2 weeks Ago By Dr. Joanne F Paul
There are so many topics to choose from and so little time. The biggest topic for today is what will be happening tomorrow. Tomorrow is US election day 2024, with the main players being Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
I am not really a political person. I like to observe the general landscape and not get involved in the political drama. So, US elections should not really be uppermost in my mind.
Like the ones before when Trump won, and Joe Biden, and Barack Obama, I watched with human interest, enjoying the analysis from various experts, and watching from afar. This election tomorrow, though, is probably the most significant one we have had over the past few decades. The result is probably a linchpin moment, not just for the US, but also for the rest of the world.
A linchpin is the most important member of a group or most important part of a system. A linchpin is also the person or thing that serves as the essential element in a complicated or delicate system, on which everything else depends. On some level it is surprising that one key election, one moment, could have such an impact and could change the trajectory of so many things.
It is really a combination of factors. For the first time ever, we have a presidential candidate who is threatening to deport all immigrants with a non-discerning brush, reduce or discontinue funding to NATO or even leave it all together, lock up Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic personnel, support Putin and North Korea, put Robert F Kennedy Jnr influencing health policies, and put Elon Musk in charge of the Federal systems and the proposed downsizing of the Federal government. The plan for Elon Musk is a clear conflict of interest since he owns SpaceX and the US government depends on this company, especially for the satellite Internet provider Starlink.
But that is the intention so far voiced by Trump himself and Musk. From a world point of view, the NATO discontinuation and Putin allegiance are the more important. At present a few of the chess pieces have been coalescing and waiting for the divergent reality pathway.
The war with Ukraine and Russia has been going on now for the past two years. The US and Europe have been furnishing Zelensky with weapons to fight off Russia. There have been some incursions into Ukraine territory by Russia, with some retaliation by Ukraine.
The feeling is that there is war fatigue in Europe and if Trump wins the election, there will be a pivot towards Russia and reduced support for Ukraine. The fact is that the US has the largest military force of all countries. It is also highly influential economically, politically, culturally, and has huge power in terms of worldwide influence.
Putin has recently amassed 10,000 North Korean troops who have been training in Russia and were expected to be in combat zones yesterday and today, possibly to start fighting on Wednesday, the day after the election. In terms of the war in Ukraine, a Trump victory will allow Putin to have an all-out attack, expecting less Ukraine support from the west. Putin has also been pushing his own world influence.
He had the largest BRICS group meeting last month, with 36 countries attending. BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The group, though, now includes Egypt, the UAE, Ethiopia and Iran, and is expanding.
A Trump victory may also support the present war in Israel, making Israel more emboldened to attacking Palestine even further. A Trump victory will see increased tariffs on products being sold to the US, significantly affecting countries that depend on the US for export revenue. This may cause countries to retaliate with tariffs of their own, leading to trade wars and lower world income.
With regard to climate change, if Trump wins, there would be a reversal of most of the climate policies, with minimal regulation of emissions and increased rate of global warming escalation. And even more significantly, if Trump wins, countries will follow and there will be a world leaning with regard to hardliners and dictator-oriented styles. But that is what we do.
We follow. Sometimes blindly. If one travels, no matter how wide and broad, no matter how many cities, we would realise we have loads of differences, but mainly we just follow what the others have and what the others do.
All cities have the same chain stores. Post-Covid we have been following with increased airline prices, with travel being more expensive than ever before. Prices of everything, especially in Europe and the US, have increased and stayed up, no matter the cost price going down.
If there is no change in the forex situation, with Scotiabank cutting back drastically on the US dollar availability with credit cards to just US$2,000, then other banks will just follow, causing a drastic effect on small businesses. Tomorrow, in a close election, millions of Americans are going to follow a caricature, mainly because he is entertaining. A Trump win would surely lead to increased war, upheaval and division, for the US and everyone.
I cannot say who is going to win. I can, though, see the two heavily divergent pathways. If we stop blindly following though and look up, we would see one pathway is a precipice.
—Dr Joanne F Paul is an emergency medicine lecturer with The UWI..
