The Global Context
2024 will certainly go down in world history as the year of elections, with more than 40 electoral contests taking place around the world, some freer and fairer than others. This has already included elections in Russia, France, the UK, the European Parliament and India. The most important one for the world as a whole, not only for its own people, which is still to come in early November, is the one in the United States of America (US), for which not just the US but the world is currently gearing up.
The stakes are as high as they can possibly be, not just for the US, but for the Americas as a continent, India and the rules based liberal global order which was created 79 years ago after the once in a lifetime United Nations (UN) Charter was signed in San Francisco in June 1945. The UN was created from the ashes of the Second World War in October that year.
This liberal world order has placed a high premium on democracy, human rights, development, rule of law, pluralism and secularism which have underpinned not only the UN Charter but the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the most widely translated document in world history.
These two documents are arguably the most important documents of the 20th century and are largely, if not totally, timeless. If, as Suzanne Nossel writes, “the United Nations remains the closest thing to a system of global governance that the world has ever known and may ever achieve,” we should do everything to preserve and improve the existing United Nations.
Indeed, if it did not exist, we would have to reinvent it, and it is clear that a UN created in the current ill-liberal global context would be far worse than the UN created in October 1945 as a result of Naziism and the devastation and deaths of millions of people which resulted during the Second World War.
The three pillars of the United Nations: peace and security, human rights and development are indivisible. Peace and security cannot be achieved without human rights, human rights cannot be achieved without peace and security and neither is possible without development.
The UN has had huge successes, including but not limited to preventing a third World War, successfully overseeing decolonization, ensuring the universalization of human rights and facilitating developmental progress at a pace never seen before in human history.
The current UN led Sustainable Development Goals, also known as Agenda 2030, represent the most ambitious human rights – based development agenda ever universally agreed by consensus by the UN’s 193 Member States.
What Does the US Election Represent for the US and Latin America?
It is an understatement to say that this is a pivotal election for defining the future of the United States—- and given its influential, even if declining global influence— the future of the world as well.
The stakes for the US are huge and the big picture issues involved include but are not limited to the following:
First, it is a contest between the cultist and regressive ideology of the Republican Donald Trump, his recently selected Vice-Presidential running mate, JD Vance and their Make America Great Again (MAGA) and Make America White Again (MAWA) followers and the relatively liberal and progressive ideology that Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, and whomsoever she chooses as her Vice-Presidential running mate represent;
Second, it is a contest between a tough and successful public prosecutor and a criminally convicted felon who has multiple additional cases pending against him at both federal and state levels. Surprisingly, the US Constitution has only three qualifications which a person needs to fulfil to be eligible to run as President (being at least 35 years of age, being a natural-born—not naturalized– US citizen even if born overseas and having been a resident of the US for 14 years). Being a criminally convicted felon or being in jail is not one of them. Trump fulfils all three conditions to run for President again.
At a third level, it is a contest between a still relatively young and dynamic woman, who self-identifies as part Black American and part South Asian, born to immigrant parents and a geriatric, white male who has made building a wall on the southern border between the United States and Mexico, to prevent illegal immigration from Latin America and the rest of the world, the centerpiece of his political platform. Many of his supporters go much further, asking for mass deportations of even many legal migrants of color. Both legal and illegal immigration to the US are likely to be heavily curtailed, regardless who wins the Presidency in November.
At a fourth level, it is a contest between what is unexpectedly emerging as the most progressive political alliance and grassroots based- coalition (eg. Black Caucus, women of all colors, youth, progressives) in US history and the most regressive political platform and coalition since the founding of the United States of America more than two centuries ago.
And fifth, it is, in its essence, a contest between the ideals of liberal democracy and freedom on which the United States was founded and an ugly form of electoral autocracy and white supremacy.
Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Trump platform and core support base represent an existential threat to the US Constitution and what the Founding Fathers of the nation dreamt of almost 250 years ago.
Many American citizens genuinely and legitimately fear that the US is down to its last real election if Trump and Vance win in November! Which party prevails in a country so visibly polarized and divided between the Blue and Red States (the latter now represent the Trump Party and no longer the old Republican Party) will decide whether this fear becomes reality or not.
Given how big the stakes are for the US and the world, it is particularly distressing that the outcome of the US election will depend not on which Party gets more of the popular vote but on the decisions of electoral colleges in a small handful of swing states located largely in the mid-west (eg, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) which represent the US conservative heartland.
One thing that can definitely be said is that, whatever the outcome (which is likely to be too close to call till the very end), the battle will be the ugliest ever in US history right till the very end— and maybe hard to determine for a protracted period of time after November 2024, depending on the results, and whether they are accepted by Trump and Vance, if they lose.
The ugliness of the Republican campaign was already evident before President Biden was finally persuaded to step down on Sunday, July 21. The pressure to do this continued to increase on him from within the Democratic Party, especially many Congressmen and women as well as its elder statesmen and stateswomen (eg, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama) despite his stubborn resistance during July. This was also partly because credible poll data after the disastrous first debate between ex-President Trump and him in June showed the latter with a relatively large lead of six percentage points over the former which was growing. Keeping Biden as the Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate in this context would have been disastrous for the Party, the US and the world.
But since his departure from the November Presidential contest, it has taken on ever greater ugliness. It now has an additional sexist and racist dimension ever since Vice-President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President after an impressive three days of extraordinary outreach and successful fund-raising which exceeded USD 100 million in just two days in late July.
Implications for India
The American dream is alive and well for Indian-origin Americans, not just in the corporate tech world of Sundar Pichai (Google) and Satya Nadella (Microsoft), but also in the political world of Washington DC (Kamala Harris on the Democrat side and Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Usha Chilukuri Vance, the spouse and woman behind JD Vance, on the Republican side) but this should not be mistaken for the Indian dream as many Indians seem to do.
The conventional view has historically been that Republican Presidents and their Party have been better for India’s national interest when compared with Democrat Party Presidents. This is because the former are perceived to be less interested in foreign policy and are therefore less interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries, especially but not only in the sensitive areas of democracy and human rights.
While there may be some truth to this, if national interest is conflated with the party in power’s narrow interest, which it should not be, even this narrow definition of national interest has not always been borne out in practice.
Examples are not difficult to find. After all, it was under President George W Bush Jr’s Republican Party government when Condoleezza was Secretary of State Rice that a travel ban to the US was placed in 2005 on then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi and his closest allies. And in recent times, the Democrats under President Biden— and even ex- President Obama before him— have been shockingly largely silent on Article 370 on Kashmir, on human rights violations and excesses and even on Hindutva.
President Biden, in particular, has turned a blind eye to these and other transgressions of the Modi government because of the (false) idea that India can be an effective bulwark against China in the Indo-Pacific region. The reality, demonstrated daily by the facts on the ground, is that India cannot, at least in the near future, be seriously regarded as either a military, economic or political bulwark against China. Indeed, if anything, given China’s military border incursions into parts of India and the latter’s growing, not reducing, economic dependency on Chinese intermediary products in strategic areas such as technology, this may never eventuate.
While no US President can or will significantly alter the overall boundaries of US foreign policy vis-à-vis India, and in that sense, Trump and Kamala would not differ that much in terms of their overall relationship with India, there will certainly be a nuanced difference in favour of liberal democracy and human rights, (and maybe even on Kashmir) if Kamala Harris becomes the next US President.
She has already been more outspoken and departed from Biden on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestine in a positive direction when she skipped his recent address to the US Congress in Washington DC and met the next day, clearly indicating that she would not remain silent on the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding before our eyes in Gaza every day.
There is no reason why she will not be willing to speak out on India, even if only occasionally, especially since she knows it much better than most countries from her regular childhood visits to South India and continuing regular people-to-people contacts, especially in Tamil Nadu, an opposition stronghold.
She may also do this, because Kamala Harris has no known rapport with Prime Minister Modi. Moreover, in her own words, her liberal and democratic values, principles, and integrity, very different from Mr. Modi’s, have largely been influenced by Shyamala Gopalan, her mother who brought up her sister, Maya, and her almost singlehandedly after her divorce from her Jamaican father. Her grandfather, from her mother’s side, who from all accounts appears to represented the best traditions of the Indian civil service and was also a product of India’s freedom struggle from British rule, was also heavily influential in defining her character, values and integrity, according to Kamala herself.
Her advantage over most other American politicians with respect to India, and certainly any previous President, if she does succeed in that aspiration, is that she knows India better at a people-to-people level and will continue to have regular access to non-censored opinions from her relatives and close friends in India which will, no doubt, shape her views on what is happening in the country, especially given continuing and even deepening government control of most mainstream media and other key institutions of governance under Modi 3.0. This is likely to work for both better and for worse in her official dealings with India.
Putting all of this together, it is reasonable to conclude that Kamala Harris will be sensitive to and better for India’s genuine short and long-term national interest but this will not necessarily often coincide with the BJPs and Mr. Modi’s Hindu chauvinistic based idea of India’s national interest.
But what if Trump wins? There is already tested excellent chemistry and rapport between the two political leaders as exhibited in both Gujarat and Texas during Trump 1.0. This should not come as a surprise since they share many similar personality traits, beliefs, objectives and relationships (Putin in Russia and Netanyahu in Israel).
Moreover, India under Modi 3.0, like the US under a possible Trump 2.0, will continue to face an existential threat to its Constitution and what its freedom fighters led by Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru wanted for an independent India which so far remains embodied both in the Babasaheb Ambedkar led inspiring Indian Constitution and in Nehru’s “idea of India”.
While the 2024 Indian election results have given the country a brief reprieve, India is not out of the woods in terms of the threat to the Indian Constitution and its core values and principles such as democracy, secularism, pluralism and federalism. A Modi-Trump alliance will only reinforce those threats for India.
It is evident that Mr. Modi will greatly prefer a prospective President Trump over a prospective President Kamala Harris, despite her part Indian-origin and ancestry, since while there could be push back from her in subtle but clear ways on many sensitive issues and matters, there will clearly be no push-back from Trump on India’s declining democratic space, human rights abuses and on the militarization and shrinking of democratic space in Kashmir.
Implications for the Post World War Two UN Based Global Order and the Future of Multilateralism
If Trump wins, there will be an existential threat to the liberal, rule of law based global order and to multilateralism itself at a time when both are already under unprecedented pressure. This is despite the need for them being more crucial than ever before to deal with climate challenges, transnational crime, unfettered globalization and many other shared threats which can only be dealt with if we have shared strong, well-funded and legitimate multilateral institutions responses.
Trump will do much more to undermine the UN and multilateralism in Trump 2.0 than he did in Trump 1.0.
As a result, the emerging world order will not be based on liberal democracy but on an illiberal authoritarianism led by Xi, Trump and Putin, uncontested by numerous other second-tier illiberal autocrats around the world. Worse still, even if Trump and the US under the MAGA and MAWA Republicans are not formally part of the China-Russia axis, they will enable it to grow stronger by a lethal combination of action and inaction.
As a result, the world will veer more quickly and decisively towards a China led world order based on illiberal authoritarianism than is currently the case or will be the case if Kamala Harris becomes US President.
China’s growing global influence at the United Nations and in the Global South through its creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Belt Road Initiative and other well-funded initiatives and institutions over the last few decades has been exponential. Chinese funding for the UN and its occupation of top positions in the organization has also grown substantially in the last 25 years. A Trump Presidency, by commission, omission and default is likely to lead to a United Nations even more influenced by China and Russia in the UN Security Council and other key bodies than it already is. Their coordinated vetoes there and in other global multilateral fora are likely to increase, further highlighting the limitation of global Member States- based organizations. They will together exploit the weaknesses of such organizations rather than build on their strengths and they will seek to recraft them in their own image and to get legitimacy for their own global and regional designs and interests.
The current existential threat to Ukraine’s very survival and existence will only deepen in such a scenario and there will also be a dire threat, as a result, to both the future of a liberal and democratic Europe as we have known it so far, aided by far-right groups in France, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Germany and the European Parliament.
The future of NATO, when Western and Central Europe and the world needs it most and the possibility of building a similar collective security multilateral mechanism in the Indo-Pacific to protect free passage in the international waters of the South China, Taiwan’s very existence as a separate state and other regional priorities will also be in doubt, as will the possibility of a two-state solution in Gaza. Bringing both President Putin and Prime Minister Netanyahu and their close allies to trial in an international court of justice, through the International Criminal Court, to face the war crime convictions already against them will become even a more distant dream than it correctly is.
Multilateralism and the United Nations, its most global and legitimate institutional symbol, have already been facing unprecedented challenges. But there may be worse to come for both the United States and the world if Trump prevails over Kamala Harris in the US Presidential election in early November.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author is Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center. He also provides high level policy advice in India and globally and writes on national political economy and global and regional geo-political and geo-economic issues. Prior to his retirement from the United Nations in late 2021, he was its Head in Vietnam, Turkey and Malaysia between 2008-2021.
Earlier, he was UNDP Senior Adviser on Inclusive Globalization based in New York. Widely published, he has written six books, ten contributions to other books and more than 100 journals and other publications.
