World holds its breath for profoundly significant geopolitical moment

Already more than 66 million ballots have been cast, but even with early voting data rolling in, the signs suggest it’s still too close to call.

Even the polls from the seven crucial swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nevada – indicate that it’s still a neck-and-neck contest.

As has so often been said about this election, the American people are split right down the middle on who they want to see as the 47th president of their country.

As America in recent years has become increasingly politically polarised, then few among them can doubt just how pivotal Tuesday’s outcome will prove for the country’s future.

It’s “the most important election in our lives,” said vice-President Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention back in August. But that certainly also holds true for so many people elsewhere in the world.

As the New York Times Berlin bureau chief Katrin Bennhold rightly observed a few days ago, “the world doesn’t pick the US president, but it will live with the consequences of whether Americans elect vice-President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump”.

There’s no escaping the sense that this election does feel epochal. This is not just because of the potentially massive implications it has for the future of democracy in America itself, but for the future of the post-war order that Washington has been such a significant player in shaping.

Perhaps more than at any time since the Second World War, US international influence is being questioned and challenged. There is the rise of the so-called “Global South” nations, indicating that some countries are coming together on their own terms and opting for different kinds of alliances with America sidelined.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at a memorial ceremony for those killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023

Military clout

Major conflicts, too, in Ukraine and Gaza have put America’s standing and role under fresh scrutiny. But even faced with all these challenges, America – like it or not – still carries substantial economic and military clout, which is why this election’s outcome will reverberate around the world.

So, just what would a Harris or Trump win mean for Europe and Nato, for the wars in Gaza and the Middle East, relations with China, Latin America, global trade, and tackling climate change?

Well as far as Western Europe is concerned, if a recent YouGov Eurotrack survey of voters in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Denmark is anything to go by, then Harris was the preferred winner in every country, with sizeable majorities in favour of the Democratic candidate in all except Italy.

The Danes are the most likely to want Harris to win, at 81%, while Italians are the least likely to, at 46% – although this still significantly outnumbers the Italian Trump vote (24%).

Here in Britain, 61% say they want Harris to triumph, compared to 16% for Trump. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, support for Harris was strongest among Europe’s left-leaning and centrist voters.

It is only among voters of parties that would generally be considered more “right wing” than “centre right” that Trump is the favoured choice – 54% of Vox voters in Spain, 51% of Reform UK voters here, 50% of AfD voters in Germany, and 44% of Brothers of Italy voters want to see a second Trump term. No doubt in other parts of Central and Eastern Europe the findings might be very different again.

As Dr Laura von Daniels, head of the Americas Research Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs recently highlighted, in many parts of Europe, the US election is viewed as a potential inflection point in transatlantic relations. “First, European leaders are concerned about a continued and possibly irreversible decline in democratic norms if Trump returns to the presidency,” says Daniels, stressing that the fear of a spread in authoritarianism applies to both the US but also in terms of its impact on the international order.

“Second, Europeans are deeply concerned about the implications of another Trump presidency for their security. US support is clearly still crucial for Nato and Ukraine. Without a clear commitment from the United States, Nato would lack the political leadership and the conventional and nuclear capabilities to defend Europe,” Daniels concluded in her online assessment written for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

It’s a view shared by many analysts and observers, among them Steven Erlanger, chief diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times, covering Europe.

“Depending on whom you talk to in Europe, a Trump victory is either a nightmare or a gift. Europe’s growing band of nativists – in Hungary, Italy, Germany and elsewhere – regard Trump as the leader of their movement.

“If he regains the White House, he would normalise and energise their hardline on immigration and national identity,” Erlanger wrote recently, adding that for Europe the election “feels like the end of an era, whatever the outcome”.

Erlanger’s point is well made, for there’s little doubt that the US’s European allies are bracing for an America that’s less interested in them.

Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the opening of the first session of the 14th National People's Congress at The Great Hall of People on March 5, 2023 in Beijing, China

Potential disruption

WHAT Europe is ideally looking for is predictability from Washington but that in today’s turbulent world might be in short supply, and the potential for disruption is obviously greater should Trump win.

As Steven Hill, author of Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age, sees it, Europe would have to “Trump-proof” itself by being more united than ever.

“It would have to fill the enormous American leadership void, helping Ukraine against Russia, promoting human rights, safeguarding its borders (including its digital borders), fighting climate change and championing democracy,” says Hill, who is a former journalist in residence at the Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB).

And speaking of that war in Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, few places outside of America itself have more geopolitical skin in the game regarding the outcome of this election than Kyiv and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Under outgoing President Joe Biden, the US has committed more than $56 billion to Ukraine in security assistance alone since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. It has allocated tens of billions more in financial and humanitarian aid.

Throughout their election campaigns both Trump and Harris have already expressed vastly different positions on backing for Ukraine. While Harris has said she would continue Biden’s policy of aiding Ukraine, clearly expressing the desire to see Russia defeated, Trump has questioned continued US support.

The former president firmly believes that Europe should be carrying the bulk of the burden in backing Kyiv and has left Nato’s future in doubt.

He has declined to comment on whether he wants Ukraine to win and has asserted repeatedly that if he is elected, he will end the war very quickly –even before he takes office in January.

“I would tell Zelenskyy: ‘No more. You got to make a deal.’ I would tell Putin: ‘If you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give (Zelenskyy) a lot. We’re going to give Ukraine more than they ever got if we have to,’” Trump said. “I will have the deal done in one day. One day,” was how he summed up his strategy to Fox News back in July 2023.

The reality, however, is that exactly what the winner of the election will do once in power is uncertain, and there is a number of variables that could affect the next president’s actions.

What is certain, however, is that Tuesday’s vote matters almost as much to Zelenskyy and Russian president Vladimir Putin as it does to the American people.

Looking on with some concern, too, will be other world leaders whose countries are embroiled in conflict. Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu would no doubt like to see a Trump win – certainly the most recent polls show that the vast majority of ordinary Israelis would vote for him if they could.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends the European Council at Batiment Europa on October 17, 2024 in Brussels, Belgium

Hardline on Iran

Trump’s previous hardline on Iran while in office chimes perfectly with Netanyahu’s take on the Islamic Republic right now, while Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian’s hope of opening up any dialogue with the West would almost certainly face a major setback under a Trump presidency.

As for Israel’s action in Gaza, the sad and some might argue shameful reality is that whoever wins, the long-term impact will probably be limited, such is Washington’s historic commitment to supporting Israel.

US relations with China post-election, however, are something else again. If Trump’s past record is anything to go by then the heavy-handedness of his “America First” agenda did not go down well with Washington’s Asian allies.

Trump, in effect, created a trade war, imposing massive tariffs on Chinese goods.

If this was meant to pressure Chinese president Xi Jinping, then it pretty much failed, say most economists. But according to The Washington Post, Chinese analysts are not particularly enthused by either potential outcome from the election.

“From a Chinese perspective, the China policies of a new Trump administration and a Harris administration will likely be strategically consistent,” the paper cited international affairs scholars Wang Jisi, Hu Ran and Zhao Jianwei from Beijing’s influential Peking University as saying last week.

Tariffs and Taiwan appear to be the two issues that concern Beijing most, the first because they could do serious damage to the Chinese economy that depends massively on foreign demand, especially from America.

While Trump could again play hardball on the tariffs issue he may be less interested in China’s territorial ambitions in Taiwan, while Harris most likely would seek to continue the Biden administration’s bolstering of US alliances in the region.

Elsewhere in the world, meanwhile, the US elections evoke a wide range of reactions and emotions in Latin America and the Caribbean, highlighting the variability of US economic and political influence across different nations.

Many Latin American leaders are wary of Trump given the impact his first term had with an aggressive “America first” posture that brought pressure for countries in the region to pull back from trade ties with China.

That said, some Latin American politicians favour Trump, among them Argentine president Javier Milei and a return of Trump could bolster other far-right populist movements in the region.

The one nation that will face difficulties from a new Trump term would be Mexico. The country inaugurated a new president of its own just last month, Claudia Sheinbaum, whose international negotiating skills are yet to be proven.

Migration remains a thorny issue and there almost certainly will be heightened tensions at the US-Mexico border, should Trump return.

For her part, Harris will also face pressure, perhaps tightening restrictions even further which the Biden administration has already been doing for some time.

Then on an entirely global level there is the ever-growing issue of tackling climate change and on this many observers agree that the policy proposals outlined by Trump and the think tanks advising his campaign would turn back the tide on America’s fundamental environmental laws.

‘Drill, baby, drill’

WHILE one might think that environmental protection should be a non-partisan issue, it is anything but in this US election.

Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mentality concerns many environmentalists and his deregulation approach has set alarm bells ringing.

Harris herself, meanwhile, during the campaign, has been forced to backtrack on policy, explaining in August while on CNN that she no longer advocates a total ban on oil and gas extraction using hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

And so there you have it: a US election, the outcome of which will be felt worldwide.

It was the English-born American Founding Father, political philosopher and pamphleteer Thomas Paine, back in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, who once observed that “the cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind”.

Today there are many –who for good reason – would question that premise, but only the most blinkered and churlish would deny that on so many levels, America and what it does still matters on the global stage.

This Tuesday, Americans will choose either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. But as Katrin Bennhold of the New York Times rightly says, while those of us outside America will have no say in that choice, it’s a surefire certainty that in one way or another we will feel the consequences of it.

By any standards, it does indeed feel like a profoundly significant geopolitical moment.