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Like most of the world, South Africa and the rest of this continent are fixated on the outcome of the US presidential election on 8 November.
But for most of us spectators here and elsewhere, this is much more showbiz than it is about the serious business of choosing the next leader of the world’s military and economic superpower. Because most parts of the world – especially Africa – have not featured in the election campaign, few foreigners have a real clue how either Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump in the White House would impact their country or region.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US assistant secretary of state for Africa, told the Foreign Press Centre in New York in late September that many African governments had been asking her what that impact might be on them.
One can guess they were more curious about a possible Trump victory because he is the wildcard in this election. Clinton was secretary of state and she is a Democrat like President Barack Obama, so she is more or less predictable.Thomas-Greenfield told the Africans not to worry because not much is going to change either way. Africa enjoyed “tremendous” support from both Democrats and Republicans. US businesses will continue to seek investment opportunities in this “last frontier” and will ensure that policymakers support them. She notes that the major US-Africa policies enjoy bipartisan support. These include the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), which provides duty-free and quota-free entry into the rich US market for most African exports, and the Pepfar progamme, which has poured billions of dollars into the fight against Aids. She didn’t mention the US Africa Command, Africom, which is doing a lot of work to help African militaries fight terrorism and other threats.
Even so, the choice Americans make on 8 November could still have a major impact on SA and Africa, though largely indirectly, through its effects on the global economy and
global security.
Trump’s protectionist plans to roll back several major US free trade agreements, if implemented, would destroy 4m jobs, the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, an independent research body, recently calculated.
These measures would probably “lead the world into a recession or worse”, says Paul Drazek, a former US trade negotiator and now independent consultant. He warns that the Great Depression was triggered not so much by the crash of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 but America’s consequent imposition of heavy trade protection measures in 1930 to try to save US jobs.
Clinton was also forced to take some anti-free-trade positions during the election campaign to fend off the big challenge in the primaries from left-wing senator
Bernie Sanders.
But her leaked emails confirm she is a free-trader at heart.
The elections could also impact global security. Trump has promised a quite radically isolationist stance for the US, threatening to renege on America’s historic commitments to defend its Nato and other allies. He has vowed to pull the US entirely out of the Syrian war.
Both of these positions have been music to the ears of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is challenging Nato on its eastern front and has intervened aggressively in Syria, bombing President Bashar al-Assad’s enemies.
That’s why he is credibly suspected of trying to influence the outcome of the election in Trump’s favour by hacking embarrassing emails of Clinton and her team and passing them on to WikiLeaks.
The leaks lead to the FBI reopening its investigation of her in the last week of October and helped Trump to close in on her in the polls.
Clinton, by contrast, would be more interventionist even than Obama, let alone Trump. She would probably confront Putin if he continued to threaten America’s Nato allies on his doorstep. Clinton would probably also confront him in Syria. She has advocated arming the Syrian rebels and creating a safe area, which implies enforcing a no-fly zone. These proposals, if implemented, would increase the chances of direct military confrontation between the US and Russia. But Clinton’s foreign policy adviser, James Rubin, says that having a greater military stake in the war would give the US the leverage at the peace talks which it now lacks. A President Clinton would probably also confront China over its seizure of disputed islands in the South China Sea to control strategic sea lanes. Whether Clinton’s interventionism or Trump’s isolationism would be more likely to ignite wider conflict is moot. Trump bellows that Clinton would provoke a “Third World War with nuclear-armed Russia”. But Rubin insists that Trump’s appeasement of Russia would be more dangerous, encouraging Putin to hazard further military adventures, like his 2014 annexation of Crimea. That could, he implied, in turn provoke greater local conflicts that would inevitably suck in the US. Wider conflict on either of those fronts could impact the global economy. So America’s voters will hold our destiny in their hands when they make their crosses on 8 November. They just don’t know it. Peter Fabricius was foreign editor of the Independent Newspaper group for 20 years, writing on African and global issues. He has been writing weekly columns for the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) since 2013. This article originally appeared in the 10 November edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.
