Conservative government and Boris Johnson.
Speaking in Westminster, Johnson declined to condemn Trump’s claims of “fraud” in the U.S. elections. “We don’t comment as a U.K. government on the democratic processes of our friends and allies,” Johnson said. The SNP’s leader in Westminster jumped on that remark, as did Johnson’s English opponents.
“With his reputation as ‘Britain’s Trump,’ Boris Johnson has a particular duty to speak out and distance himself from his friend’s false claims of major fraud and unsupported declarations of victory before the votes have been counted,” said Ian Blackford, the SNP leader in Westminster.
“The fact that he won’t speaks volumes.”
The world, like the United States, is in limbo. But one thing is clear: 2016 was not an aberration.
Americans may have rendered their final verdict in the 2020 election, but the maddeningly uncertain outcome as votes continue to be counted, combined with President Donald Trump’s premature victory dance, has left much of the world awaiting the results with anticipation bordering on anxiety, wondering whether they will face a future marked by increasing U.S. authoritarianism and isolationism, or a pathway back to restoring one of the world’s most admired democracies.
“Dear American friends … the reputation of democracy is at stake and the world is watching,” the United Kingdom’s former Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt warned on Twitter as the election stalled in a deadlock. “Please proceed carefully.”
As of Wednesday morning, neither candidate had secured the 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory, though Joe Biden’s gains in key battleground states gave his campaign hope of ultimately prevailing. But the final result likely won’t be known until later in the week—and legal challenges from Republicans loom.
The electoral deadlock put many of Western allies on edge, fearful that four more years of Trump’s “America first” foreign policy will further erode critical security alliances and leave them increasingly exposed to threats from rising powers, principally China. But it also offered encouragement to a new generation of nationalist leaders from Brazil to Hungary, who see Trump’s norm-breaking presidency as an affirmation of their own policies.
In a major breach of protocol, Slovenia’s nationalist Prime Minister Janez Jansa weighed in on behalf of Trump on Twitter, following the president’s claim to have already won the election: “It’s pretty clear that American people have elected @realDonaldTrump @Mike_Pence for #4moreyears. More delays and facts denying from #MSM, bigger the final triumph for #POTUS. Congratulations @GOP for strong results across the #US @idualliance.”
Still, most world leaders responded cautiously to the early election night results, which may not be fully tabulated for days, mindful that a hasty decision to pick the wrong horse in the race could backfire, undermining their relationship with the next American president.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has cultivated a close personal relationship with Trump, tried to steer clear of the fray, saying, “Of course, we don’t comment as a U.K. government on the democratic processes of our friends and allies.”
“We need to be patient and wait and see who wins the US election,” Britain’s Foreign Minister Dominic Raab tweeted. “Important the process is given sufficient time to reach a conclusion. We have full confidence in the checks and balances of the US system to produce a result.”
The European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, made it clear that the final outcome is not yet known. “The American people have spoken,” he tweeted. “While we wait for the election result, the EU remains ready to continue building a strong transatlantic partnership, based on our shared values and history.”
The unexpectedly strong showing by Trump sent a powerful message to Washington’s European partners that the president’s isolationist tendencies are deeply rooted in the American heartland, forcing them to rethink their own security alliances with the United States at a time when Russia has become increasingly assertive on its European flank.
“Even if Biden ekes out a win, Trump’s strong showing will convince a lot of foreign observers that they can’t put much faith in the U.S. in the long term,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on multilateralism with the International Crisis Group. “It’s hard to see foreign powers sealing complex bargains with the U.S. if they suspect that another nationalist will win in 2024.”
“The big question is what China will do next,” Gowan added. “If Biden wins, will Beijing rein in its assertive tendencies and realize that it needs to be more careful or cooperative with Washington? Or has Beijing now concluded that the only way to deal with the U.S. is all-out competition, whoever is in office? If Beijing miscalculates, the world gets quite dangerous quite quickly.”
To leave FP’s live election blog and read the rest of this article, click here.
Colum Lynch is a senior staff writer at Foreign Policy.
Amy Mackinnon is a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy.
Regional media is covering the U.S. elections much like we covered theirs.
The coverage of the U.S. election on Press TV, Iran’s English-language state broadcaster, looked a lot like how the West covers elections in the Middle East. Iranian TV showed images of armed young men holding American flags, pre-election clashes, and boarded storefronts. It underscored the prominence of personal attacks in the campaign and baseless allegations hurled by President Donald Trump of electoral “fraud.” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called on the next president—whoever ends up prevailing in the tight contest—to respect international law and treaties.
But there is something to that portrayal. Personal attacks, at least from Trump, did crowd out serious discussions of policy. Weapon sales skyrocketed ahead of the election. A strongman-like incumbent did claim victory before many of the votes had even been counted, saying that counting ballots was tantamount to a “fraud.” He threatened to challenge the election in the Supreme Court. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook had to flag the U.S. president’s posts for disseminating false information.
Several days ago, a photographer friend, who’s covered wars, protests, and elections across the Middle East, posted what he called “U.S. election gear.” It included the kind of kit we’re all used to carrying to cover turbulence in the Middle East, including a flak jacket, gas mask, and medical kit. Though initial fears of election-related violence failed to materialize, some observers worried that Trump’s inflammatory and premature claim of victory in the wee hours Wednesday morning could stoke unrest and a crisis of legitimacy, regardless of how the final vote count goes.
“The U.S. does have a history of election fraud,” said a reporter on TRT, the Turkish state broadcaster. “So these are legitimate concerns to raise and to explore here in this election,” she continued, despite the fact that most U.S, elections experts have cited very minimal fraud in past elections. Egyptian TV reported on skirmishes outside the White House. The Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar TV ran a photo on its of Trump pointing his finger at his own head with the headline: “Trump Falsely Asserts Election Fraud, Claims a Victory.”
Countries—and leaders—who have borne the brunt of U.S. criticism for years are taking the opportunity to return the favor. Americans, for their part, have heard their whole lives that they are citizens of the world’s most vibrant democracy—a claim a lot of people around the world, including in the Middle East, probably believed, too. But this year’s contentious vote will leave behind a legacy abroad, of a beacon shining a little less brightly.
Rebecca Collard is a broadcast journalist and writer covering the Middle East.
Papers don’t want to give the impression Beijing is taking a side.
The big news in Chinese media isn’t the U.S. election—it’s the delayed listing of the massive Ant Group, the financial giant owned by the billionaire Jack Ma, on the Chinese stock market. Without that, the election would probably be making headlines—but would still be getting considerably less coverage than in previous years, thanks to the sharply escalating tensions between the United States and China.
Politically sensitive topics—especially around foreign relationships—tend to produce limited and nervous coverage in China. That’s backed up by my conversations with reporters in Chinese state media. A reporter from one state-linked outfit told me that months ago they were told to be very careful about covering this election and to ensure the coverage was “calm,” “neutral,” and “appropriate.” They were advised to not publish an excessive number of articles on this matter and to avoid live election results that might draw a lot of public attention—and most importantly, to be very cautious about their wording so that their stance wasn’t read as that of the Chinese government.
“My pitch on battleground states was rejected by the chief editor, since if we imply that a particular candidate might win the swing states, readers might interpret it as China supporting them, and even worse, readers might interpret it as China trying to interfere with the election,” the reporter said.
She said it was frustrating to report on the election with so many restraints. Weibo, China’s Twitter-alike service, is being monitored closely as well; when she posted about Donald Trump being likely to win Florida on her personal Weibo, the message was deleted immediately.
Another reporter, from ThePaper.cn, noted that they had received similar guidelines in reporting the election: “Stay low-key” and be careful when reporting “democracy-related issues.”
Chinese social media has been less restrained—and less accurate. On the morning of Nov. 3, a few bloggers posted a fake election result showing Trump winning almost 400 electoral college votes. Some bloggers mistakenly believed “electoral colleges” were colleges that inform people about election-related knowledge. Many WeChat articles echoed right-wing extremists and tried to scare Chinese Americans away from voting for Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Given the confusion and lack of coverage, comic memes have been all many people have seen about the results. That has added to the feeling that the whole event isn’t that important—only a reality TV show.
Tracy Wen Liu is an investigative reporter, author, and translator who focuses on the U.S.-China relationship.
Decriminalization measures have won across the United States.
While the final election results remain in flux, a clear trend emerged at the ballot box Tuesday: Americans are ready to move on from the war on drugs. Four states—New Jersey, Arizona, Montana, and South Dakota—have, based on preliminary results, voted to legalize cannabis. The District of Columbia, where marijuana is already legal and regulated, has voted to decriminalize psychoactive mushrooms and roots, specifically psilocybin mushrooms and mescaline.
But it was Oregon that took the big swing. The Pacific Northwest state voted to legalize and regulate the prescription of psilocybin mushrooms for medicinal purposes and to decriminalize all currently illicit substances, turning drug possession into a low-level felony. Under the new regime, arrests for drug possession would be either punishable by a $100 fine or would require a referral to a health center—all funded by the proceeds of the state’s cannabis tax. The regime resembles the Portuguese model, which aims to treat drug use as a medical, not criminal, issue.
Other criminal justice reform measures didn’t fare quite as well. Oklahoma rejected a measure to reduce sentencing measures for nonviolent crimes, and a much-touted measure to end California’s cash bail regime seemed headed for defeat. In no-brainer territory: Utah and Nebraska have adopted constitutional amendments to fully abolish slavery, even as punishment for a crime.
Justin Ling is a journalist based in Toronto.
What Angela Merkel’s approach to a blustering incumbent can teach us about America’s political crisis today.
As I watched U.S. President Donald Trump’s rambling late-night response to the initial election results, I needed a moment to recall which earlier disputed election it reminded me of. Then I remembered: It was Germany’s 2005 national election, which I followed as a graduate student newly arrived in Berlin. The televised aftermath of that vote—and the political resolution that followed—puts the United States’ current crisis into some new perspective, and may suggest how it’s most likely to get resolved.
The election pitted the incumbent, Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, against the leader of the Christian Democrats, Angela Merkel, in what was her first campaign for national office. Schröder was the clear underdog, after a second term marked by the passage of unpopular welfare reforms that triggered street protests and fractured his party. Merkel was expected to stroll to victory in partnership with her intended coalition partner, the business-friendly Free Democrats.
The polls were wrong. The Christian Democrats barely eked out a one percentage-point lead over the Social Democrats. That wasn’t enough for Merkel’s preferred coalition, but it was a lead nonetheless—a fact that Schröder went on to ignore in the traditional nationally televised post-election group panel (dubbed the Elefantenrunde or “elephant panel”). A red-faced Schröder hectored and huffed before the cameras, declaring without evidence that “nobody, except for me, can form a stable government—nobody except me.” At a wide-eyed Merkel visibly struggling to process the unexpected election result, Schröder growled, “You can’t seriously think you’re going to be chancellor. Get real.”
Last night, Trump cloaked his grievance in a veneer of legal objections, just as Schröder claimed some authentic connection to Germans’ popular will. But beneath both lies the same basic motive: wounded alpha-male ego. It’s to Merkel’s credit that she recognized narcissistic rage wasn’t a politically effective force at that juncture. The votes had been tallied, and Merkel correctly surmised that Schröder’s flailing wasn’t going to alter Germany’s established norms for forming a government. Schröder wasn’t actually threatening to usurp her—he was blustering. But Merkel has never been easily intimidated.
On Twitter, there is chatter of Trump mounting a coup. But halting the vote count is beyond his control, just as leading a military insurrection is beyond his capacity. Trump announced his intention to dominate America’s public life for the next several weeks—and for as long after that as he likes. But who says that’s up to him? More likely is that as the remaining states do their constitutional duty, and the votes stack up in favor of Joe Biden, Trump’s lawsuits will be exposed for their vacuity, and his ranting will recede into the background as a new president-elect asserts himself.
Biden could do well to learn from Merkel that power speaks for itself, and shouting exposes the very lack of it. It’s a large reason why, 15 years after that first election, Merkel is still the German chancellor. It also helps explain why Schröder has long since left public life, and now works in the energy sector for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Cameron Abadi is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
There wasn’t any blue wave for House Democrats looking to pad their majority.
Democrats appear on track to retain control of the House of Representatives, but rosy projections about adding seats faltered as election results from across the country showed they wouldn’t be getting the blowout over President Donald Trump’s Republican party that they had hoped for.
In early returns, Democrats—who were expected by analysts to gain anywhere from five to 20 seats—failed to pick off any Republican incumbents in battleground districts and lost six of their own, making inroads in just two redistricted North Carolina seats. In Texas, where the Democrats eyed several pickups by backing candidates with strong national security credentials, for instance, the party ended up losing ground in key races.
Here are results from the House races that Foreign Policy was tracking most closely:
Texas 10th: Michael McCaul, the top-ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, managed to defeat progressive challenger Mike Siegel on Tuesday night in the suburbs of Houston and Austin. McCaul—who has been a backer of Trump’s calls for a wall on the southern border—also is a major backer of U.S. security assistance. He spoke out against the 2019 House resolution to end American involvement in Yemen.
Texas 22nd: In the Houston area, former foreign service officer Sri Kulkarni was defeated in his second run for Congress, a seat that Democrats had hoped to flip by driving up turnout among Asian-American groups such as voters of Chinese and Indian descent. Troy Nehls, a sheriff in nearby Fort Bend County, scored the win.
Texas 23rd: In the sprawling 23rd district of Texas, one that spans about a third of the U.S.-Mexico border, Democrats were hoping to capitalize on Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant policies and turn a historically deep red district blue, as part of their push to transform Texas into a swing state. But those hopes were dashed when Republican Tony Gonzales, a Navy veteran, beat out former Air Force intelligence officer Gina Ortiz Jones for the seat.
Michigan 8th: Democrat Elissa Slotkin appears to have won her re-election bid against Republican Paul Junge. Slotkin is a former CIA and Defense Department official who holds seats on the Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, and was a lead sponsor of a bill in Congress to rein in Trump’s ability to use military action against Iran.
New Jersey 3rd: Rep. Andy Kim, a former State and Defense Department official during the Barack Obama administration, managed to hold off a challenge from Republican David Richter to keep his south-central New Jersey seat that had been targeted as a pickup by the GOP.
But the Republicans did score a win on the House Armed Services Committee, on which Kim sits, unseating New Mexico Democratic Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, a first-term member who served as a co-chair of the House Democratic National Security Task Force founded after the 2018 midterms. Texas also sent former White House physician Ronny Jackson to Congress to replace Mac Thornberry, the one-time chairman of the committee, who is retiring.
New Jersey 7th: In this district that extends from the Pennsylvania border to the Newark suburbs, former senior State Department official Tom Malinowski has won a second term. A member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Malinowski pushed back strongly against the Trump administration’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen and the White House’s defense of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Virginia 7th: This slice of the Richmond, Virginia suburbs is still too close to call on Wednesday morning, with the Democratic incumbent and former CIA official Abigail Spanberger trailing U.S. Army veteran Nick Freitas with more than 10 percent of the vote left to be counted. Spanberger, a freshman, was one of the first six Democrats in the House to call for an impeachment inquiry for Trump last year.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Divided government could mean four years of financial instability and stagnation.
As of early morning, Nov. 4, the presidential betting market is back where it was 24 hours ago. As was true before the polls closed and the counting began, as of 7 a.m. on Nov.4 , Joe Biden is being given a 60 percent chance of victory.
But there is winning and there is winning. What the decision-makers and the markets that drive the world economy were hoping for was an outcome that promised a new and coherent response to America’s coronavirus crisis. They wanted a road map for America’s answers to long-term questions such as infrastructure and climate change. To deliver this, what is needed is a large-scale fiscal program to revive the parts of the U.S. economy that the Federal Reserve cannot reach. This does not mean that big money in America uniformly backed the Biden/Harris ticket, or that the business elite had discovered an enthusiasm for a progressive agenda on education finance, childcare, or health. But compared to Donald Trump, the prospect of a Democratic clean sweep did at least offer a coherent answer to America’s predicament. The polls themselves were a factor. It is hard to bet against the kind of margin they assigned to a Biden victory.
Then, around 9.30 p.m. Eastern Time on the night of Nov. 3, it became clear that the blue wave was a fantasy. Biden may eke out a victory. But even if he does, he will not be carried into the White House on a political high tide. The United States remains profoundly divided. By prematurely claiming victory, Trump has already cast doubt on the legitimacy of the outcome.
This is the worst-case scenario. The most likely result is divided control of the White House and Congress (with Republicans maintaining control of the Senate), paralysis in fiscal policy, and continued reliance on the Fed as the main backstop not just of the U.S. economy but of the entire global economy. That is a recipe for lopsided financial bubbles that increase the risk of future financial instability and benefit the wealthy minority who own financial assets. As for the economic damage done by coronavirus, the best bet remains a vaccine.
It was a sign of the times that as the storyline shifted, money went in two directions: into Treasuries, driving prices up and yields down, and into NASDAQ futures. As the American impasse threatens to deepen, those are moves toward safety—and away from real and sustainable recovery.
Adam Tooze is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a history professor and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. His latest book is Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, and he is currently working on a history of the climate crisis.
The president is drawing from an authoritarian playbook—but it’s important to consider which kind.
One virtue of President Donald Trump’s speeches is that they can never be described as curated: the anodyne product of backroom speech-writers poring over focus group data, desperate to avoid offence or hostages to fortune. Rather, they are primordial experiences, white-water rafting on a stream of consciousness. As such, they do tell us much about how the president sees himself in the country.
There has been an explosion of—often highly partisan—comparative studies of authoritarianism that seek to place Trump next to Vladimir Putin. How many times have hackneyed (and usually misleading) phrases such as “Putin’s playbook” been deployed? Looking simply at Trump’s eye-opening election night speech, though, rather different parallels emerge.
That is not the kind of speech Putin would or could ever have given. First of all, Russian democracy is (largely) a stage-managed sham, while U.S. democracy is still (largely) not. Putin does not have to worry about contesting results, or even waiting for them. The real question in Russian elections is how much effort, electoral bribery, and downright falsification is needed to get the results the Kremlin wants.
It is also a matter of positioning. Putin is, in his own words, the galley slave, working hard for his people because they demand it. He graciously accepts a burden placed upon himself, rather than doing anything as squalid as fighting for it. The tsar was the representative of the divine to the Russian people, and vice versa; Putin is the connection between Russia and its destiny.
Finally, there is a huge emphasis on control—both his own self-control, but also conveying the sense of the system’s effortless grip on the country. Much like the Borg, the Kremlin wants to convince people that resistance is futile. Apathy is, after all, an established authoritarian’s tool to ensure that those who would resist feel too marginal and isolated to do anything but conform.
None of these applies to the Donald. His claims that “a very sad group of people” want to disenfranchise his supporters, of “a fraud on the American public” are the words of the populist outsider. Instead of calm confidence, he is returning to the kind of rhetoric that so successfully whips up his base, a narrative of plucky outsiders being suppressed by a deep state that would cheat them of their rightful victory—and the promise to fight for that victory.
If we want parallels, it is with populists who do not control their own system. Benito Mussolini in 1922, mustered his supporters to march on Rome because “it is the right and duty of the Italian people to liberate their political and spiritual life from the parasitic incrustation of the past.” Mexico’s current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did his best to paint the 2006 elections he narrowly lost then as fraudulent. Bolivia’s former President Evo Morales in 2019 tried to hold on as evidence of fraud in his claimed election victory mounted.
Even after four years as president, Trump is still framing himself as the populist outsider, not the father of the nation.
Mark Galeotti is principal director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence, and an honorary professor at UCL.
Despite polls suggesting the Democratic candidate would beat the president, the contest is tight.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden remained in a tight battle for the presidency Wednesday, despite widespread polling that predicted a clear Biden win but appeared to be as flawed as it was four years ago, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump.
The two candidates were in a desperate fight to win some of the same Midwestern states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—the so-called Democratic blue wall—that cost Clinton the election four years ago, with the counting not yet done. Final vote tallies were not expected until later Wednesday at the earliest, but one outcome was clear: The United States is just as polarized as the pundits feared.
Trump, in a late-night press conference at the White House, prematurely declared victory and vowed to fight any effort to count outstanding ballots, including at the Supreme Court.
“This is a fraud on the American people,” he said, referring to efforts to count ballots in key states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. “As far as I am concerned, we have already won it.”
Biden was bidding to be elected the 46th president of the United States, putting him in a position to replace one of the most tumultuous and controversial leaders in American history. In a statement after midnight Tuesday, Biden told supporters that the vote could go well into Wednesday, in part because of the late mail-in votes yet to come in. “We’re feeling good about where we are,” Biden said. “We’re feeling real good about Wisconsin and Michigan. And by the way it’s going to take time to count votes, but we’re going to win Pennsylvania.”
If he manages to eke out a win, which may not be known for days, the 77-year-old Biden would be expected to be a far more predictable and stable president than Trump, one who has pledged to restore U.S. alliances and prestige, as well as attack COVID-19 in a more forthright way.
But obstacles remain, including possible legal challenges by the Trump campaign should the vote go Biden’s way.
To leave FP’s live election blog and read the rest of this article, click here.
Michael Hirsh is a columnist for Foreign Policy. He is the author of two books: Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street and At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World.
The state was a must-win for the president, and he prevailed thanks in part to broad support from Cuban Americans and other Latino voters.
Donald Trump is projected to win Florida, one of the most important battleground states in the 2020 elections and a must-win for the U.S. president on the path to reelection.
In preelection polls, Democratic candidate Joe Biden had a narrow lead over Trump in Florida, but Latino voting blocs turned out for Trump in higher numbers than expected—especially in Miami-Dade County, where Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won by a 30-point margin in 2016. This year, Trump got nearly 46 percent of the vote in the majority-Latino county, a surge of 13 percentage points since the last election.
Part of the president’s appeal among the more than 2 million Hispanic voters in the county is his tough stance on socialist Latin American regimes. The Trump team warned during the campaign—repeatedly and falsely—that Biden would advance radical socialist policies in Washington if elected. (A surge in conspiracy theories and disinformation may have also played a role in turning Spanish-speaking voters in South Florida against Biden, as Politico reported.)
Trump, who has long been favored by Latino communities that fled such regimes, including Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans, even made inroads among more Democratic-leaning groups this year, early post-voting data shows.
Trump was hoping to attract Colombian American voters in Florida by painting Biden as a far-left sympathizer. Even young Cuban Americans, who Democrats hoped would veer left, turned out in larger numbers for the president this year. While only 21 percent of Cuban Americans under 40 said they intended to vote for Trump in 2016 in Miami-Dade, around 55 percent indicated they would do so this year.
Ahead of the elections, some members of Trump’s top national security team visited key swing states including Florida on official government business—trips that Democratic lawmakers and other Trump critics said were thinly veiled political stops designed to shore up support for his reelection campaign on the taxpayers’ dime. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to Latin America in the weeks before the election drew criticism from some Brazilian lawmakers and diplomatic heavyweights, who accused Trump’s top diplomat of using the trip as a “campaign rally to appeal to Latinos in Florida.”
In a last effort to win the state, Biden sent former President Barack Obama to campaign in Miami on Monday night. Obama, who won around 58 percent of the vote in Miami-Dade in 2008 and 62 percent in 2012, used his last speech as an opportunity to appeal to the Latino community. “Here in South Florida, you see these ads, ‘Joe palling with communists, palling with socialists,’” Obama said. “You’d think he was having coffee with [late Cuban President Fidel] Castro every morning. Don’t fall for that. … He served as my vice president. I think we would know if he was a secret socialist by now.”
Augusta Saraiva is a former intern at Foreign Policy.
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
The South Carolina senator is a key defender on the right of U.S. foreign aid.
Control of the Senate remained uncertain at the close of election night in the United States, with a few key races that would determine whether Republicans retain or lose the majority still too close to call. However, Republicans had at least one thing to celebrate when Sen. Lindsey Graham scored an important reelection win in South Carolina.
Graham, the powerful Republican leader who pinned his fate on cultivating a close relationship with a president he once derided as a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot,” scratched out a victory over a heavily funded Democratic nominee, Jaime Harrison, in South Carolina’s Senate race.
Graham is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has represented South Carolina for nearly two decades, carving out a role as one of the most influential and visible Senate leaders. But his powerful defense of President Donald Trump made him a favorite target for Democrats, who poured piles of money into the campaign of his challenger. In the weeks leading up to the election, Graham bemoaned his lack of funding, issuing a series of desperate appeals for donations. “I’m getting overwhelmed,” he told prime-time host Sean Hannity on Fox News. “Help me. They’re killing me moneywise.”
In Washington, even Graham’s staunchest critics concede his influential role as the right’s most prominent guardian angel for diplomacy and foreign aid budgets. Graham sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chairs the lesser-known but arguably just as influential appropriations subcommittee that oversees the State Department and foreign aid budgets.
As Graham became more aligned with the president, he continued to resist the administration’s repeated efforts to gut funding for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. When the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2020 budget called for a 23 percent cut to diplomacy and global development, Graham slammed the proposal as “insane.”
“I don’t know who writes these things over in the White House but they clearly don’t understand the value of soft power,” Graham said at an appropriations committee hearing with then-USAID chief Mark Green.
Beyond Graham, here are other important developments in Senate races across the country:
Colorado goes blue: Democrat John Hickenlooper defeated Colorado’s incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner in a win that erodes the Republicans’ narrow majority in the Senate. Gardner was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he played an important role in the Republican caucus on crafting hawkish legislation on North Korea. He also co-chaired the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus.
Tuberville turns ’Bama red: Former Auburn University football coach and political novice Republican Tommy Tuberville has defeated first-term Democratic Sen. Doug Jones. Jones had defeated Roy Moore to claim the seat once held by former Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions three years ago in a hotly contested upset for Republicans. Jones was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Warner coasts to win in Virginia: It’s not a shock that Sen. Mark Warner won a third term in the Senate, but the move could be significant if the Democrats manage to flip the upper chamber. In that case, Warner, who’s the ranking member of the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, would take over the powerful gavel, and he has promised to restore independence to the panel. “The Intelligence Committee has got to be independent of politics, it needs to be willing to speak truth to power, and should the Democrats take control, and whether I’m chairman or vice chairman of that committee, those intelligence professionals, the vast majority of who live in Virginia, I’m going to have their back,” Warner said on Tuesday.
Cornyn takes Texas: Border-focused Republican Sen. John Cornyn, the former majority whip in the upper chamber, has won reelection over Air Force veteran and Democrat M.J. Hegar, who ran for a seat in the Austin suburbs two years ago. Cornyn chairs the Senate Judiciary subcommittee for immigration, refugees, and border security, and he has defended the Trump administration’s decision to take money from the Pentagon budget to pay for Trump’s border wall.
Democrats flip Arizona: Former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly has defeated Republican Sen. Martha McSally, a key pickup for the Democrats. Kelly, who is also the husband of former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, polled ahead of Biden in the state, which Democrats won in the presidential race for the first time in 24 years. The race is also significant because it takes out a Trump ally on the Senate Armed Services Committee in McSally.
Ernst ekes out Iowa: Trump ally Sen. Joni Ernst has scored a narrow victory over Democrat Theresa Greenfield in Iowa. The retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Colum Lynch is a senior staff writer at Foreign Policy.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Darcy Palder is a former intern at Foreign Policy.
Neither U.S. presidential option is great for Tokyo.
TOKYO—For Japan, just about any outcome in a nail-biter U.S. presidential election brings its share of worries.
A victory for incumbent President Donald Trump carries the known risks—contentious negotiations about who should pay for the extensive U.S. military presence in Japan, the constant threat of tariffs on Japanese autos, and the broader concern of having a mercurial figure at the head of the U.S.-Japan alliance. (There is no illusion here over who is in charge of a relationship dubbed by a former U.S. ambassador as “the most important relationship in the world, bar none.”)
A Joe Biden administration carries unknown risks. Who will be in charge of foreign policy? Will Japan be able to recreate the close personal ties between Trump and former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (a favorite golf partner for the president)? Most importantly, will the United States go soft on China?
That’s not to say that Japan is itself willing to stand up to a rising China in public. On the record, officials talk about the strategic alliance with the United States but add that it would be unrealistic for Japan to decouple from its largest trading partner.
They are happy, however, to let Washington take the lead—and the heat. Such a position would give Japan the chance to take a somewhat harder line on the human rights, territorial, and security challenges posed by Beijing without getting in too much trouble. They believe that Trump will happily oblige in this area. There is also the practical issue that the conservative ruling party in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party, has traditionally worked better with Republican presidents. The relations between Abe and Barack Obama were noticeably cool.
At the same time, a new Trump administration could carry a very tangible cost. Negotiations on a base agreement for U.S. troops are due to start next year. Japan currently contributes around $1 billion annually. Trump, ever the negotiator, is said to be demanding an increase to $4 billion to $5 billion. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton puts the figure at $8 billion.
There is also the fatigue factor. The diplomats at the foreign ministry believe that they have successfully steered clear of any relationship crises with a prickly foreign leader, but they are not sure they can keep this up for another four years. In this, they are probably not alone.
William Sposato is a Tokyo-based journalist who has been a contributor to Foreign Policy since 2015. He has been following Japan’s politics and economics for more than 20 years, working at Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. He is also the co-author of a 2021 book on the Carlos Ghosn affair and its impact on Japan.
Officials and observers say widely anticipated interference has not materialized.
After one of the most bitterly fought election campaigns in recent memory, Americans went to the polls on Tuesday amid fears that Election Day would be overshadowed by voter intimidation, foreign interference, and technical glitches at polling stations.
But by Tuesday afternoon, the election had progressed largely without incident, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which runs a nationwide election protection program.
“It appears at this stage that we are on path to a relatively successful Election Day, one characterized by record turnout levels during early voting, record levels of participation in vote-by-mail,” said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, on a call with reporters Tuesday afternoon.
“I think this speaks to the success of historic voter protection efforts, which aimed to empower voters so that they were armed with as much information as possible about how to participate in this election amid the pandemic,” Clarke said.
While the committee’s hotline had received tens of thousands of calls from voters across the country, they mostly centered on isolated issues, and there was little evidence of efforts to systematically prevent people from voting on election day.
The FBI and the New York attorney general are investigating a wave of robocalls received by voters in several states urging them to “stay safe and stay home.” The calls do not explicitly mention voting, but the timing raised fears that they could be part of an effort to deter people from going to the polls.
Earlier in the day, cybersecurity officials reasserted their confidence in the security of the election. Unlike 2016, when Russian hackers targeted election infrastructure in all 50 states, this year was “much quieter,” a senior official from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters. “At this point, this just looks like any other Election Day and even just another Tuesday,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“We have no indications that a foreign adversary has succeeded in compromising or affecting the actual votes cast in this election,” said acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf on Tuesday.
The Washington Post reported early Tuesday evening that U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency took action in recent weeks to deter foreign actors, including Iran, from seeking to interfere in the election. The move came after U.S. intelligence officials announced that Iran was behind a wave of bizarre emails sent to Democratic voters in swing states.
Amy Mackinnon is a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy.
Record voter turnout is expected in the United States. How does it stack up?
The United States is on track for its highest electoral turnout since 1908—likely around 65 percent of eligible voters, according to data from the U.S. Elections Project. But U.S. turnout usually lags behind that of other developed democracies.
In Sweden’s general elections in September 2018, 82.1 percent of eligible voters showed up at the polls. Preelection polling suggested that the far-right, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party would win big. The final results revealed no clear winner, but the election appeared to put the center-left Social Democrats in control of the country’s agenda, after pushing other parties to the right on immigration policy during the heated campaign. Unlike in the United States, Sweden’s elections were held on a Sunday, giving as many people as possible the opportunity to vote.
In December 2019, the United Kingdom’s parliamentary elections saw 62.3 percent turnout, just below estimates for Tuesday’s elections in the United States. That election kept Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party in power—they won the largest percentage of the popular vote since 1979, picking up seats long held by the Labour Party. It also granted Johnson a mandate to proceed with his plan to leave the European Union on Jan. 31. The U.K. election was held on a Thursday, but Britain allows voting in person, by mail, and by proxy.
See the figures above from nine other major democracies to get a sense of how the United States compares.
James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
Audrey Wilson is a senior editor at Foreign Policy.
Few Americans have any idea how exotic their election process is.
Few Americans have any idea how exotic their election system—with its Electoral College and gerrymandered voting districts—looks from abroad. But even the voting process itself is very different from just about every other democracy’s, making voting more difficult and increasing the risk of voting irregularities and partisan disputes. Here are 10 problematic ways in which voting in the United States is different:
1. Election Day on a work day. Most democracies vote on weekends or make their election day a holiday, which means more people can vote without worrying about missing work.
2. No uniformity in national elections. The United States appears to be the only democracy in the world that does not strive for uniform rules and procedures to govern national elections. Voting takes place across thousands of jurisdictions with myriad ballot types, voter eligibility criteria, voting equipment, counting methods and time frames, procedures for early or absentee voting, and rules for resolving disputes.
3. No national election management body. Unlike almost every other country, the United States lacks a national election commission or other body responsible for the election process. Even other countries with strong federal traditions such as India, Canada, and Mexico have national election commissions that run federal elections with uniform nationwide rules.
4. Partisan election management. In 33 U.S. states, the chief election official is elected in partisan elections and is allied with a political party—the only democracy in the world that selects its senior election officials this way. The impartiality and fairness of election administration thus depend too much on the personal integrity of partisan state and local election officials, who often endorse candidates or run in the elections they themselves supervise. This greatly increases the risk of disputes and litigation.
5. Complicated voter registration. Unlike most countries, the United States lacks a national or otherwise uniform voter registration database. Instead of registration being automatic or taking place at the initiative of the government as in most other countries, the burden of registering to vote rests on each individual. This tends to discourage voter participation.
6. Widespread controversies over voter identification. Most countries have uniform rules on what identification voters must provide at polling places to cast their ballots. Many countries have national ID cards or voter ID cards that every voter can show.
7. Voter suppression. Historically in the United States, there has often been at least one major party working intentionally to make it harder for at least some category of people to vote. Currently, one major political party appears to be trying to discourage voter participation. This does not seem common elsewhere in the world. The practice in some U.S. states of stripping those with past felony convictions of their right to vote for life is also highly unusual.
8. Little authority for election administrators. U.S. election administrators generally have relatively less discretion than those in other countries to adapt rules and procedures—for example, in reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic.
9. No standardized balloting or counting process. Even within a state, technologies and procedures vary from one county to another. Rules about how absentee ballots are counted vary substantially throughout the country—another potential source of disputes. Again, no other country seems to do it this way.
10. No dedicated mechanism to resolve election disputes. Globally, the trend is to establish dedicated election dispute resolution mechanisms. In the United States, in contrast, those with complaints about the process generally have to go to the courts, which tend to be slower and involve judges with less election expertise.
Eric Bjornlund is the president of Democracy International, chair of the Election Reformers Network, and author of Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy.
The U.S. president is seen as a failure—but that helps China.
Chinese have a clear opinion on the likely electoral victor in the United States: President Donald Trump. When China’s Phoenix New Media covers the election on Weibo (a Chinese version of Twitter), the most liked comment is always “Chuan Jianguo [Trump] will surely win!”
Lots of Chinese bloggers refer to Trump as Dong Wang (懂王), “the Know-King,” which comes from him saying “nobody knows more about taxes than I do,” “nobody knows more about construction than I do,” and even “nobody knows much more about technology.” But this nickname is always used sarcastically, due to Trump’s failure in handling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since the coronavirus hit the country, the United States has failed to protect its people, leaving them dealing with illness and financial crisis. In contrast, in China, where the pandemic originally started, daily new case numbers have been kept very low, and people are able to live relatively normal lives. Chinese media outlets never stop criticizing Trump’s woeful response to the pandemic, implying that democracy doesn’t always work. Emphasizing Trump’s failure could portray China as a more responsible nation, thus downplaying some of the domestic problems China is facing.
Another common Trump nickname is Chuan Jianguo (川建国), literally “Trump Builds China.” Many people believe that under Trump’s presidency, there has been continuous doubt about America’s global leadership and that China’s path to becoming a superpower is now clear. Many Chinese scholars and reporters thanked Trump for giving China four years to grow and rise up to power. Hu Xijin, the chief editor of the tabloid Global Times, once thanked Trump for his work to “help promote unity in China” on his personal Twitter.
Trump’s challenger Joe Biden gets much less media coverage in China, where he is usually called Baideng (白等)—it sounds similar to his name “Biden” in Chinese, and it means “wait in vain.” Ordinary Chinese barely know anything about him save for the news featuring his family’s business affairs in China, and they tend to think he has no shot in this presidential election. When the country’s propaganda machine constantly features Trump’s failures, many Chinese influencers and bloggers have openly endorsed Trump, as have some dissidents overseas, such as the blind activist Chen Guangcheng. Many Chinese opposed to Communist Party rule see Trump as their savior.
[For more of FP’s coverage on the 2020 U.S. election, check out Postcards From the Wedge, our series on how niche foreign-policy issues are playing out in key battleground races, The World’s Election, our collection of articles on how other countries are watching the Nov. 3 vote, and What We’re Missing, a set of daily takes from leading global thinkers on foreign-policy issues not getting enough attention during the campaign.]
Tracy Wen Liu is an investigative reporter, author, and translator who focuses on the U.S.-China relationship.
Beijing often places more importance on structural trends than presidential personalities.
One of President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign’s frequent lines of attack has been that Joe Biden is “soft on China”—and that Beijing will be happy if the Democratic challenger is elected. Trump’s own Office of the Director of National Intelligence has claimed that China is interfering on Biden’s behalf—although the allegation drew heavy pushback from analysts.
It’s true that Biden has never been a China hawk, and at points he has been downright complacent about the challenges posed by dealing with Beijing, such as his statement in 2019 that China is “not competition for us.” In the 1990s, like most prominent politicians, he was an enthusiastic proponent of engagement and World Trade Organization accession for China, and during the Obama administration he was skeptical of occasional efforts to refocus attention on Beijing.
But above all, Biden is a man of his party, and of the center. And the consensus around China in Washington has shifted a long, long way in the last few years, driven by Beijing’s new aggressiveness and intense anti-Americanism. That’s been reflected in Biden’s own positioning, and that of his advisors. Even dedicated doves are sharpening their beaks. There’s still a real chance that a Biden presidency attempts a partial reset of relations, if only to try to pull out of this year’s spiral—but there’s unlikely to be a return to the complacency of the past. Beijing is simply too big, too nationalistic, and too strong to be, as it was during the Obama years, a third-place priority.
As for the Chinese leaders themselves, I doubt they have any particularly strong preferences. For one thing, the Marxist analysis of other nations favored by the Communist Party’s leadership still tends to see elections as a sham and places importance on structural trends rather than individual personalities. When there is a strong interest in one side, it’s normally because of existing corrupt ties with a particular leader, such as Beijing’s connections to former authoritarian Prime Minister Najib Razak in Malaysia. That same scandal connects to Trumpworld–but Trump’s attitude toward Beijing, while wildly erratic, certainly hasn’t displayed any of the sense of fealty that Beijing’s pet leaders show.
Whoever wins, China seems convinced that the United States is on a path of clear decline. That’s reinforced by the disastrous U.S. COVID-19 numbers of the last few weeks, often hitting over a thousand deaths a day. China’s entire official coronavirus death total is less than 5,000; even guesstimates of concealed numbers end up in the range of 20,000 to 40,000 deaths, a small fraction of the over 230,000 dead in the United States so far.
James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
Many adherents of the conspiracy theory believe Trump’s victory is preordained.
The QAnon conspiracy theory has a lot on the line today, as followers wait and see whether their trust in “the plan” was well placed.
For years, the supposedly anonymous Q has promised that even the most chaotic happenings around U.S. President Donald Trump were a part of some master plan that would soon be revealed. Just this weekend, an official Q missive asked QAnon’s followers: “Are you ready to take back control of this Country?” That optimism has, generally, carried over to the usual hangouts of Q’s followers on Tuesday, even as polls continued to show Biden with a sizable lead.
Most QAnon followers are predicting a big Trump win tonight regardless. Many have fixated on isolated reports of broken voting machines or pro-Trump poll watchers being denied entry to polling locations as evidence that the supposed deep state is out to rig the results—although there are relatively few reports of election hiccups, a reality which isn’t lending itself well to the idea of a national conspiracy.
Tonight may be make-or-break for QAnon, in many respects. There are sure to be some victories, as pro-QAnon candidates such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican candidate for Congress in Georgia, are likely to win office. The big question is what happens if Trump doesn’t win his second term. On some of 8kun (formerly known as 8chan) ’s message boards, where much of the QAnon chatter happens, one poster warned to “STANDBY BECAUSE THERE IS A STRONG POSSIBILITY THAT PATRIOTS WILL NEED TO GO HOT THIS WEEK.”
The sentiment that Q’s followers will need to “go hot,” or take some kind of physical action, is growing, with the conspiracy theorists predicting the dawn of some kind of prolonged civil war or national disruption. On QAnon-friendly Infowars, onetime Trump advisor Roger Stone, fresh from campaigning in Georgia, suggested the possibility of martial law being imposed, before encouraging the mass arrests of Obama-era officials and, if found guilty, their hanging. The movement has survived failed prophecies before, however, and may well mutate into a new form.
Most curious is that Ron Watkins, son of 8kun owner Jim, chose today to announce his sudden retirement from managing the day-to-day operations of the QAnon message boards. Many QAnon watchers suspect Jim Watkins is the real identity behind Q.
Justin Ling is a journalist based in Toronto.
Sensing Trump is on the way out, Israel, the UAE, and Turkey are trying to squeeze as much out of the United States as they can now.
In the months and weeks preceding Tuesday’s presidential election, there was an unmistakable effort among the United States’ partners in the Middle East to get while the getting’s good. Sensing that U.S. President Donald Trump was running out of time, the Israelis, Emiratis, Turks, and others sought new agreements with the White House or to consolidate newfound regional gains before a potential change in power.
The United Arab Emirates, for example, wanted to lock in its promised F-35s (which it did). Israel was hoping to secure more F-35s and other goodies for agreeing to allow the Emiratis to acquire the planes (also successful). The country, too, won an agreement that will expand U.S.-Israeli scientific cooperation to the West Bank and Golan Heights. Meanwhile, Turkey has been pressing its advantage to insert itself further in the Eastern Mediterranean and Nagorno-Karabakh without fear of a response from the United States.
One has to have a certain amount of respect for the shrewd cynicism of regional leaders, although if folks in Washington’s foreign-policy community are disturbed, they have a right to be. At the same time, though, Americans have left themselves open to being played because over the last few decades, foreign policy has become domestic political warfare by another means. Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that regional allies are locking in what they can.
Since the George W. Bush administration reversed much of the Clinton administration’s approach to the Middle East by invading Iraq, declaring the Freedom Agenda, and passing on the Oslo peace process, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been a series of 180-degree swings. After Bush, President Barack Obama wanted to get out of the Middle East and negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran in part to achieve that goal. Trump also wanted to get out of the Middle East, but he withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. A President Joe Biden would likely alter his predecessors’ approaches to Iran as well and take a tougher stand on the human rights violations of Washington’s regional friends. Some of these shifts were prudent foreign policy, but some of it was also politics.
It was always a myth that politics ended at America’s shores, but once upon a time, there seemed to be a consensus about the United States’ role and purpose in the world: to serve as the anchor of the liberal world order. No longer, and leaders in the Middle East (and elsewhere) have taken note. They have sought to leverage the whiplash between Democratic and Republican foreign policy—as opposed to U.S. foreign policy—to their advantage, at least temporarily. That is why they are now hedging, making deals and moves that will make it harder for a Biden administration to reverse course.
Steven A. Cook is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East.
Regional coverage has focused on the prospect of all-too-familiar chaos.
In Latin America, a region too often shaken by undemocratic elections, fraud, and street riots, U.S. elections used to set a clear path for the right way to do things. For years, the United States has been taken as an example—and has taken a strong (and in many cases questionable) hand in democratic efforts around the world.
But following the United Nations report warning of the steps needed in case of unrest after this year’s U.S. election, the change is clearer than ever: The United States is no longer a democratic exemplar.
On the morning of U.S. Election Day, the major media in Latin American countries, instead of reporting as they normally would on the implications of the outcome in their own countries, reported on worst-case scenarios. An article published by Infobae, one of Argentina’s leading media outlets, talks of boarded-up stores, increased arms purchases, and possible “catastrophic scenarios,” while El Observador, one of Uruguay’s leading newspapers, blamed Trump and his rhetoric for the possible political violence expected after this election night. Latin American media is now covering the U.S. elections as U.S. media once covered Latin American elections.
Trump’s recent speeches, in which he has refused to say that he would accept a defeat, and the videos of riots shared and circulated on social media only support this notion—which the next days could prove all too true. It’s a chillingly familiar picture for Bolivia, which in recent years has experienced political transitions plagued by unrest and accusations of fraud, and for Venezuela, perhaps the best-known example of elections that, according to international opinion, lack the guarantees or security expected from a democracy.
Unless a smooth and peaceful transition ensues, the U.S. elections have the potential to worsen the already strained U.S. reputation in Latin America. Latin American democrats used to try to follow in the United States’ footsteps when it came to the peaceful transition of power. Now they’re edging away from the U.S. path as fast as possible.
Milagros Costabel is a visually impaired freelance writer and disability rights advocate living in Colonia, Uruguay.
What to expect from the next four years, regardless of who wins the vote.
We may not know who the next president is for some time. But there are a few things we do know.
First, if Joe Biden wins, we know that most countries around the world will heave a sigh of relief, at least temporarily. Donald Trump is deeply unpopular in most of the world; remarkably, leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are seen as more trustworthy than he is. America’s global image will get a big short-term bounce if voters show Trump the door; it will take a further hit if Trump clings to power despite his many failures.
Second, we can be confident that neither Trump nor Biden is going to resurrect old-style neoliberal hyperglobalization. Biden will be more interested in multilateral trade reform than Trump ever was, and his team is likely to try to build or repair multilateral regimes on climate, an array of digital issues, health, and trade. But the commitment to lowering barriers and opening markets that prevailed during the “unipolar moment” is history.
Third, the United States and China are going to be rivals no matter who is in the White House. Competition between the two most powerful countries is baked into the structure of the international system, and it is exacerbated further by a fundamental incompatibility between the two states’ core strategic preferences. In particular, China’s desire to push the United States out of Asia is directly at odds with Washington’s desire to remain there to help prevent China from dominating the region, and these contrasting objectives will inevitably spark recurring tensions. Biden may be more effective at forging multilateral arrangements to constrain China (while simultaneously seeking to cooperate with Beijing on those issues where interests overlap, such as climate change), but neither president will expect China to evolve into a democracy and become a benign stakeholder in a U.S.-dominated order.
Finally, this election will not end the deep polarization and reflexive partisanship that have roiled U.S. domestic politics for more than two decades, and this condition will continue to exert baleful effects on America’s international position. Polarization will continue to hamper efforts to address the pandemic. It will encourage and facilitate foreign interference in U.S. domestic politics (or even the mere suspicion of the same). It makes it harder to take prompt action to address serious problems like climate change, and it makes other states warier of making long-term agreements with the United States because they cannot be sure that any promises that U.S. officials make will survive the next election cycle.
There’s one more thing we also know about the next four years: Whatever Trump or Biden is planning to do over the next four years, neither will be able to implement it as he expects. No president is able to set a foreign-policy agenda and stick to it completely because the rest of the world inevitably throws unexpected surprises at them. George W. Bush got blindsided by 9/11, Barack Obama didn’t see the Arab Spring coming, and Trump dismissed and then downplayed the danger of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having a clear set of goals and a strategy for achieving them is highly desirable, but it’s the events that policymakers don’t anticipate that often determine whether they succeed or fail.
Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
In the short term, progress on vaccines may matter more than any particular president. In the long term, though, it’s the government’s relationship with the economy that will be key.
It is Election Day, and the markets are up. Given Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s lead in the polls, it seems like investors like the idea of him moving into the White House soon. It is easy to see why. If he’s elected, odds are that he will quickly launch a big fiscal stimulus program to help the unemployed, struggling businesses, and state and local governments. All need support for the foreseeable future.
But after the virus, when the economy enters a recovery phase, there would be some economic risks inherent in the Biden agenda as well. He plans to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour—a very large increase for many states and, for some, just a few dollars off from their median wage. While small increases to the minimum wage during economic booms have negligible impacts on employment, a very large increase during a recession, especially a recession that has hit the food and retail sectors very hard, is a much bigger risk. Add on other labor costs from more paid sick leave and health care, and the outlook for a vigorous jobs recovery, especially low-wage jobs, is more uncertain.
Biden also plans to increase corporate tax rates to levels above the international average. This will make U.S. companies less competitive and encourage them to keep more of their profits abroad. Biden likewise plans to give the government a larger role in the economy, especially when it comes to promoting the building of new infrastructure and development of green technology. Whether such moves will actually help the economy depends on if the projects fulfill an economic need or are driven by political interests. If history is any guide, political interests often win out, and there is a dearth of good shovel-ready projects for the administration to start with. Still, some might counter, such spending could at least create good government jobs, as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) did during the Great Depression. But research from economic historian Price Fishback estimates that WPA jobs may have actually slowed the United States’ recovery in the 1930s and 1940s by making workers reluctant to take private-sector jobs.
Of course, a Trump presidency also poses risks, including less social stability, less certainty on trade, and likely a smaller fiscal stimulus while COVID-19 is still raging. But over a longer term, under a second administration led by him, there is more certainty that taxes will stay low and that the deregulations he put in place, which included spurs to cheaper generic drugs and Internet service, will persist. Uncertainty is bad for businesses and markets. In the past four years, of course, there were plenty of days when the stock market would rise or fall following a surprising Trump tweet about trade or health care. But the markets later bounced back and, even during the including the pandemic, the stock market continued to trend upward. Perhaps markets see certainty in low taxes and less regulation and tune out the noise.
Over the next few years, the United States’ and the world’s economic trajectory will largely be determined by innovations in vaccines and therapeutics more than any one president. But after that, economic health will come down to the role Washington plays in the economy. Big economic shocks are often followed by large expansions in the welfare state that endure for decades. Either Biden or Trump would have to tread carefully.
Allison Schrager is an economist, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and co-founder of LifeCycle Finance Partners, LLC, a risk advisory firm.
Europeans don’t like Trump—but they’re also not sure what they think about the United States at all.
Most Europeans cannot vote in the U.S. election, but they are watching it with suspense. Everywhere—on the internet, on TV, in newspapers—they discuss the ins and outs with an eye for detail and historic context that one hardly ever sees during a European election campaign. In Europe, everyone seems to be a “U.S. specialist,” but “EU specialists” are rare.
Europeans are opinionated about the U.S. election, too. In a timely publication, Isabell Hoffmann of the Bertelsmann Foundation and Catherine de Vries, a political scientist at Milan’s Bocconi University, asked Europeans whom they would vote for and what they thought about the United States. Unsurprisingly, 45 percent of respondents said they wanted Joe Biden to win, while 17 percent supported Donald Trump. But the surprise was that the rest said they would vote for neither candidate. That’s 38 percent of respondents—a lot. How is this possible in a Europe where—except for Poland—the dislike of Trump is so pronounced?
Zooming in, one sees that this “neither” option scores best in Southern European countries: in Spain, Italy, and, to a certain extent, France. In those countries, resentment with the United States, its capitalist system, and its foreign policy has always been stronger felt than in Northwestern Europe (which has a more trans-Atlantic orientation) and Eastern Europe (where the United States still gets credit for its anti-communist positioning in the Cold War). Moreover, Europeans seem to have lost faith in the effectiveness of U.S. democracy altogether during the past few years.
Still, when Europeans are asked to name their country’s closest partner, they prefer the United States over any other non-European country by a wide margin—mostly for economic reasons but also for political reasons and a little bit because they think Europeans and Americans share similar values.
This same pragmatic attitude is reflected in a recent article by German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer in Politico, in which she points out that anti-American sentiment is on the rise in Germany, a country that has solidly relied on U.S. protection and trust since World War II. It is becoming hard, she writes, to make a strong case for trans-Atlantic relations these days. “But the case must be made.”
[For more of FP’s coverage on the 2020 U.S. election, check out Postcards From the Wedge, our series on how niche foreign-policy issues are playing out in key battleground races, The World’s Election, our collection of articles on how other countries are watching the Nov. 3 vote, and What We’re Missing, a set of daily takes from leading global thinkers on foreign-policy issues not getting enough attention during the campaign.]
Caroline de Gruyter is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a Europe correspondent and columnist for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. She currently lives in Brussels.
Good riddance to a superspreading coronavirus election campaign.
Now that we’ve arrived at Election Day, we can safely conclude that the intersection of U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign with the COVID-19 pandemic was unimaginably awful. For weeks, Trump exhorted crowds to pack like sardines to hear him speak, masks optional, about how under his leadership the country is “turning the corner” on the epidemic. As for the 237,142 Americans who have died of the disease—ignore them, they’re a fraud.
The truth is that the United States’ epidemic is out of control, with cases rising in 48 of 50 states, some 800 added every day to the names of the deceased, and hospitals nationwide reporting that their intensive care units are full, staffing is short, and supplies are running out. Trump has claimed that doctors make money by falsely listing deaths as caused by COVID-19; that lie is an appalling affront to the nation’s exhausted medical workers from Honolulu to Bangor, Maine. The American Medical Association denounced Trump’s profiteering claims as “malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided.”
Although Trump supporters have long argued that COVID-19 deaths are overstated, all scientific evidence points in the opposite direction. A study by public health scholars at the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University recently showed an enormous excess death toll in 2020 compared to prior years. The study’s authors reckon that 26 percent of the excess deaths were uncounted COVID-19 cases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the 2020 excess death toll by the end of September at 299,000, arguing two-thirds of those numbers were COVID-19. A separate study looked just at the months of March through July, compared with the same time period in previous years, finding 225,000 excess deaths. At least 67 percent of that excess, they said, was due to COVID-19.
Comparing the United States’ excess death rates with those of other wealthy nations, researchers at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania found that the United States had the third-highest rate of mortality from February through July, with 71.6 deaths per 100,000 people. “If the US death rates were comparable to Australia, the US would have had 187 661 fewer COVID-19 deaths (94% of reported deaths), and if comparable with Canada, 117 622 fewer deaths (59%),” the researchers wrote.
Moreover, for every individual American that has died of COVID-19, an average of nine grieving immediate family members are left behind, traumatized, needing mental health care. And former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers reckons the economic consequences of the United States’ COVID-19 crisis is $16 trillion.
Using the numbers suggested in these studies, the 231,486 deaths officially tallied should be augmented by 26 percent of the CDC’s excess deaths, bringing the death toll to 359,100, leaving behind 3,231,900 grieving family members.
Trump owes every family and friend that has lost a loved one in our coronavirus catastrophe an apology. In his pursuit of reelection he has discounted their lives, insisted “almost nobody” dies from COVID-19, and insisted the virus is nothing to worry about. “Don’t let it dominate your life,” he said. That’s never been a real option for Americans—but getting rid of Trump still is.
Laurie Garrett is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer.
Settler leaders are openly praying for Trump, but Netanyahu is more cagey.
Foreign leaders traditionally avoid taking sides in U.S. elections. It’s a matter of diplomatic decorum, but it’s also a practical choice: Betting on the wrong horse could mean alienating the next president of the world’s only superpower.
In Israel, some politicians are hewing to the tradition—others, not so much.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a political veteran, managed to gracefully dodge the issue on a call with President Donald Trump last week heralding the U.S.-brokered normalization deal between Israel and Sudan. Trump wanted to know one thing: “Do you think Sleepy Joe [Biden] could have made this deal, Bibi?”
“Well, Mr. President,” an embarrassed Netanyahu responded, “one thing I can tell you is we appreciate the help for peace from anyone in America.”
Still, it’s not hard to discern which candidate Netanyahu and his backers prefer.
Jewish settler leaders, who make up a key part of Netanyahu’s support base, held a reelection prayer service for Trump on Monday at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a contested Jewish and Muslim holy site in the divided West Bank city of Hebron.
“We’ve gathered here to bless President Trump and first of all to thank the Lord for President Trump and for a presidency that made such important changes,” the host of the event said.
Eli Cohen, a minister from Netanyahu’s Likud party, took a more subtle approach on the airwaves Monday, arguing that Israel’s recent peace push with several Arab states may stall if a new U.S. administration adopts a “concessionary policy” and does not “show resolve” vis-à-vis Iran.
Trump withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear agreement with Iran two years ago, egged on by Netanyahu. Biden has pledged to renegotiate the deal.
The opposition leader Yair Lapid, the head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, struck a more traditional note. He said on Monday that, no matter who won, “the next president of the United States will be a friend of Israel.” Lapid criticized Netanyahu for alienating Democrats and turning Israel into a “branch of the Republican Party.”
Yair Golan, a former deputy chief of the Israeli military and now a member of the left-wing Meretz party, gave a scathing assessment of Trump’s leadership—challenging the conventional wisdom in Israel about the U.S. president. “Trump represents all that is evil and corrupt in politics,” he tweeted Tuesday. “Even if he has done a number of worthy things, he is dangerous to the free world, dangerous to Israel, and dangerous to the values of normal people.”
Given how far apart Trump and Biden are on Middle East issues, such strong opinions in Israel over the identity of the U.S. president will only grow after Election Day.
In a recent interview with the Arab American News, Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris made clear that the Biden administration would reverse many of Trump’s signature policy moves that harmed the Palestinians.
According to Harris, a Democratic administration would reinstate U.S. financial aid to the Palestinians, reopen the U.S. Consulate to the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem, endeavor to reopen the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, and oppose Israeli settlement construction and outright annexation in the West Bank.
Drawing a clear line in the opposite direction, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman told the Jerusalem Post on Sunday that if Trump were reelected, U.S. policy would continue to favor Israel’s right-wing leadership, only more so.
“Maximum pressure” campaigns aiming at financially squeezing both Iran and the Palestinians into submission would proceed unabated. “The only strategy they really have right now is to hope Trump loses,” Friedman said.
Alluding to the prospect of more Arab states normalizing ties with Israel, Friedman added that this would only be possible if Trump remained in office. Such a scenario would force the Palestinians “to understand that they’re on the wrong side of history and can move in a different direction. We’ll have the first chance in probably 12 years to really get around the table on terms we can accept.”
Friedman’s “we” seems to refer to both Israel and the United States. It reflects another one of Trump’s foreign policies that Biden is expected to roll back if he wins: no daylight between U.S. and Israeli positions.
Neri Zilber is a journalist covering Middle East politics and an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the co-author of State with No Army, Army with No State: Evolution of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, 1994-2018.
The global economy is in bad shape—and Big Capital knows that only a blue wave can start fixing it.
As we await the outcome of the U.S. election, the world economy drifts listlessly, paralyzed by the shock of COVID-19 and geopolitical and political uncertainty. As Gita Gopinath, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, has warned, we are in a liquidity trap—a situation of chronic low interest rates and depressed demand. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has spoken of a black hole of monetary policy.
The way out is to raise aggregate demand. Since the private sector is in shock, government taxation and spending are key. That is what gives the U.S. election its capital economic importance. No other government, not even the Chinese, can match America’s fiscal clout.
The nightmare scenario is that America’s election makes things worse. A disputed election followed by a constitutional crisis would compound the craving for security, which would further increase the demand for liquidity, driving the dollar higher. This is the perverse logic of the world’s reliance on the U.S. currency as the de facto global currency. A crisis increases the demand for dollars, even if the crisis originates in the United States.
The second-worst situation would be a divided power balance in Washington with the Democrats in control of the White House and Mitch McConnell pursuing a policy of obstruction in the Senate. That would limit the scope for an adequate fiscal response and stunt U.S. economic recovery.
What the markets are hoping for is not just a Joe Biden victory but a blue wave in Congress, opening the door to massive spending on Biden’s priorities of green energy, infrastructure, child care, and education. That would accelerate the recovery and flood the bond market with new American IOUs. This would drive yields higher and depreciate the dollar. A cheaper dollar would benefit U.S. exporters at the expense of their competitors, but it would also provide relief to all those around the world who owe money in dollars. On balance, there are few things better for global trade and growth than a weak dollar.
Trillions of dollars are currently riding on this scenario. The worry is that we will wake up on Nov. 4 both to an uncertain political future and to a violent financial backlash.
Adam Tooze is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a history professor and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. His latest book is Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, and he is currently working on a history of the climate crisis.
In 2016, Trump triumphed in places where inequality is lower but economies are more stagnant. But now inequality is rising everywhere.
Even four years later, the 2016 U.S. presidential election results still look paradoxical. Many who considered themselves economically marginalized voted for a billionaire, Donald Trump, among whose priorities was cutting taxes on the very rich. Despite an economic calamity that has left many of those same voters even worse off, during the 2020 election campaign, Trump continued to lambaste redistributive policies and promised to keep his tax cuts in place. It remains to be seen how well Trump’s election gambit will work, but it is clear that much of his base remains intact and supports his message.
The explanation of this apparent paradox can be found in the peculiarities of the U.S. voting system. Since presidential elections are decided on a state-by-state basis through the Electoral College, as a political matter, inequality within each state matters more than inequality at the national level. That makes intuitive sense; people compare their economic status more with that of their immediate neighbors than with people living a country away.
The Republican Party is particularly dominant in those areas with stagnant local economies but fairly stable—and relatively contained—income inequality. As economists James K. Galbraith and Jaehee Choi have pointed out, in 2016 Trump received the support of states such as Alaska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Iowa, Utah, and Michigan, which have troubled economies but also saw the smallest increases in inequality nationwide between 1989 and 2014.
The Democratic Party, by contrast, mobilizes the vote of the two extremes of income distribution, especially in places where both extremes exist and are visible to the other group. Four years ago, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton succeeded in states such as Connecticut, New Jersey, California, New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, where over the past three decades inequality soared.
In the two Americas, local interpretations of the causes of inequality and how to fix it vary. According to a Pew survey, the majority of Democrats (who are more likely to come from more unequal places) believe that income inequality is due to an unprogressive tax system, unequal starting points in life, or racial discrimination. Many Republicans—who may come from places where inequality is lower, but where people are, on average, poorer—think that hard work does more to determine one’s ranking in the income pyramid. For these voters, the revitalization of stagnant economies in the country’s periphery—so that hard work is even an option—is more important than redistribution.
Of course, in 2020, COVID-19 is exacerbating inequality everywhere across the United States, including in key battleground states where inequality has been more stable in recent years and where voters swing more easily from one party to another. Democrats, then, may be better placed to capitalize on the despair of Americans on the margins of the labor market in these areas, breaking Trump’s hold there.
Edoardo Campanella is a Future World fellow at IE University’s Center for the Governance of Change in Madrid and the co-author, with Marta Dassù, of Anglo Nostalgia: The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West.
Most Russians are afraid a President Biden would bring a chill in relations, but insiders hold a more nuanced view.
MOSCOW—In Russia, the U.S. presidential election has become a national obsession. Ordinary people who rely on state-controlled television as their main source of information have seen the topic pop up every day on multiple talk shows. Among the elite, the duel between U.S. President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden has become the favorite topic of conversation at fancy restaurants and in the corridors of power.
The prevailing view is that a victory for Biden would be bad for Russia, because a Democratic administration is expected to impose new economic sanctions on Moscow as punishment for its bad behavior—first and foremost, for its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This view is widely shared by pro-Kremlin pundits, senior officials and the executives of state-owned enterprises, and is even promoted by the few remaining independent Russian media outlets such as the Bell newsletter, a daily staple in the information diet of the Russian upper-middle class.
A more nuanced view on Biden is held by some people working on U.S. issues in the Russian government. A president who is not tainted by suspicion of being a Russian asset—and who knows how to organize a normal process for national security discussions—will be able to restore some guardrails to the U.S.-Russia relationship and prevent further deterioration, those people argue. A President Biden would not be able to pay close attention to Russia, since he and his senior advisers will be overwhelmed by domestic issues and otherwise focusing on China. But a possible new Democratic administration appears to be open to retaining some pillars of the arms control regime and discussing rules of competition in cyberspace. And it could be more clear-eyed—and therefore skeptical—about the side effects and efficiency of sanctions as the United States’ major tool in Russia policy. Much will depend on who is put in senior positions such as secretary of state and national security advisor, and on the midlevel bureaucrats controlling the Russia portfolio.
After U.S.-Russian relations nearly hit rock bottom on Trump’s watch, nobody in Russia believes that four more years of Trump could be good for Moscow. If Trump is reelected, the only silver lining will be the even deeper level of disarray in the Western alliance and U.S. disengagement from its partners that a second Trump term would likely bring. For the Kremlin, schadenfreude over the gradual demise of Pax Americana would simply sugarcoat the risks and downsides of Trump remaining in the White House.
Alexander Gabuev is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
For the first time, the United Nations is warning staffers of how to deal with disturbances after a U.S. election.
The United Nations has issued instructions to staffers to steer clear of post-election celebrations or protests in the United States, but if they find they can’t, they should follow these guidelines: remain calm, seek refuge in a local building, and if traveling in a car, resist the temptation to honk your horn.
The U.N. Safety and Security Department—which is responsible for keeping international civil servants safe and sound in trouble spots from Afghanistan to Somalia—turned its attention this week to U.N. headquarters, warning staff to beware of election violence not in the streets of Mogadishu but in Manhattan.
The department stated in an internal memo that “the outcome of the upcoming host country elections could spark both celebrations and spontaneous demonstrations. In these uncertain times with COVID-19 and the possibility of civil unrest, U.N. staff and non-staff personnel are encouraged for their own safety to avoid crowds in general.”
“Remain calm and carefully navigate to the edge of the crowd or where it is safest,” the memo counsels. “When leaving the protest area — walk briskly and avoid running. If you are driving, DO NOT stop your vehicle in the area of the protest. Keep windows and doors locked.
“Drive carefully through or around the crowd at a low speed and do not honk your horn.”
The unprecedented alert came as the United States is bracing for a possible wave of post-election violence, spurred in part by President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that Democrats are carrying out widespread electoral fraud, his suggestion that only a “rigged” election could cost him victory, and by his refusal to acknowledge publicly that he would accept the results of the election if he loses.
The internal guidance—which was provided to Foreign Policy by a U.N. staffer and previously reported on the Inner City Press blog—comes several months after the U.N. leadership sought to discourage U.N. staffers from participating in anti-racism demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May. The current guidelines focus largely on the security implications of possible protests and avoid the political question of whether it would be appropriate for U.N. staffers, including U.S. citizens, to participate in election celebrations or protests.
In New York City, where the U.N. is headquartered, midtown Manhattan boutiques and stores from Dr. Martens to Fendi spent the days before the election boarding up their storefronts, fearing that protests could provide an opportunity for looters to hit the flagships of some of the city’s most iconic brand names.
Colum Lynch is a senior staff writer at Foreign Policy.
They don’t have great hopes for Biden—but they’re desperate for a change in Washington.
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, the Palestinian refugees languishing in the Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp in Lebanon felt they had been proved right about America’s vision for the region. He was pro-Israel and did not pretend otherwise. But the refugees, young and old, nevertheless took this as a sign of hope: If anyone could get a deal that would secure a Palestinian state, it would be the straight-talking Trump.
After four years of Trump’s presidency, however, they have never been so desperate for a change of guard at the White House. Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem without any regard to Palestinian sentiment, cut humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees, and declared that the United States would consider it entirely acceptable if a future Palestinian state never comes into existence. Trump’s much-touted attempt at a peace deal, dubbed the “deal of the century” by the president, was so tilted to Israeli interests that it was a non-starter for the Palestinian leadership.
Palestinians don’t expect much from Democratic challenger Joe Biden either. A self-professed Zionist, Biden will consider neither cutting off defense aid to Israel nor reversing Trump’s decision to move the embassy. He has been quiet on the future of refugees and their right to return to their original homeland. Marie Kortam, a third-generation Palestinian refugee and a sociologist, texted “LOL” when I asked if Biden would be better for Palestinian refugees like her. “There is nothing in Biden’s program on Palestinian refugees,” she said. “He will also implement a lopsided pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy, but at least he will not be as bad as Trump, who is [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s best friend.”
Biden has said that if elected, he would oppose Israel’s annexations in the West Bank, resume funding to humanitarian organizations working with Palestinians, and focus on a two-state solution. But resolving the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not going to be a priority for a president who has made it clear that he will be focused at first on fixing the U.S. economy in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Palestinians are aware that they are viewed by others as expendable, even by ostensible allies. Indeed, that has been clearer than ever after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed a peace deal this year with Israel, with the Trump administration’s encouragement, in a bid to check Iran’s regional expansion. But years of victimhood make one attuned to degrees of exploitation. Whoever wins in the United States, Palestinians know they will lose—yet they insist any president would be better than Trump.
From talks with Kim Jong Un to the fate of the U.S. troop deployment there, Tuesday’s election could be critical to a key U.S. ally in Asia.
SEOUL—If Joe Biden wins Tuesday’s election, he’ll have a lot of work to do to restore America’s position in East Asia. After four years of President Donald Trump berating allies, slapping them with tariffs, and shaking them down for protection money, whoever is in the White House next January will face, for the first time in decades, real questions about the region’s ultimate commitment to the United States.
“Just because South Korea chose the U.S. 70 years ago doesn’t mean it has to choose the U.S. for the next 70 years too,” Lee Soo-hyuck, South Korea’s ambassador to the United States, told lawmakers in the National Assembly last month.
South Korea is watching the election closely, if only because it has been a hectic four years. First, there were Trump’s threats to obliterate North Korea, quickly followed by a doomed epistolary love story with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. There were hopes, after almost 70 years, of an end to the Korean War—but those fell by the wayside. Along the way, there was the Trump administration’s insistence on tweaking the existing free trade agreement with Seoul to make it more beneficial to Washington.
And hanging over it all is the fate—and cost—of the nearly 30,000 U.S. troops in South Korea. With the Trump administration demanding a fivefold increase in Seoul’s financial contribution to the troop deployment, U.S. Forces Korea recently had to inform its Korean employees that they could face furloughs if the dispute were not soon settled.
In the first op-ed printed in Korean media by a U.S. presidential candidate, Democratic challenger Joe Biden promised to work with South Korea, “rather than extorting Seoul with reckless threats to remove our troops,” as he wrote. There are no specifics as to how he would settle the current dispute, but the promise to improve relations sounds a lot sweeter than the current threat of pulling out.
The current South Korean administration is also interested in getting a president who can drag North Korea back to the negotiating table and improve inter-Korean relations, which have soured since the failed Hanoi summit in February 2019.
With Biden, some Koreans fear a return to the Obama administration’s “strategic patience,” which basically translates into not engaging with Pyongyang at all. In one of the presidential debates, Biden did say he’d meet with Kim only under the precondition that the North denuclearize, but no one should hold their breath. The approach is the opposite of South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s plan for dealing with the North, which is engagement, diplomacy, and talks.
Meanwhile, as South Koreans keenly watch the election and its implications for the future of America’s alliance structure in East Asia, North Korea is not sitting idle. In a deliberate show of force, North Korea showcased at the Oct. 10 Party Foundation Day parade its largest-yet intercontinental ballistic missile, one that can reach the United States with multiple nuclear warheads.
[For more of FP’s coverage on the 2020 U.S. election, check out Postcards From the Wedge, our series on how niche foreign-policy issues are playing out in key battleground races, The World’s Election, our collection of articles on how other countries are watching the Nov. 3 vote, and What We’re Missing, a set of daily takes from leading global thinkers on foreign-policy issues not getting enough attention during the campaign.]
Morten Soendergaard Larsen is a freelance journalist based in Seoul who writes about geopolitics.
Donald Trump Jr. thinks Trumpism is far more popular globally than it actually is.
Donald Trump Jr. has published an interesting take on the electoral predictive maps common on Twitter, showing the entire world supporting Trump save for a handful of countries including Mexico, China, and India. Mexico, of course, has long suffered through the presidency of Donald Trump, who promised that the U.S. neighbor would pay for a border wall that never materialized. And as well as blaming China for the coronavirus, Trump supporters have spent the past few weeks trying to paint former Vice President Joe Biden as soft on Beijing and spreading conspiracy theories about his son Hunter Biden’s alleged Chinese connections.
Why Trump Jr. marked out India as a blue state is somewhat of a mystery. Contrary to what the Trump Jr. map shows, most of the world distrusts Trump, and the popularity of the United States has dropped sharply worldwide. But India is a rare exception: A majority of Indians say they trust Trump and his policies. In part that’s because of the strategic friendship between Trump and India’s Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi—although Modi was also seen as friendly with former President Barack Obama—but Trump’s hostility toward both Muslims and China helps. Trump Jr. has surprising faith in some traditional U.S. opponents, however. India may be blue, but Iran, Russia, and North Korea are all imagined as GOP backers. Meanwhile, being called one of the world’s “shithole countries” has not deterred Liberia from backing Trump.
To be sure, Trump Jr. is not known as a student of world affairs (and may have taken the entire map from an alt-right poster) —which may be why his map shows Indian-administered Kashmir and India’s northeastern states as separate from India, Hainan as separate from China, and for some unknowable reason has Liberia as the only Democrat-supporting African nation. The motivations for these choices may be more domestic than international. And in India’s case, it perhaps reflects how Indian Americans are expected to vote. Polls suggest that 72 percent of Indian Americans, who comprise nearly 1 percent of the U.S. electorate, will likely vote for Biden. The group’s growing influence could even help flip Texas this year. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, is also of Indian descent, and deliberate mispronunciations of her name have become a staple of Republican events.
James Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
Trump’s insults and ideological closeness to Marine Le Pen have left a bitter taste.
PARIS—There are plenty of American-style diners and bars in major French cities, and they reported roaringly successful election-night parties four years ago.
Some remained open all night to broadcast Donald Trump’s election as Le Président, with viewers—whether French or expat Americans—describing it as one of the most extraordinary and (it has to be said) entertaining political dramas of all time.
Old Glory flew from café awnings, and the Star-Spangled Banner could be heard blaring out of sound systems as revelers cheered or booed the result of every count.
None of this can happen in 2020, because France is in full coronavirus lockdown, with all restaurants, cafés, and bars from Paris to Marseille shut until at least early December.
An overall sense of nationwide immobility—and gloom—has been intensified by thousands of extra troops and police on the streets following a series of horrible Islamist terrorist attacks carried out by lone knifemen.
This means election night viewers having to remain at home to watch the contest, while barred from organizing any festivities involving more than a handful of family members or others they live with.
All French broadcasters will nonetheless deliver dedicated programs starting in the early hours of Wednesday morning local time, to factor in the time difference.
France is traditionally hugely interested in the political fortunes of its old ally, despite relations becoming very frosty during the Trump administration.
Like everywhere else in Europe, Trump’s approval rating was at less than 25 percent in France at the start of his incumbency, although he did have some fans within Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party.
The far-right party, which used to be called the National Front, was always a natural ally of Trump’s Republican Party because of their shared reactionary views on subjects ranging from immigration to climate change.
These differences were politely played down by French President Emmanuel Macron when he first hosted Trump on a visit to Paris in July 2017. There were even initial signs of a surprising friendship between the two men—and indeed between the respective first ladies, Melania Trump and Brigitte Macron—but it did not last long.
By late 2018, Trump was launching ferocious attacks on Macron over everything from tariffs to France’s capitulation to the Nazis at the beginning of World War II.
The viciousness reached a low point around the time of commemorations of the centenary of the end of World War I, when Trump tweeted that the French “were starting to learn German before the U.S. came along.”
A Macron spokesman tried to be as diplomatic about the insult as possible, suggesting that the line had been “made for Americans.”
Such episodes alone imply that the vast majority of the French are hoping for a Biden victory this time around, although there is unlikely to be much sense of rejoicing if it happens.
Nabila Ramdani is a French Algerian journalist, columnist, and broadcaster who specializes in French politics, Islamic affairs, and the Arab world.
Trump has showered Netanyahu with foreign-policy favors, but a Biden win could be a harsh wake-up call for Israelis.
JERUSALEM—Few countries have been as invested in Donald Trump’s presidency as Israel, where a recent survey found that Israelis favor the incumbent by an almost 45 percent margin. (Conversely, only 27 percent of American Jews are expected to vote for Trump, who divulged in August that “the evangelicals are more excited … than Jewish people” about elements of his Israel strategy.) That said, an answer to the proverbial question of whether Trump has been “good for Israel” remains elusive.
Whereas other world leaders have often strained to maintain constructive relations with the Trump administration, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to stay high atop the president’s short list of favorite allies over the past four years. Now, after having been a conspicuous beneficiary of U.S. diplomatic bounty throughout Trump’s tenure, Israel is bracing for the impact of what could soon be a different reality.
Much of what Trump has bestowed on Israel has been rhetorical or symbolic in nature. In December 2017, Trump extended official U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and in May 2018, a new U.S. Embassy was unveiled in the city. In 2019, Trump signed a presidential proclamation affording recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed a declaration that the “establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law.” Last week, Pompeo announced that Israeli citizens born in Jerusalem could now elect to list their place of birth as “Israel” in U.S. consular documents.
The recent conclusion of the Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, formalized and expanded an entente that had been fast-tracked already amid the dangers of an ascendant Iran. Trump’s determination—and sweeteners that he may have provided—to close this deal and a subsequent one with Sudan appears to have played a pivotal role as well.
More importantly for Israel, this newly tailored diplomatic paradigm has effectively revoked a de facto Palestinian “veto over peace and progress in our region,” in Netanyahu’s words, with a new cohort of Arab states prepared suddenly to reach agreements with Israel despite the stalemate in its conflict with the Palestinians.
On the flipside, Israel has not been spared tangible fallout from Trump’s erratic conduct of global affairs. In May 2017, an indiscreet Trump raised hackles in Israel when he shared privileged Israeli intelligence with Russia.
Israeli defense officials are sounding the alarm that, after consenting to deliver the F-35 stealth fighter to the UAE, Trump—ever the transactional figure—could also prove amenable to additional weapons sales that would erode Israel’s qualitative military edge. And on Iran, the premier external threat to Israel, Trump’s America First policy has often meant America alone: Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and imposition of tough prohibitions on Tehran notwithstanding, a diminished United States has been unsuccessful at persuading its former great-power partners to activate snapback sanctions against an emboldened Iran.
A Trump victory would likely see the continuation of these countervailing trends, with the United States acquiescing to Israeli unilateralism while continuing to step back from active involvement in the Middle East. (Russia could perhaps maneuver, as it has in Syria, to fill that vacuum.) The laconic foreign-policy agenda that Trump has proposed for a second term offers no hint of new directions.
But things will almost certainly change for Israel if pollsters are correct and Joe Biden captures the White House. Committed to restoring traditional U.S. alliances that have frayed under Trump, a new Democratic administration will be more inclined to work by international consensus. Israel’s position as a valued wingman of the United States will not be in jeopardy—Biden has so far rebuffed efforts by progressives to circumscribe the U.S. friendship with Israel—but Israelis should prepare for the return of a more measured approach that features, among other things, greater understanding for Palestinian viewpoints and a renewed push for compromise with Iran.
Shalom Lipner is a nonresident senior fellow of the Middle East program at the Atlantic Council. From 1990 to 2016, he served seven consecutive Israeli premiers at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.
An early declaration of the election result from a partisan network—on the left or right—could trigger violence in the United States.
A disputed and violent election in the United States threatens to undermine the credibility of the political system and lead to a further loss of U.S. prestige around the world. As President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden trade insults and accusations, entrenching deep social divisions, trust in the electoral system is faltering.
With armed civilians marching past polling stations and fear of unrest prompting some individuals and communities to mobilize themselves in self-defense, a controversial outcome could trigger clashes across the country. If the 2020 election does explode, the way that the result is communicated to the American people is likely to be the trigger.
That’s because how the result is announced can be as important as the result itself.
The controversial Kenyan election of 2007 provides a good example of how important the process of announcing the results can be. The presidential election was expected to be tight, but some opinion polls suggested that the main opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, had a slight lead. The early results appeared to confirm this, in part because some of those numbers came from Odinga’s political heartlands. Then the results stopped coming, and opposition leaders warned that the election was being fixed. When President Mwai Kibaki was finally declared to have won in a rushed announcement—from which most of the media was excluded—it appeared to confirm Odinga’s fears. In the political clashes that followed, more than 1,000 people died.
The outcome of the election would have been controversial whatever the process, but the way it came about poured fuel on the fire.
The United States is heading in the same direction. On the one hand, Trump has already implied that a victory for Biden would mean a rigged election. On the other hand, favorable opinion polls mean that the Democrats are confident of winning and are unlikely to view a Trump win as credible.
Against this backdrop, the way the results will be announced seems almost designed to cause trouble. The United States lacks a centralized and unified electoral commission responsible for presidential elections—in stark contrast to most democracies. This means that many Americans take their cue from television stations, which have tended to announce the outcome early based on exit polls and other projections. This is always a risky strategy, but could be catastrophic in 2020.
This year, many Democrats have voted by mail because of public health concerns. Republican voters are less concerned about COVID-19 and so more likely to vote on Election Day—and in many states, in-person votes are counted before mailed ballots.
This means that the early results and exit polls conducted at polling stations could suggest a Trump win, which will encourage the president, his social media followers, and perhaps some of the media outlets that support him to declare an early victory before all votes have been counted. Things will look very different however, when postal ballots are finally counted—which could take days. Once postal votes are added to the totals, we may well see a clear Biden victory.
As in Kenya, a late change of electoral fortunes, with both sides claiming victory, would inflame passions and foster accusations of manipulation. It could also lead to a political impasse in which the U.S. Supreme Court—now loaded with Trump appointees—would have the final say. This would be unlikely to lead to the kind of loss of life witnessed in Kenya, but it would generate remarkable political instability, especially if rival parties trade accusations of voter suppression and ballot-box tampering, further reducing public confidence in democracy.
Nic Cheeseman is a professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham and the author of How to Rig an Election.
Democrats are expected to take the House, but there are a few races that could really shape U.S. foreign policy.
Democrats are widely expected to retain control of the House. In fact, David Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report predicts that the Democratic Party will pick up anywhere between five and 20 new seats. Here are the races that foreign-policy pros should be watching most closely:
Texas 10th District: Michael McCaul (1), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is in a toss-up race against second-time Democratic challenger Mike Siegel, according to the Cook Political Report. (Siegel lost his bid to represent the Republican-leaning district by just over 4 percentage points two years ago.)
Texas 22nd: Sri Kulkarni (2), a former foreign service officer, is running for Congress in Texas’s 22nd District—an area where voters have helped turn Texas from a deep red state to a potential battleground for Democrats.
Texas 23rd: Gina Ortiz Jones (3), a U.S. Air Force veteran, is in a heated race to gain the sprawling 23rd District of Texas that spans nearly one-third of the U.S.-Mexico border. Republican Rep. Will Hurd, a former CIA officer, announced last year he would not run again.
Michigan 8th: Rep. Elissa Slotkin (4), a former CIA analyst and senior Pentagon official, is running for reelection in Michigan. She has been vocal about fears of homegrown extremism and how the hyperpartisan and ultra-politicized atmosphere across the country could become a grave national security threat.
New Jersey 3rd: Rep. Andy Kim (5), a former National Security Council staffer in the Obama administration, is running for reelection in New Jersey’s 3rd District after winning by a narrow margin in 2018. He is one of a group of national security experts who ditched the Beltway to run for Congress in 2018. He’s also co-chair of the House’s National Security Task Force.
New Jersey 7th: Rep. Tom Malinowski (6), a former senior State Department official in the Obama administration, is running in a tight race for a second term in Congress. From his perch on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Malinowski has been one of the Democrats’ most vocal critics of Trump’s foreign policy and of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Virginia 7th: Once represented by two-term Republican insurgent Dave Brat (who knocked off House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 primary upset), this suburban Richmond district is now the site of a close fight between Rep. Abigail Spanberger (7)—a Blue Dog Democrat and former CIA official who sits on the House Foreign Affairs committee—and Republican challenger and Army veteran Nick Freitas (8).
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Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Our reporters offer some tips on the Senate seats that could have serious impact on Washington’s foreign policy world.
The race for control for the U.S. Senate is much tighter than for control of the House of Representatives. Whichever party wins will have a razor-thin majority, according to projections. We’re not likely to have final results on election night.
Who controls the committees? The Democrats stand a good chance to lead key foreign-policy oversight committees, including the Senate’s armed services panel, where many members are in close campaigns. Republican Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, David Perdue of Georgia, and Martha McSally of Arizona are all in toss-up races. Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan faces a challenge from Republican businessman John James, who has run ahead of Trump in state opinion polls. Likely to lose his seat is Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, who also sits on the Armed Services Committee.
South Carolina: A potential game-changer could come in South Carolina, where the well-funded Democrat Jaime Harrison has consistently outraised Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the congressional panel overseeing the State Department’s appropriations. Graham has been one of the Republican Party’s most dogged defenders of funding for U.S. diplomacy and aid amid repeated attempts by the Trump administration to make deep spending cuts.
To leave FP’s live election blog and read the rest of this article, click here.
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
History suggests that post-election crisis is coming for Americans—both at home and abroad.
Although the international system is filled with threats and uncertainties, there is a strange public quiet in the days before the U.S. elections. Hackers and propagandists from various countries are burying deep into foreign systems, military forces continue to clash in numerous conflict zones, and competition for resources and markets has intensified, particularly between China and the United States. Nonetheless, the focus of national security in early November is internal for the U.S. government: securing a peaceful and legitimate election.
Regardless of what happens on Nov. 3 and the days after, foreign crises will almost certainly rise in importance for U.S. national security. The historical record reminds us that foreign adversaries pay close attention to American domestic weaknesses.
First, conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, the South China Sea, the Indo-China border, and other regions are escalating. With the world distracted by electoral instability in the United States, local actors who believe they have the upper hand (and external support) will be tempted to expand their attacks, widening the violence.
Second, our near-peer competitors will surely recognize that the messy presidential transition will weaken the ability of the United States to act abroad with decisiveness and coherence. They might also perceive a defeated President Trump as a potential collaborator against American national interests, in return for payments and other personal benefits. Trump’s undermining of long-standing American commitments to Ukrainian security, in return for investigations of his domestic rival, are a tempting model for President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and others eager to exploit America’s leadership vacuum for their own purposes.
Third, and perhaps most concerning, smaller actors, especially North Korea, will surely see the post-election instability in the United States as an opportunity for more aggressive behavior aimed at strategic goals and their own domestic audiences. We should expect more North Korean missile tests at the end of the year, and perhaps other forms of aggression around the demilitarized zone. Why wouldn’t Kim want to show his strength, and highlight America’s limited will to respond?
More than ever, we need a bipartisan group of current and former national security officials to assemble and prepare for the likely international crises of the next few months. Speaker Nancy Pelosi should convene this group, perhaps under the auspices of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and she should reach out to Republican members of the House and Senate to join. At the very least, this initiative will encourage a substantive and productive public discussion of foreign policy, which might temper the actions of foreign adversaries, encourage some sound judgment in the current administration, and lay out a path for the next president and his team.
Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the University's Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
Whoever wins, the United States’ democratic model is already shattered.
The 2020 U.S. presidential election will have seismic long-term implications, whichever way it goes. But it is the short-term threat of violence that is most catching Asia’s attention ahead of tomorrow’s vote.
“Here is Bloomingdales boarded up today,” a friend wrote a few days back to a sprawling WhatsApp group, mostly filled with political obsessives from India, of which I’m a member. The image showed the high-end retailer’s flagship location in Manhattan apparently preparing for rioting. “Oh, that’s crazy,” one replied. “Wow! Bloomingstan,” another member of the group replied.
The threat of post-election disorder ought not be quite as shocking as it is, given the United States’ recent history with violent political protests and plots such as that launched by supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, and given that many of Trump’s supporters seem unlikely to accept a victory by former Vice President Joe Biden under any circumstances.
But there are two other things about the election that Asian observers are more justified in being surprised by. First, there are the seemingly unbridgeable divisions in U.S. society, which appear likely to remain whoever wins. And second is the sheer ricketiness of U.S. election infrastructure, which increasingly looks like something from an emerging economy—Bloomingstan, or Americanistan perhaps—in its unfairness, unreliability, and vulnerability to interference. The fact that Monday’s news was so dominated by stories about court cases and post-election legal challenges will only have deepened this alarm.
Perhaps one should view all this as a perverse sign of American strength. Unlike China, the United States has traditionally been able to endure moments of political protest, even extreme street violence, without anyone suggesting the republic itself is actually in peril. And perhaps this time either Trump or Biden will win so convincingly that the threat of unrest simply dissolves on election night, beaten back by the sheer size of the victory.
Viewed from Asia, however, that threat of ever deeper division looms large, and behind it the reality that the United States is no longer anything close to a model democracy. Rather, U.S. democracy seems fragile and potentially ready to crack, whoever wins. “A weary world is watching,” as one Singapore news channel put it this week, but an alarmed world, too.
James Crabtree is a columnist at Foreign Policy, the executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies-Asia, and the author of The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age.
On substance and style, authoritarians see an ally in the White House—and hope to keep him there.
Over the past few weeks, there has been a fair amount of speculation about what the U.S. presidential election means for the Middle East. I’ve chatted with American, Turkish, and Egyptian journalists about this, and no matter how you slice it, it seems clear that a victory for U.S. President Donald Trump would be good for the region’s leaders and their supporters. Not so much for Iran, the Palestinians, or the democratic opposition in the rest of the region.
The Middle East’s pro-U.S. strongmen and their backers seem to know it. Saudi social media, which has become one immense propaganda campaign for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has sought to reinforce the Hunter Biden laptop story. Many Israelis also openly favor four more years of Trump. And a pro-regime Egyptian singer, Wissam Magdy, has taken an old ode to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and turned it into a paean to Trump.
None of this should be surprising. Just look at Trump’s record: He is tough on Iran, doesn’t care about human rights, has moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, has shielded regional authoritarians from congressional criticism and legal jeopardy, has produced a plan to resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that reads as though it was written in the Israeli prime minister’s office, and wants to transfer more high-tech weapons to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. That’s a list that should make nearly all the Middle East’s kings, presidents, and prime ministers happy. The exceptions being, of course, the people in the Middle East who dare to resist.
There is also the issue of style. In many ways, Trump conducts U.S. foreign policy in the same way the Middle East’s leaders do—informally and based on personal ties. It is easy to pull an end run around the U.S. State Department when a prince or minister can just WhatsApp the U.S. president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
If Trump plans to run his second administration like he ran his first one, the worst thing Middle Eastern potentates and leaders for life can expect from Washington is to make them really sick of winning.
Steven A. Cook is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East.
The country’s entrenched elite could help a new U.S. administration achieve its regional goals—while sacrificing its citizens.
BEIRUT—When Donald Trump moved the American embassy to the disputed city of Jerusalem in 2018, Lebanon, a country that has been at the frontline of the Israeli-Arab rivalry since the start, witnessed muted protests. One year later, the Lebanese emerged in the thousands against their own political elites and demanded they be replaced, along with the country’s sect-based power-sharing system.
To the extent that Lebanese people are now thinking about the U.S. election at all, they are hoping the winner will recognize that the economy, not Israel, is their country’s top concern. They want more U.S. diplomacy—just not filtered strictly through the prism of Palestine.
They should be careful what they wish for. Such diplomacy will inevitably focus on what Lebanon can do for U.S. strategic interests—and it has already started. Last month, Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, and its Shia ally the Amal movement gave in to American pressure and greenlighted Lebanon’s government to engage in talks with Israel to resolve their dispute over maritime boundaries. It was a de facto recognition of a state they do not officially recognize.
As the two delegations met in Naqoura in southern Lebanon, under U.S. mediation, hopes were raised that the discovery of gas in the disputed area might alleviate Lebanon’s economic misery. Some went as far as to say that Lebanon would earn billions annually if an agreement is reached. But many in Lebanon—oil and gas experts, political analysts, and civil society activists—have been skeptical. They say everyone benefits from the talks, except for the Lebanese. Gas has not yet been discovered and the only offshore drilling attempt revealed a dry well, according to Laury Haytayan, a Lebanese oil and gas expert. Even if gas were discovered, it could take up to a decade to put the required infrastructure in place. Activists say that the politicians were using the talks to create a false impression that they would be able to pay the country’s debts with revenue the state might earn from gas, without ushering in political or economic reforms.
“You need to drill, find gas, do your analysis to find out if it is commercial and economically viable; you need to build necessary infrastructures and then start production,” Haytayan said. “It is a long process, time that Lebanon does not have to save its economy.”
Hezbollah’s acquiescence to the talks with Israel would not have come without Iran’s counsel. Both conceded to avoid more American sanctions from the Trump administration. But the extent to which Hezbollah, and Iran, agree to further concessions to reform the Lebanese economy could depend on what the next U.S. administration decides it wants for the region.
Joe Biden has said that, if he wins the election, the United States will rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, and end Trump’s maximum pressure policy against Tehran. That is music to the ears of Hezbollah, and of course its Iranian patron. “But if Biden wins then Iran and Hezbollah may make fewer concessions,” for instance on reforms in Lebanon, said Sami Nader, a Lebanese political analyst. Many in Lebanon feel that, although Trump’s pressure campaign did not force Hezbollah to give up its weapons, it at least squeezed Hezbollah financially. A deal with Iran that again allows it to easily sell its oil on international markets would flood Iran with cash—some of which would eventually fill Hezbollah’s coffers.
Whether Biden wins or Trump returns, Lebanon’s wily politicians have used their recent deal with Israel to show that they, not the activists or the demonstrators who oppose them, can deliver on U.S. strategic interests. Many Lebanese now fear that in the larger battle between global and regional powers, their cause might turn out to be a casualty.
At the State Department, Pentagon, and other agencies, some senior officials can’t take four more years.
National security professionals across U.S. government agencies fear an exodus of senior experts from government if Donald Trump is elected to a second term, according to a dozen current and former officials across multiple agencies, who said that the president’s disdain of government expertise and political attacks on seasoned diplomats could spark a massive brain drain.
During his four years in the White House, Trump has drawn fire for dismissing or undermining senior intelligence and law enforcement officials dealing with Russia, ignoring top government health experts on the response to the coronavirus pandemic, and shutting out career diplomats from decisions on foreign policy.
Already, Trump has vowed to fire more senior government officials if he is reelected, including CIA Director Gina Haspel, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, who has been at the forefront of the U.S. response to the pandemic—and who rendered a scathing judgment of the administration’s failed response in a Washington Post interview last week.
The onslaught of politicized attacks, scattershot approaches to policymaking, and Trump’s norm-shattering methods of governance have worn down many veteran national security professionals, said the current and former officials, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“It’s not simply a question of policies that may be difficult to support, it’s a deliberate undermining of the way we protect the integrity of government services,” said one former senior State Department official who served under multiple administrations. “I can’t remember another administration in which there was such a wholesale assault on the professionalism of the mid- and senior-levels of bureaucracies in the US government.”
To leave FP’s live election blog and read the rest of this article, click here.
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Trump had success focusing on the region’s authoritarians, but the next administration will need to get back to basics.
The Trump administration’s Latin America policy brought a welcome and necessary focus on parts of the region’s authoritarian club, particularly Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. As part of its so-called maximum pressure campaign, in the last few years, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has erected an immense architecture of individual and sectoral sanctions on these regimes and their corrupt ruling classes; the Justice Department has issued indictments of political leaders; and the State Department has rallied allies and provided a needed jolt of energy to fractured opposition movements. An impressive maritime dragnet has further curtailed the illicit activities of these regimes. However, while the United States focused on authoritarian consolidation in the hemisphere, attention on broader governance challenges has suffered—all while the region’s quality of governance has plummeted.
Both left and right populism have returned in Latin America’s largest countries—Mexico and Brazil—and the region’s voters have embraced power-grabbing strongman candidates with disdain for the press, democratic institutions, legislative oversight, and checks and balances. In the Northern Triangle of Central America, where weak and corrupt governments are the norm, political leaders have steered El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras decisively toward autocracy. These trends all augur ill for the quality of governance in much of Latin America.
Whoever wins the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election will need to renew the United States’ focus on anti-corruption initiatives, institutional reform, and consolidating democratic commitments first made in the Inter-American Democratic Charter. In order to aspire to the charter’s high-minded aspirations—it declared in Article 1 that “the peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it”—the United States will need a less transactional, more committed approach to bring wayward countries back in line. Indeed, although the charter may be most relevant in the cases where its principles are most obviously lacking—Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—the U.S. focus should expand to highlight the erosion of democracy regionwide.
To be sure, the transactional approach had its upsides; given the United States’ leverage over smaller countries, it was often able to win out on single-issue matters. Witness the Trump administration’s prodding of Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries to establish so-called safe third country agreements in order to stem the flow of migrants to the United States. But that didn’t compensate for the fact that the approach often encouraged a highly circumscribed view of the region. With a range of important benchmarks effectively reduced to monthly migration figures and progress on squeezing the “Troika of Tyranny,” U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America has suffered from a paucity of political vision.
For a variety of reasons, it is in the United States’ national interest to see an integrated, prosperous, and deeply democratic Latin America. Foremost among them is that the region’s challenges tend to spill over into the United States. The region desperately needs to clean up the systemic corruption and the institutional rot that have festered unchecked for too long.
In turn, at stake in this election for much of Latin America is nothing short of the quality of democratic governance in the region. The Trump administration deserves credit for confronting the brutal dictatorships in Caracas, Havana, and Managua, as well as the great powers—such as China, Iran, and Russia—that provide them a critical lifeline. However, if in the next four years Washington cannot find a way to widen the aperture of engagement and reverse the deteriorating quality of governance in the region writ large, China, Iran, and Russia may find the door wide open to their influence anyway.
Ryan C. Berg is a senior fellow in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he is the director of the Future of Venezuela Initiative.
Israelis are watching the U.S. presidential race almost as closely as Americans.
TEL AVIV, Israel—In most countries, predicting election outcomes is the job of pollsters. In Israel, a newspaper closely aligned with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to consult a different cohort on the question of Donald Trump versus Joe Biden: astrologists, numerologists, and palm readers.
Their unanimous projection was not exactly a surprise given Netanyahu’s close ties to Trump: The U.S. president will win a second term, according to the mystics, though only after a prolonged fight.
“Trump will get reelected, but it won’t be via knockout but on points,” one of them divined in Israel Hayom, the country’s highest-circulation daily. The newspaper is owned by Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson and serves largely as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu.
“The Democrats won’t respect the outcome, and Joe Biden will steal the presidency,” leading to a crisis in the United States, the astrologer added.
The election is dominating headlines in all the Israeli media, alongside news of the gradual easing of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. In a country often consumed by its own turbulent politics, the American vote has eclipsed just about everything else.
For observers of the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu over the past four years, the fixation shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. The U.S. president has given Netanyahu huge political gifts at critical moments, helped Israel forge ties with Arab countries, and crushed Palestinian hopes for viable statehood.
Some 63 percent of Israelis prefer a Trump victory, seeing it as better serving Israeli interests, according to a poll released on Monday by the Israel Democracy Institute; only 17 percent said the same of a Biden win.
The coverage in Israel has become so granular that Amit Segal, a reporter for Channel 12 news, scolded his colleagues on Twitter for wasting their time on issues like “which polling station is more accurate in Pennsylvania.”
“Who cares what you think?” he said. “You’re in Israel.”
The soothsayers of Israel Hayom predicted it would take days or weeks for the election results to become clear in the United States—echoing the projections of more temporal forecasters. They also offered predictions about politics in Israel—where voters might be called on to cast their ballots once again in the coming months.
“Whether or not there will be elections in Israel in the near future, Netanyahu will remain [prime minister]a and the [U.S.-Israel] alliance will continue,” one of them predicted.
[For more of FP’s coverage on the 2020 U.S. election, check out Postcards From the Wedge, our series on how niche foreign-policy issues are playing out in key battleground races, The World’s Election, our collection of articles on how other countries are watching the Nov. 3 vote, and What We’re Missing, a set of daily takes from leading global thinkers on foreign-policy issues not getting enough attention during the campaign.]
Neri Zilber is a journalist covering Middle East politics and an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the co-author of State with No Army, Army with No State: Evolution of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, 1994-2018.
There is now a widespread belief that their big neighbor is headed for a sociopolitical meltdown no matter who wins.
TORONTO—U.S. President Donald Trump once inspired angst among Canadians. Modern Canada grew rich with free trade—and there was a real fear following Trump’s 2016 election victory that the United States might renounce the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and spark an economic meltdown north of the border.
But as Canadians wait for Tuesday’s election results, all that seems like ancient history. NAFTA was indeed renegotiated in 2018, but the fallout was hardly cataclysmic—a small blip compared with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Demagoguery against foreign trade practices was part of Trump’s campaign rhetoric once again, but Canada got scant mention. It’s hard to remember that, just a few years ago, Trump went on a Twitter rant about—of all things—Canadian milk.
Surveys suggest that only about a quarter of Canadians have confidence in Trump, a sharp drop from the 80 percent or more who typically said the same of Obama. That number hasn’t moved much since the early period of Trump’s presidency, when NAFTA hung in the balance. To the extent Canadians are deeply invested in the outcome of Tuesday’s election—and I assure you they are—this concern is coded in primarily moral terms. Few still worry that Canada is under actual threat if Trump is reelected.
A reflexive hostility to U.S. power has long been a defining quality of the Canadian intellectual class. But during the Trump era, that hostility has gone mainstream—and the way it’s expressed has changed. Before the age of social media, Canadians looked to their political leaders to peacock their independence and moral superiority. Liberal former Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, in particular, made a great show of opposing U.S. unilateralism, surrounding themselves with sharp-tongued cultural nationalists who hectored former U.S. President George W. Bush endlessly.
This approach is gone, both in style and substance. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, his heir apparent, generally have been professional and statesmanlike in their dealings with Trump (right down to Trudeau’s statements during the U.S. election campaign), having sensibly concluded that there’s no point in antagonizing a vain U.S. president with 87 million Twitter followers and a penchant for spite. In 2020, moreover, Canadians simply no longer depend on their public officials to criticize the United States and its leaders. They can do it themselves on social media.
As to how Canadians actually feel about the United States, the dominant sense is no longer fear. It’s something closer to pity, as there is a belief that Americans might be headed toward some kind of sociopolitical meltdown no matter who wins the election. Several snowbirds I know are selling their Florida condos—not because of COVID-19 but because they see the United States as a potentially dangerous and unstable place.
Yet, paradoxically, even as Canadians become geographically estranged from the United States, they have never had a closer connection to its internal politics—thanks to a borderless English-speaking social media universe that allows everyone to jump casually into everyone else’s feeds. This is a world in which a Globe and Mail Trump takedown can go viral as easily as a Ben Shapiro burn on Trudeau. Indeed, one of the reasons why a growing number of Canadians now question whether they still need the CBC—the Canadian public media network—is that much of its news content consists of rehashing U.S. political commentary. Canadian nationalists have long warned of the siren song of U.S. cultural hegemony. Who could have predicted that its most irresistible earworm would be crooned by none other than Trump?
Jonathan Kay is an editor at Quillette, a host of the Quillette podcast, and an op-ed contributor to the National Post.
Whether Biden wins or Trump pulls off an upset could have big implications for Iran, Israel, and the rest of the Middle East.
Across the Middle East, there is no shortage of speculation about what a change inside the White House could mean.
After a decade of protest and turmoil across the region in the wake of the Arab Spring—uprisings that removed some long-standing dictators (and U.S. allies) and plunged several countries into war and crisis—the Middle East has spent the last four years coming to grips with U.S. President Donald Trump’s sharp break with his predecessor.
The biggest change has come on Iran, where Trump pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and ramped up a so-called maximum pressure campaign on Tehran in a so-far-unsuccessful bid to force concessions from the Iranian regime. Democratic challenger Joe Biden has said he would attempt to revive the pact–provided Iran were to return to its commitments as well. (After Trump pulled the United States out of the deal, Iran broached many of its nuclear commitments, including by ramping up production of enriched uranium.) But even if Biden wins, there would be big questions about the fate of any renewed Iran deal: Tehran has learned not to trust the durability of any commitment made by one U.S. administration, and even European allies agree that any revived accord with Iran should be broadened to include curbs on Iran’s other nefarious activities—which might not fly with the country’s leadership.
When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Biden has also staked out a different position from Trump’s, advocating for a return to the two-state solution outlined under the 1993 Oslo Accords. Biden has opposed Israel’s recent unilateral moves, including a seemingly stalled plan to annex Palestinian territory in the West Bank, and said he would restore the funding and diplomatic relations with Palestinians cut by Trump. But after Trump’s one-sided intervention in the conflict, it’s unclear if the United States could again position itself as the neutral broker for peace it long claimed to be.
Likewise, when it comes to Saudi Arabia, a change in administrations could bring a big shift. Trump, and particularly his son-in-law and envoy Jared Kushner, has cozied up to the Saudi kingdom and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, despite ongoing atrocities in the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi agents in Istanbul two years ago. Biden has pledged to reassess the relationship with Riyadh and hold global human rights abusers to account.
But supporting, or at least tolerating, abuses from strongmen who had close ties with Washington has been a keystone of American Middle East policy for decades under both Democratic and Republication administrations. That’s one reason the Syrian opposition will be watching the election closely.
Trump appeared to be tougher on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad than former President Barack Obama—launching more strikes and sanctions—but that had little impact on the regime’s legitimacy or its ability to resist what’s left of the opposition. However, despite Trump’s reputation as anti-Muslim, his tough stance on Iran, one of Assad’s key backers, won him some fans in the Arab world, and there is concern that a warming of U.S.-Iran relations under Biden could further strengthen Assad. At the same time, Trump has allowed Turkey, which backs rebel forces, a much freer hand in Syria.
That came at the despair of Kurdish forces in northern Syria, who had partnered with the United States to battle the Islamic State. Trump rushed to pull out the bulk of U.S. troops from Syria, abandoning Kurdish fighters and sending a message to local allies that the United States may not be a reliable backer.
Rebecca Collard is a broadcast journalist and writer covering the Middle East.
Both Biden and Trump have pledged to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. But the Taliban have a vote, too.
KABUL—Since the United States invaded Afghanistan almost 20 years ago, the Afghan people have experienced four U.S. elections and three different U.S. presidents. Each vote brought feelings of uncertainty, hope, and trepidation. But this year, with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden saying they finally want to withdraw U.S. forces from the country, this could end up being the most consequential vote for Afghans since 2001.
There’s the question, of course, of whether and how either candidate will actually carry out this withdrawal. Trump’s tweets about pulling out troops by December were quickly corrected by military officials; Afghan security officials for their part doubt the United States can dismantle a decades-long presence in a couple of months in the middle of a pandemic. And then there’s the Taliban.
On Monday, terrorists attacked Kabul University and killed at least 19 people, wounding dozens more. Afghan government officials blamed the Taliban; the militant group denied it was behind the attack, though both the Taliban and the Islamic State have targeted schools in the past. Since signing a deal with the United States in February, and promising to curtail attacks against U.S. forces and cut ties with al Qaeda, the Taliban have been emboldened in Afghanistan.
The peace agreement has done nothing to curb violence against Afghan civilians and security forces, with violence reaching record levels in recent months. Over the last year, the Trump White House has offered the Taliban a lot while proffering Kabul very little, continually criticizing the administration of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and cutting U.S. aid.
But it’s not clear where Biden—who as vice president long favored an enduring U.S. counterterrorism mission in the country—really stands on the Taliban or Afghanistan’s future. And Afghans worry that he’ll have enough nation-building to do at home after four years of Trump’s wrecking ball. That could leave an early Biden administration distracted and looking anywhere but at Afghanistan. The upshot, many in Kabul fear, is that Washington will continue to string the country along—even as the carnage continues.
Ali M. Latifi is a freelance journalist based in Kabul. He has reported from Qatar, Turkey, Greece, Washington, and more than a dozen provinces of Afghanistan. He has worked with Al Jazeera English, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and Deutsche Welle.
The American public is already confused. China, Iran, and Russia may now get more creative with their election meddling.
A Russian hacker group known as CyberBerkut knows what to do during elections. If needed, it can falsify electronic voting records, for example, to make it appear that a candidate who received 1 percent of the vote in fact won the election. The group was almost able to pull that off in Ukraine’s presidential elections six years ago. The hack was discovered in time, but U.S. voters should keep it mind and prepare for confusion on Nov. 3—and Nov. 4, and possibly beyond.
The purpose of CyberBerkut’s attack was “to discredit the election process,” as a Ukrainian official later told Wired reporter Andy Greenberg. Although many Americans assume that China, Iran, and Russia engage in election interference because they support either President Donald Trump or his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, the reality is much more straightforward: These countries interfere with U.S. elections to sow confusion. A United States whose citizens can’t even agree on what constitutes a fact is a dream scenario for anyone trying to outflank it. It is far less risky than betting on a particular candidate, after all, who will have their own constituencies to serve. As Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago, pointed out last week, Russian leader Vladimir Putin sees all American leaders as adversaries.
In that way, the puny amounts Russia spent interfering with the last U.S. election (the Facebook ads were around $46,000) were a spectacular investment. Much of the electorate mistrusts the validity of the result. Meanwhile, election interference remains a dominant theme in the U.S. coverage of this cycle, with a staggering three-quarters of Americans convinced that foreign governments are likely to interfere in this election too. Whether they will (the FBI says they already are) or won’t, the public will always have doubt about the credibility of the result.
Given the bang for the buck in interfering with U.S. elections, it is worth watching to see whether Russia, China, and Iran get creative. It would be a good investment for them to spend more than they did on the 2016 election, but these countries may already consider Americans sufficiently confused and disunited, making 2016-style misinformation campaigns not worth it. They could instead bank on something that would require a distracted United States to swiftly take action, and where it would be unclear what the right response would be. An armed attack on a neighboring country, perhaps? A string of cyberattacks on hospitals in a swing state? Disruption of COVID-19 vaccine research?
But such stunts would just be icing on the cake. As things stand, neither Russia nor any other country really needs to try any old tricks or even new ones to sow disarray: The United States is so busy confusing itself that its adversaries can just sit back and watch as what is sure to be a hectic few days unfold.
Elisabeth Braw is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on defense against emerging national security challenges, such as hybrid and gray-zone threats. She is also a member of the U.K. National Preparedness Commission.
Polls suggest Trump will lose reelection, but the memories of 2016 have made pollsters leery.
It takes an awful lot to unseat an elected incumbent president, even an unpopular one. It has happened only three times in U.S. politics in the last century—1932, 1980, and 1992—and despite Democratic challenger Joe Biden’s substantial, steady lead over President Donald Trump, pollsters and pundits alike are doubly reluctant to call this one.
That’s not just because Trump has been openly suggesting he might not accept the results—even declaring the first night of the Republican convention that the only way he could lose “is if this is a rigged election”—but also because the media and pollsters have still not recovered from their embarrassment over the titanic miscalls of 2016. There was a lot of crow eaten the week of that year’s election, and the bitter taste still lingers, as does concern over the damage to reputations.
Though some respected polling outfits such as FiveThirtyEight are now giving Biden almost as high a chance of winning as that 2016 prediction, TV networks and major news organizations such as the Associated Press are pledging to be restrained in their predictions and open up their data to the public. Because of the massive number of mail-in and absentee ballots this time, in part due to COVID-19 measures—and because of Republicans’ many legal challenges to them—some networks are suggesting they may not call the race by Tuesday night, as typically happens. “CNN is deploying resources to keep viewers apprised of updates on vote counts and reports, which may extend beyond November 3,” the network said in a press release.
But the odds are clearly stacked against Trump. On Saturday, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote on his website that Trump has just a 10 percent chance of winning and “things aren’t likely to change all that much in our forecast between now and just after midnight on Tuesday, when we’ll freeze it.”
Biden’s other major advantage may be that not only is he well ahead of polling in the national vote, but that he is also ahead of where Clinton was against Trump in most battleground states at this juncture. Even so, Biden is still thought to be vulnerable in some of the same states that Democrats in 2016 described overconfidently as their “blue wall,” including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
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Michael Hirsh is a columnist for Foreign Policy. He is the author of two books: Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street and At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World.
At least three groups will closely monitor the voting process for signs of trouble.
As someone who has led or managed more than 40 election observation efforts in 22 countries over three decades, I have seen many problematic elections in struggling democracies and authoritarian states. Unfortunately, the 2020 U.S. elections already resemble those in many of the world’s fragile democracies, as I described in Foreign Policy on Oct. 24. Since then, the parallels have only gotten more disturbing, with U.S. President Donald Trump and his campaign continuing to accuse the challenger of planning to “steal” the election, last-minute legal challenges to voting procedures in key states, and Trump tweeting encouragement to supporters whose threats had led former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign to cancel an event in Texas.
As millions of Americans go to the polls tomorrow, among the many people watching closely will be the international election observer community, including me. Official observation efforts monitoring the U.S. elections include those of the Organization of American States and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. For the first time, the Carter Center has a domestic election program that somewhat resembles their election observation programs overseas. While we always emphasize the importance of monitoring the entire electoral process before, during, and after voting, here is what I and other election observers will be looking for on Election Day itself.
When monitoring in-person voting in the United States, observers will look for compliance with local voting procedures—for example, whether polling places are open as scheduled, operate efficiently, and protect ballot secrecy. Observers also assess the process of checking voter registration and eligibility, which in the United States varies significantly from state to state. Observers also look for signs of voter intimidation, such as from unauthorized individuals inside or outside polling stations. As I pointed out in my article, this could be a serious issue following Trump’s and his campaign’s repeated calls for his supporters to go to polling stations to “go in to the polls” and “defend” the vote against alleged “fraud.”
Election observers will also evaluate how long voters must wait to cast their ballot and whether there are other obstacles to participation—issues that are especially important in the U.S. context. With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging in much of the country, observers will also want to note whether the local process protects the safety of voters and polling station personnel, including whether officials, poll watchers, and voters are wearing masks and maintaining social distancing. Election observers usually also estimate voter turnout independent from any official numbers.
When election observers visit polling places, they typically use a checklist or questionnaire provided by their observation mission. By using a standardized list, a mission can systematically collect comparable information from diverse polling stations. That’s more complicated in the United States than just about every other democracy, because the United States lacks a uniform nationwide election process. Election procedures vary not only by U.S. state but often by locality as well.
In order to make a final judgment on the integrity of an election, the observation missions will aggregate local findings—which may not be typical—and compare them with findings from other places. The question for an observation mission is not whether problems occur at all but whether they are systematic and capable of making a difference in an election’s outcome.
Of course, millions and millions of Americans will already have cast their ballots through mail-in, early in-person, or absentee voting. The balloting on Nov. 3 will be only a part of the overall process. And given the legal challenges already announced by Trump, and his refusal to commit to honoring the results, the biggest threats to a democratic election process may not occur until after Election Day.
[For more of FP’s coverage on the 2020 U.S. election, check out Postcards From the Wedge, our series on how niche foreign-policy issues are playing out in key battleground races, The World’s Election, our collection of articles on how other countries are watching the Nov. 3 vote, and What We’re Missing, a set of daily takes from leading global thinkers on foreign-policy issues not getting enough attention during the campaign.]
Eric Bjornlund is the president of Democracy International, chair of the Election Reformers Network, and author of Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy.
