What a Trump victory could mean for the world

Billions of people will be affected by the outcome of next week’s US election

When America elects a president, the whole world watches – not just for the spectacle and the drama, but because such is the United States’s global influence that billions of people without a vote stand to be affected by the outcome.
From the blasted tree lines of eastern Ukraine to the ruins of Gaza and the typhoon-blown waves of the Taiwan Strait; in the crowded buses running down Tehran’s Ali Vasr Avenue, the high rises of Beijing and the overheated, parquet-floored rooms of the presidential administration in Moscow, the same question is being asked: Who will win on Tuesday night?
Nowhere are the stakes higher than for Ukraine where everyone understands that the country’s survival is dependent on the US.
Soldiers in the east do not rely solely on American weapons, vehicles, ammunition.
But Ukraine’s British, European, and other allies are in no position to provide “anything like” the same level of support if the US contribution were to shrink or vanish, said Ed Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute.
The outcome of the election is thus literally an existential question.
But the candidates have been so vague about their plans, there’s little consensus about who would be better – or least bad.
“They are like four competing opinions and I can’t tell which is most popular,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former defence minister, said from Kyiv.
“With Harris, the most pessimistic view, which is quite widespread, is that if she wins she will just more or less continue Biden’s policy – and we’ll be a long, long time in this war.
“Of course, some people say ‘no, no it will be different’. Some optimists think it will be much more effective and end the war.”
“On Trump, it’s the same difference: Some are definitely very afraid that he will cut the deal with Putin, we will lose the occupied territories, and he will say ‘if you guys disagree, I am not going to send anything at all’,” said Mr Zagorodnyuk.
“Alternatively, an equal amount of people think that because he has no escalation anxiety, because he is very transactional and bold, he may be exactly what we need to win the war.
“Because the only way to get out of the situation we’re now in is radical, out-of-the-box thinking. There are some very, very smart people who think that,” he added.
Trump is on record saying that if he wins on Thursday he will get on the phone to Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky to force a peace deal before his inauguration in January.
He has been vague about exactly how he would do this.
But his running mate JD Vance has said Russia should keep the territory it has occupied and the surviving rump of Ukraine should not be allowed to join Nato or another foreign alliance.
That, critics say, sounds a lot like a Russian victory.
But Ukrainian officials are also deeply frustrated with Joe Biden’s handling of the war – in particular a fear of escalation that they believe has deterred the White House from supplying sufficient weapons quickly enough to actually win the war.
That strategy may have kept Ukraine in the fight so far. But it has not stopped grinding Russian advances over the past year.
The view from the Kremlin is… opaque.
Before Mr Biden pulled out of the presidential race, Putin went on record saying the incumbent was the better option for Russia.
He was more predictable, more traditional in his grasp of statecraft. Altogether just an easier person to work with, the Russian president implied.
But Russia’s disinformation operations this year appear to be focused on hurting Kamala Harris and helping Trump.
Researchers have identified fake videos purporting to show Trump voters’ ballots being destroyed and Haitian illegal immigrants voting for Ms Harris to a St Petersburg troll farm.
Many people in the Middle East will be tuning into the US election.
“In the past I don’t think there was even a broadcast because it was in the middle of the night for us. This year, we’re going to broadcast it from 11pm till morning,” said Amit Segal, the chief political commentator for Israel’s Channel 12.
“It is not that Israelis know the details of this impossible Electoral College system, but they’re fully aware it is down to the wire and they’re fully aware of the consequences.”
Unlike in Ukraine, there is not much ambiguity here: If Israel were America’s 51st state, it would be firmly Red for the Republicans.
“A recent poll put it at 66-17 in favour of Trump. It is because of the war and, moreover, it is because of a development of a view in Israel that the Democratic Party specifically and the world Left in general is not a friend of Israel, but rather a foe,” said Mr Segal.
The very fact of the election has already affected the course of events in the Middle East.
Two controversial operations – the invasion of Lebanon on Oct 1 and the attack on Jabalia in northern Gaza that began five days later – would probably “not have gone ahead so easily” if the election had not been looming, said Mr Segal.
He said Benjamin Netanyahu had ruthlessly exploited Mr Biden’s fear that a row with the Israeli government could alienate pro-Israeli voters.
Many Israelis believe a Harris victory would give Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah reason to hope for a US-Israeli split, and thus an incentive to fight on. A Trump victory would extinguish that hope and force them to end the multi-front war.
That may well be unfair on Mr Biden who, despite tensions with Mr Netanyahu, has spent huge political capital backing Israel since Oct 7.
It’s fair to say that Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei probably has a different preference for president.
“On the whole, the regime seems to want Harris to win,” said Arash Azizi, author of What Iranians Want.
“Throughout the last year the fear of Trump’s return has been all over the Iranian media. They basically have PTSD from the last Trump presidency: his unpredictability, his maximum pressure policy, his closeness to Netanyahu.”
Mr Azizi said Iran’s relatively small and ineffective disinformation campaigns had been focused on hurting Trump and helping Ms Harris – setting it aside from its ally Russia.
That view is not universal.
There is a faction in Tehran who believe Trump the transactional businessman will play a much straighter bat than the mercurial Democrats, who dangle the prospect of compromise but always end up backing Israel anyway.
During the recent presidential election, some hardliners accused their opponents of pedalling “Trump-o-phobia” – trying to scare voters into backing the moderate candidate out of fear how Trump would react to a conservative.
But things are not so clear-cut. Yes, Trump is close to the Israeli Right and might buy into its idea of an all-out bombing raid on its nuclear and oil infrastructure in the hope of bringing down the regime.
Then again, he might not. Both he and Ms Harris have swung wildly between calling for tougher policies and demanding a return to talks, said Dr Sanam Vakil, an Iran watcher at Chatham House.
“I would frame it more that Iran doesn’t want to start on an even worse footing than it already is with the next US president – whoever it is,” said Dr Vakil. “Over the past few days even the supreme leader’s security advisor indicated there would be pragmatism in future relations with Washington. That is a very interesting development out of the current crisis.”
“Economic prospects are quite bleak. Sanctions relief is an objective of the new president. Those are the priorities.”
In China, as elsewhere, coverage and discussion of the US election is saturating both the tightly controlled state-controlled media and social networks.
Much of the reporting has recently focused on the potential instability inside the US around the election, citing domestic American reporting about the potential for political violence.
And yet there is little in the way of a discernable preference for one candidate over the other. And that’s because in material terms, Beijing has not seen much difference.
Trump in his last term ignited a trade war, blamed China for Covid-19, and launched a controversial FBI-led crackdown on Chinese economic espionage. He’s promised to wildly expand anti-Chinese tariffs if he gets back in White House.
But while Mr Biden has cooled the rhetoric, he has not really changed course: he has maintained and, in some cases tightened, some of Trump’s tariffs (in September he slapped 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, and this month his administration reduced the types of semiconductors that American companies can sell to China). Most significantly, he has explicitly pledged to go to war to defend Taiwan if it is attacked.
Speaking to Joe Rogan last week, Trump accused Taiwan of “stealing” America’s chip industry and implied it should pay for protection – themes he has raised in previous interviews.
Zhu Fenglian, the spokesman for China’s Taiwan affairs office, this week said such remarks cast doubt on Trump’s commitment to the island.
“Whether the United States is trying to protect or harm Taiwan, I believe most of our Taiwan compatriots have already made a rational judgment and know very clearly that what the United States pursues is always ‘America First’,” she said at a news briefing. Taiwan’s people know that “Taiwan at any time may turn from a pawn to a discarded child”, Ms Zhu added, without directly referring to Trump.
It’s not just in the world’s war zones that Tuesday’s election will be watched nervously.
Mexico, America’s southern neighbour, is also its second largest trading partner (bettered only by Canada), the biggest source of its imports, and within the top four trade partners of 45 of the 50 states.
It is also the object of much of Trump’s fiery rhetoric about border security, immigration, and drug cartels.
Earlier this year it was reported that he had mused about sending special forces hit squads across the border to assassinate cartel leaders. Some hot-headed Republicans have talked about an Iraq-style invasion.
“I was deputy minister of finance last time Trump was a candidate and president,” said Vanessa Rubio-Marquez, a long-serving Mexican politician and diplomat now teaching at LSE.
“At the beginning like in any other electoral cycle, we had to wait for things to calm down from narrative to policy. Once things were settled, we engaged in a very open frank dialogue including on trade, migration, organised crime.”
Despite the tariff talk, Mexico, Canada and the US are bound by a free-trade deal that Trump himself negotiated in his last term, Ms Rubio-Marquez pointed out.
Loose talk about cross-border hit squads is unhelpful, she said. But there’s always a distinction between rhetoric and reality.
There are dozens of other areas and regions that could be affected by the election.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which pitches itself as a plan for the next Republican administration but which Trump has tried to distance himself from, calls for a radical overhaul of the United States Agency for International Development that would have significant consequences for United Nations and NGO-led aid and assistance programmes around the world.
The European Council of Foreign Relations warned in a paper published on Thursday that Trump’s policy preferences could destabilise the Western Balkans – potentially sparking new wars in Bosnia and between Serbia and Kosovo.
But both Trump and Ms Harris have been vague about the specifics of their foreign policy.
That is deliberate, said Dr Vakil – it gives them latitude on the knotty questions in the Middle East and elsewhere.
But it also makes it difficult for both friends and foes to plan ahead.
Ms Rubio Marquez, who helped the Mexican government deal with the first Trump presidency, is relatively sanguine.
“I think in general I would say the first thing you have to do after a very heated election is to wait until the general environment of intensity and polarisation calms down a bit, and it passes from campaign to policy,” she said when asked how she would advise other governments to deal with the uncertainty.
“Understand the difference between noise in a campaign and actual policy. You need to be ready for many scenarios.”