By Jamil Maidan.
If you are a Southeast Asian with any appreciation of the impact of US domestic and foreign policy on your life, you may wish to closely observe the strange goings-on in the current US presidential campaign.
It will strike you at once that the race for nomination in the Republican Party (also called GOP for Grand Old Party) has totally degenerated into low entertainment. That became obvious when the front-runner, the billionaire real estate developer Donald Trump, steered an impertinent discussion on the length of his fingers to the size of his private parts. That is the measure of the Republican campaign, pun intended.
Except for Ohio governor John Kasich, who owns the only adult voice in the group, all the Republican presidential candidates have pursued a campaign based on hatred, anger, fear and grievance. In this toxic game, Trump has emerged as wizard: from his foul mouth flows an endless stream of cruel insults, baseless demonization, inflated boasts and brazen lies. There is a racist streak in his rhetoric.
The Republican faithful should have dumped him long ago as a malignant party crasher. Instead, his pursuit of the nomination has not only prospered, it has macerated the bids of all his rivals. The only strong challenge to Trump’s campaign so far is that of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas who himself is as bigoted as Trump and as shrill to minorities and immigrants, although much less vulgar in language.
This is a sad reflection on the intelligence, emotional stability and sanity of a large part of the American population. Let’s hope this part isn’t large enough to elect a president. It is also a sad reflection on the Republican Party, which has defined itself in recent decades as dismissive of minorities and worshipful of wealth and has thereby raised a batch of presidential candidates that are both clowns and Frankenstein’s monsters.
While the Republicans are falling apart in chaos, the Democrats are in a battle between blind idealism and a pragmatism struggling to inspire trust.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described democratic socialist, would lead a revolution in governance that has no clear and convincing idea of how its programs would be carried out.
Former State Secretary Hillary Clinton has the experience and the skill to sustain President Obama’s healthcare reform and to build on his foreign policy, which she once co-authored. In spite of her recent surprise loss to Sanders in the Michigan primary, and the enthusiasm of his youthful supporters, she retains a commanding lead in the number of delegates won through primaries and caucuses, and super delegates.
Now why should we in this neck of the global woods care if Trump or Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders, or any of the thread-hanging Republican candidates becomes the 45th president of the United States? We should—because the policies of No. 45 could spell the difference between conflagration and relative peace in the South China Sea. And between the US remaining a reliable trading partner for East Asian countries and its becoming rigidly protectionist.
Throughout this campaign Donald Trump has been demonizing China at the drop of a hat. He has threatened to engage China in a devastating trade war. The pugnacity of his rhetoric gives the impression that he doesn’t mind going to war with any country that crosses the US. He probably won’t do that if and when he becomes president but it is fair to say that he is more likely to do it than all the others.
It is safe to say that none of the Republican candidates can manage the US presence in East Asia as keenly and as carefully as President Obama does today. Nor do they appear to have the same interest in dealing with China with firmness and prudence. It was the Republicans’ obsession with a war in the Middle East and another in South Asia that lured them into neglecting East Asia during the George W. Bush years.
And all of them have a populist, protectionist streak in their genes, which is hostile to the trading aspirations of East Asian economies. Even the Democrat Bernie Sanders rails that free trade agreements have robbed American workers of countless jobs. He’s an unrepentant populist protectionist.
Hillary Clinton is no protectionist but you can tell from her statements that she isn’t for just any free trade deal. It has also got to be a fair trade deal. Her only complaint against some trade pacts is that they’re weak on labor standards. That means that besides being a fair trader she could also be a trade-reforming US president.
On the South China Sea, she is the heir to Obama’s mantle of self-restraint. Yet she has proven in a good number of Asean-led forums that diplomatically she can deal firmly with China on the issue of freedom of navigation and over-flight. Observers cite her immense faith in the virtue of diplomacy; if she were president that faith should save her from involving the US in new wars of choice — including in the South China Sea.
No doubt, if she returns to the White House, this time as president, it will be good for East Asia. But though she leads Sanders by a wide margin, and though she consistently beats Trump in voter surveys, there’s no guarantee she’ll be holding office in the West Wing next January. The advocates of populist protectionism, the haters of political correctness and the racists just might produce the number of votes to bar her way to the presidency.
That would bode ill not only for the US but also for the world at large, including Southeast Asia
