Reflections On Trumpland From A Muslim American In Australia

Reflections on Trumpland from a Muslim American in Australia
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As a Muslim-American with multiple ethnic identities, the US presidential election result has certainly left me unsettled. This is especially true if I am to believe that President-elect Trump was elected due to his incendiary rhetoric towards minorities. I certainly hope that was not the main cause for his success but we can’t even rely on polling data any more to discern clear causality!

The outcome has also led me to consider the flaws of the American electoral system which allows for the most strident minority of voters to shape the outcome of a highly consequential executive office. Living in Australia, the Trump electoral outcome gives us reasons to value preferential and compulsory voting in this regard. While preferential voting does allow for some fringe political views to get into electoral office, this is an important opportunity for venting of those elements of the polity without having them in the dominant majority. American voters have no such avenue for expressing their frustrations and thus populism finds its mark through outcomes such as the Trump presidential victory.

Now let us settle in beyond the doom and gloom projections and see what Trump might do realistically beyond his stated rhetoric. His support has come from a fairly unusual coalition of voters. There are indeed the rust belt macho white males who supported him but there are also people like gay IT tycoon Peter Thiel, who holds both American and German citizenship. People like Thiel could be a moderating force on any pressure Trump may face from the socially conservative wings of the Republican party to roll back on civil liberties.

People who are concerned about the anti-Semitism at Trump rallies and the endorsements from the KKK, should note that within his own family, Trump has a Jewish son-in-law and his daughter Ivanka also converted to Judaism upon marriage. Thus he is highly unlikely to engage in overtly anti-Semitic policies. We can also hope that his wife Melania, having been born and growing up in the former Yugoslavia, would give him some lessons on the perils of divisive ethnocentric rhetoric, moving forward.

On broader foreign policy issues, he would likely become more hawkish on Iran and China but more dovish on Russia and North Korea. The Iran nuclear deal will likely be revoked and Chinese trade arrangements may get a blow. Regardless of specific positions on country relations, he is unlikely to start armed conflict, given his less interventionist views on world affairs. How this plays out remains to be seen. He should certainly learn from the dovish approaches that the Clinton administration undertook with North Korea when erstwhile Secretary of State Madeline Albright visited Pyongyang as peace gesture which came to no avail. With Russia, I remain more optimistic as I do fervently feel that Vladmir Putin is ultimately a pragmatist and if he feels Russia is respected as a global power he would be willing to work with the USA in a constructive way forward on Syria as well as on broader regional peace in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

Policies on Afghanistan and South Asia remain most ambiguous thus far with a Trump presidency. The drone approach will likely continue and surprisingly Trump signalled in an interview to the Hindustan Times a willingness to support a peace process between India and Pakistan. However, how this might be realized remains to be seen.

Despite his threats to the contrary, the one Obama foreign policy success that Trump is unlikely to undo would be the détente with Cuba. There is too much business value in stake for those positive changes underway to be rolled back no matter what the extreme elements of the Cuban-American Republican presence in Florida may suggest. There may be some diplomatic stiffening and Cuba may engage in some rhetoric and military exercises but the overall peace process there is now irrevocable and a singular achievement of John Kerry and Barack Obama.

Finally, Trump’s willingness to reduce American military bases overseas while using the savings of those closures to build new military hardware will deserve close scrutiny. On the one hand this is a mark of his willingness to rein in the perceptions of American imperialism overseas but on the other hand greater weapons production at home harkens back to warnings that President General Dwight Eisenhower gave about such enterprises in his farewell address and I quote:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”

Thus at the end of the day, Trump’s presidency certainly deserves a chance, especially given his promise to work for all Americans and tentative and attempt to redeem his past arrogance, misogyny and xenophobia with a more conciliatory victory speech. However, we should also not be too glib in our celebration of American democracy as somehow having the collective wisdom of delivering good candidates as president. The electoral system is deeply flawed and the lack of awareness of world affairs, and a tendency for a sloganeering vacuous patriotism in the US polity can certainly lead to more Orwellian outcomes.

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