New York: Except perhaps for a few liberal democracies like India, Japan and South Korea in Asia, Europe and North America, the US elections are more important to most nations than their own. 2020 is particularly significant as the world confronts a major new bully.
For the first time ever, more than half of those likely to vote have already sent in their preference, either through in-person early voting or via postal ballots—over 80 million and counting.
Senior officials from the three African nations I am privileged to be an advisor to have asked for my assessment of the way the wind is blowing. For who wins the White House in November 2020 will have an impact on their economies, security, and politics.
In India, the airtime and newsprint expended every four years on the US elections is second only to its own polls. China displaced Pakistan as the favourite bugbear after the India-China June 2020 clashes. Now all eyes are on America.
The two Presidential debates, organised by the bi-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates (only America could dream up something like this), have not achieved much in changing peoples’ minds. The fault lines are clear. The issues are not employment or livelihoods or racism or immigration. The issue is China and its virus. And of course, “the economy, stupid”, the catchphrase used during Bill Clinton’s campaign in the early 1990s.
Donald Trump promised to put America first. And he does it. He does not pull his punches, even telling Heads of State at the 2017 United Nations General Assembly session that they too should put their countries first just as he does with America. Was he being condescending? No American complained.
Trump thinks out of the box, shoots from the hip and has discarded all those fancy statements that professional diplomats produce. He cut short his attendance at the Nato summit in London last year after a group of leaders, including Boris Johnson, was caught on video ridiculing him for staging lengthy press conferences.
The G-7 meeting in Canada last year was communique-less as the participants could not agree on practically anything.
The “liberal” media took Trump apart for weakening trans-Atlantic partnerships.
In reality, he has redefined them, asking America’s allies to get their act together.
The consummate deal-maker (he wrote a book in the 1980s called The Art of the Deal) was already angry that America was getting the short end of the stick in its deals with especially China. The virus was the last straw.
Coronavirus cases in the United States are spiking again to highs not seen since the July peak.
You either thank Donald Trump for his tough stance against China and its unfortunate godchild, the World Health Organization, or you blame him for not handling the pandemic well.
The White House’s explanation that it did not know what was hitting the world in terms of the Wuhan virus is reasonable. No one knew. Europe floundered, as did Asia and Africa and Latin America. China lied, people died.
The Democrats claim that the President knew how serious the pandemic was, but did precious little to control it. Did he? The jury is still out on that one.
While the New York Times reported last week that hospitalisations had jumped more than 40%, according to Johns Hopkins University that tracks the virus across the world, Wuhan virus cases exceed 32 million, with more than 7 million people in the US infected. It is a staggering number, and places America more than one million infections beyond the next closest nation, India.
Virus-2 seems to be hitting the US much as it has again attacked Europe.
This is shocking news for a country that has long led the world in infectious disease research and control. Americans are angry.
Why did this happen? If China had redeemed its plummeting image across the world by acknowledging that it had unknowingly spread the virus and asked for global cooperation to contain it, the Democrats would have won the US Presidential election.
But the Chinese Communist Party, like all authoritarian systems, loathes public discussion and debate. Secrecy is paramount and officially mandated narratives masquerade as news. Any admission of culpability is taboo.
The truth is slowly coming out. On 4 October 2020, the Head of Emergencies at WHO said that one in ten people in the world might have been infected with the Chinese virus, more than 20 times the earlier estimate. Dr Michael Ryan warned that ultimately it means “the vast majority of the world remains at risk”. He said the pandemic would continue to evolve and the world was “now heading into a difficult period”.
Poll pundits in the United States claim that Latinos and African/Asian immigrants will vote democratic. This might have been true in 2016, but the equations are changing. Most recent and longtime immigrants, while pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the values that it represents, retain robust interest in their home countries. The majority of first-generation immigrants remits money to those left behind. Non-banking companies thrive on this.
And with modern communications, immigrants know in real time the devastation caused by the virus in their low-income countries of origin with weak health systems, high external debt, and dependency on sectors most exposed to the pandemic such as tourism and commodities. In poorer countries, the shocks are so profound that we face the risk of a “lost generation”, the IMF said recently. Bolivia or Lesotho might not be able to punish China—the USA can. And Trump’s promise to hit China even harder resonates.
At least three members of my morning walk Quad+ in New York have deferred plans to visit their families in Latin America and Asia this year. Jo Biden will not get their votes.
President Donald Trump, the quintessential US businessman, measures every relationship in transactional terms. There have been media claims of his asking Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 polls. But China has damaged him and America. Trump neither forgives nor forgets.
Last week, Putin (in many ways a Russian Donald Trump), who has praised Trump in the past for saying that he wanted better relations with Russia, said that he would work with any US leader, while noting Biden’s “sharp anti-Russian rhetoric”.
Domestically, we have the interesting (and unexpected) phenomenon of American manufacturers struggling to meet demand for goods that Americans are buying up as the Chinese-unleashed pandemic drags on. From cars, to mobiles, to appliances, to paint cans, demand has largely recovered after the virus crippled manufacturing across America nine months ago. Inventory shortages are the “norm”, at least for now.
By August, factories were back to normal production levels, but demand bounced back faster than expected, depleting stocks and exacerbating the supply gap.
As Americans abandon large cities and head to suburbs or the countryside, car dealers are seeing their stocks dwindle as public-transport averse people rush to buy vehicles. White goods are in short supply.
Waiting periods on Amazon (a kind of manufacturing output bellwether) have lengthened appreciably. When Dr Kiran and his wife Daisy went to Best Buy (a household name) for a slim refrigerator for their remodelled kitchen, they were told that they would need to wait for up to four weeks! And paint cans to redo their patio were very difficult to find. “Thank you, China,” Dr Kiran said bitterly.
The salesman explained with a satisfied smile that demand was back up, but supply chain disruptions, worker absences and staff reductions owing to virus-proofing the workplace have complicated efforts to catch up. He hoped that stock levels would reach usual levels by early 2021. Extra cash from stimulus cheques are contributing to demand resurgence.
The Wall Street Journal quoted Mike Jackson, Chief Executive of AutoNation Inc, America’s largest publicly traded dealership chain: “We do not have the inventory on the new side or the pre-owned side to meet the demand that is out there.” He expects availability to improve next year, but is happy that shortages are driving prices, and hence profits, up.
Data from the Federal Reserve shows that production of consumer durables like refrigerators, trucks and furniture collapsed by 50% between January and April, but in October is slightly up on the January figures. Pent up demand will keep driving sales well into 2021.
I heard the Chief Executive of Whirlpool, Marc Bitzer, last week. He was happy with their exceptionally strong order books, and added, for good measure, that they were trying to minimise customer frustration. Factories are working overtime under new safety protocols.
Significantly, the full-page announcements in leading newspapers about Black Friday or Mad Monday deals, are perceptibly less, even online.
The stock market is fluctuating wildly, but the Nasdaq Composite Index is well above its pre-Covid February levels.
With an unerring businessman’s instinct, President Donald Trump has opted for livelihoods. He has argued, convincingly for several, that many of the over 230,000 fatalities attributed to the pandemic were of people already very close to death owing to cardio or pulmonary or kidney ailments. The actual number of those who have been killed by the virus itself could be much lower. American voters, desperate for reassurance, tend to believe him.
New York, from where I am reporting, is the soul of Americana. Within weeks of the virus attack tens of thousands of New Yorkers fled, the fastest outmigration since 9/11. Many half-packed their bags and bolted overnight.
The world’s financial centre looked like a post-Armageddon relic (a ghost town, Trump called it). When I came two months ago, block after block displayed shuttered restaurants, bars, museums, and businesses. Parking a car on the street below my apartment in the heart of Manhattan was a pleasure, not the nightmare it always is! New York’s real estate music was never supposed to stop. But it paused for several months and is still not where it should be.
Yet, the city that never sleeps has is coming alive again! Restaurants have been permitted to set up tables on the sidewalks, lending a magical, fairyland ambience to magnificent Manhattan. Advance bookings are required, and all the saved money, reinforced by stimulus cheques, is flowing freely. New York is back to its business, which is business. Its vibrant energy, vibe, rhythm, pulse is beginning to throb again.
The President’s greatest advertisement yet is set to the insanely popular song “YMCA”. The chorus “it’s fun to stay at the YMCA” becomes “everybody say MAGA” and the ad shows Trump flinging red MAGA (Make America Great Again) baseball caps into the audience. One cap, through computer graphics, flies around his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton and makes her stumble (a real incident) as she tries to get into her limousine, another cap buzzes around present challenger Jo Biden’s head before knocking him out!
When Trump was elected four years ago, sceptics predicted that he would destroy the world, since an unstable person had his finger on the world’s greatest nuclear arsenal. The Obama Administration believed that America’s number one enemy was a nuclear-armed North Korea that should be pressured to relent.
Trump took another route. He warned North Korea that if it misbehaved, he would unleash fire and fury such as the world had never seen. Having shown resolve, he held two summits with the (equally) unpredictable Kim Jong-Un, including an unprecedented meeting in the heavily militarized Demilitarized Zone, becoming the first serving US President to cross the 1953 armistice line separating North and South Korea.
Thanks to the Syrian imbroglio, abetted by Barack Obama and company, Russia found its way back to the Middle East. Trump wants a “deal” with Putin. Its contours will emerge in the weeks to come.
And when he chose Saudi Arabia (a huge market for American weaponry, a major oil supplier, and a key presence on the Mideastern canvas) as his first foreign destination, he tore up the diplomatic rule book. The results are now emerging.
Within just a few weeks, UAE, Bahrain, Sudan (and soon Saudi Arabia and others, possibly including Pakistan) have normalized relations with Israel. The powerful Jewish lobby is delighted that the Trump Administration, guided by his orthodox Jewish son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, has consigned the Palestine issue to irrelevance. The frozen mental and ideological barriers of the past have crumbled forever.
“I saved his ass,” Trump had said amid the US outcry over Saudi dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi’s killing in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, according to Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”
Trump bypassed Congress to sell roughly $8 billion in arms to the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. He vetoed a trio of resolutions blocking the sale, as well as a resolution to end US support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. The Israel reconciliation is the payback.
Like Donald Trump or hate him, he does what he thinks is good for America. Selling more American goods to the Arabs will be one obvious benefit.
Trump has seen US imports of oil collapse. OPEC is as dead as a dodo. Fuel prices across America are the lowest in decades. Voters love this.
Donald Trump is not afraid to take off the velvet glove.
With ISIS and its blood-thirsty “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi eliminated by US forces, the Arab world is uniting against common enemy Iran, whose economy has been shattered by US sanctions and an alleged terrorism-supporting key military official exterminated by an American precision strike. The average American, still hurting from 9/11, loves this raw demonstration of his nation’s awesome economic and military power (as delighted as when Osama bin Laden was eliminated in a midnight raid into Pakistan nine years ago). Although defiant at present, Iran will fall in line soon.
Interestingly, the rabidly anti-Trump Washington Post described the demonic al-Baghdadi as an “austere Islamic scholar”, much as China considers the diabolical Hafiz Saeed (Pakistan’s darling) as a revered Islamic leader!
For fifty years, US Presidents had tried the conventional mantra with China: trade brings prosperity, engagement brings peace, and both can change behaviour. It did not work. China was meant to be the market of the world, and big international corporations drooled over the prospects. Instead, China has become the factory of the world, a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up the resources of the planet.
Trump has taken China head-on.
He has banned Huawei from 5G networks in the US. Last month, the US imposed export curbs on Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., China’s largest chipmaker, delivering a new blow to China’s technology industry and sharpening tensions over intellectual property. US firms will now need a licence to export certain products because of an “unacceptable risk” that the goods could be used for military purposes.
A Harvard Professor was arrested for selling secrets to China. PLA members doing research at American universities have been called out for lying in their visa applications. Confucius Institutes have been designated as foreign missions of China.
In July 2020, the Trump administration put visa and asset sanctions on several Chinese officials, including a Politburo member, for their role in “gross violations of human rights”, invasive surveillance, mass extrajudicial detentions, forced sterilization and abortions and mandatory birth control in China’s far western region of Xinjiang.
Chinese students coming to the US face intensive scrutiny, especially those sponsored by the government. Over 3,000 have been expelled. According to the South China Morning Post, US border agents carried out over 1,100 searches of Chinese nationals’ electronic devices in 2019, recording a 66% increase from the previous year. The affected students largely hail from China’s seven major national defence colleges, which are directly subordinate to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, receive funding from the military and work on military projects.
Earlier this month, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members (and their family members) would be banned from obtaining immigration to the US. The new policy was approved by Congress to “tackle threats to the safety and security of the US”. Now I understand why US visa applications need a declaration that the applicant has never been a member of a terrorist organisation!
Counting Communist party members and their families, the ban could technically bar travel to the United States for as many as 270 million people, according to one internal administration estimate.
In 2017, the Administration used the same statute in the Immigration and Nationality Act for a travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries. The ban was challenged in US courts, but remains.
FBI director Christopher Wray recently said, in response to Beijing’s “far-reaching campaign” of economic espionage that FBI is now opening a new China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours.
In July, Washington closed the Chinese consulate in Houston (a centre of high technology research), calling it a “spy centre”.
The China Scholarship Council—the primary vehicle by which the state provides scholarships—funds 7% of Chinese students studying abroad, about 65,000 students, most of them in the US. The CSC strongly encourages, and in some cases requires, Chinese scholarship recipients to return to work in China after completing their studies abroad, regardless of country of study.
One Chinese member of my morning walk group asked plaintively, “If Chinese universities are the best ever in human history, as the Communist Party claims, then why are hundreds of thousands of Chinese graduate students studying in Western institutions?” And he then answered the question himself: “Princeton University alone has 69 Nobel Laureates associated with it!” And whispered: “Xi Jinping’s daughter was at Harvard from 2010 to 2014, protected by Chinese bodyguards.”
According to a media report in 2012, Bo Guagua, son of embattled politician Bo Xilai, also attended Harvard University and had a playboy “princeling” reputation. He earlier went to Harrow School and Oxford University.
Despite America becoming a hostile environment for Chinese students, for those who have already spent years in undergraduate and graduate study in the US, going back to China is unpalatable, as it means starting anew, without solid academic and professional networks, and jobs at lower salaries. They also must confront the Chinese government’s instrumentalist view that students should return and serve their country, blurring the lines between state and society. According to the US-based Centre for Security and Emerging Technology, more than 85% of US-based Chinese STEM PhD students intend to stay in the United States.
The just concluded India-USA Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement has received surprising media coverage in a nation that is so insular, and thinks New Delhi is a small town in Idaho! Most American commentators stress that with cutting-edge US technology, India will get real-time access to American geospatial intelligence that will enhance the accuracy of automated systems and weapons like missiles and armed drones, and make India’s powerful military more than a match for China. Americans have been fed a daily diet (even by anti-Trump media) of China’s increasingly aggressive threats to many countries in its neighbourhood and beyond, and its disregard of established international norms.
America’s under-30 generation has grown up in a post-Cold War world, nurtured on narratives of American exceptionalism and the “end of history” in America’s favour. These kids will vote for Trump. Ronald Reagan is remembered, apart from his economic policies, as the great American President who took down the Soviet Union. Trump might be the President who takes down China.
China has dared to challenge America’s smug self-confidence. Biden also threatens to be tough on China, but accusations of his family’s financial links with Beijing fly thick and fast.
In the ongoing confrontation with the worst form of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, America is winning. Despite all its abusive and bellicose rhetoric, China has backed off in the South China Sea, not daring to confront the United States.
So, what impact will all this have on the elections? Democratic challenger Jo Biden should be able to see the moving finger writing. The American voter will vote for Donald Trump. Jo Biden might as well prepare his “conceding” speech.
Deepak Vohra is former Indian Ambassador to Armenia, Georgia, Sudan, South Sudan, Poland and Lithuania.