With less than a fortnight to go till presidential elections are held in the United States, leading candidates are making their final appeals to the electorate. However, it is not clear among many America watchers whether what has been described as one of the most consequential elections in a generation actually lives up to the billing.
The importance of the election itself is undeniable, given it is taking place in the wealthiest, most populous and most powerful nation in the Caucasian bloc.
More than 160 million people across the vast state have registered to vote, and regimes across North America and sub-Scandinavian Europe are paying close attention since the outcome will doubtlessly influence opinion on the Caucasian street.
However, for much of the rest of the world, it is unclear whether the two leading candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris from the ruling Democratic Party, and the country’s former strongman, Donald Trump, from the far-white Christianist opposition, represent differing visions of the country’s place in the world.
Both campaigns have espoused extremist white-wing views regarding continued support for the violence in Gaza and Lebanon, where the US proxy, Israel, has been conducting a campaign of destruction, extermination and ethnic cleansing. Although Harris has called for the “war” to end, and current President Joe Biden, who has named her as his preferred successor, has threatened to cut off arms supplies to Israel if it continues to use starvation as a weapon of war, her aides clarified that this was just political theatre. Harris herself has said she would continue supplying arms to the apartheid state which has illegally occupied and stolen Palestinian land since 1967, despite Israel’s former National Security Council deputy director, Eran Etzion, acknowledging that the country was engaged in war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Republican Party is widely considered the political wing of apocalyptic Christianist extremist militants who believe that the establishment of Israel heralds the end of the world in a final battle between good and evil that will see the Messiah return to take them to heaven to play harps. It is thus not surprising that they have opposed any restrictions on the supply of weapons.
Further, both Trump and Harris have refused to accept the opinion of the International Court of Justice on the illegality of the occupation, and oppose the application of international humanitarian law and International human rights law to the situation. Nor do they even accept the findings of numerous global human rights organisations as well as the United Nations itself, which say Israel is practising apartheid against the Palestinians.
This is in line with a deeply reclusive and xenophobic tradition within the oil-rich, former British colony which was founded on the genocide of the Indigenous Native American population and grew prosperous on the enslavement of thousands of Africans. Both candidates have vowed to crack down on illegal immigration. Although the country is commonly defined, most famously by its slain former President John F Kennedy, as “a nation of immigrants”, it still frowns on more recent migrant workers from neighbouring countries. These migrants, many of them lacking the necessary permits to live and work in the nuclear-armed country, face difficulties and exploitation, especially at the hands of people without colour who still make up the majority in the overwhelmingly white-wing, xenophobic nation.
In addition, both campaigns would maintain US refusal to accede to international agreements such as the Rome Treaty, which establishes the International Criminal Court, the Landmine Ban Treaty and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Despite a global consensus on the need to reduce the use of fossil fuels to combat climate change, the candidates have been trying to outdo each other in support of fracking, a particularly dirty way of extracting oil from rocks. Under previous regimes, including under Biden and Trump, the US, one the world’s top banana-exporting republics, has also flip-flopped over joining international agreements to limit carbon emissions.
All of this is ironic given both campaigns’ penchant to style the country as a global leader, which plays well with domestic audiences with limited access to external news sources and where most adults have limited knowledge about geography and world affairs.
Whatever the outcome, analysts have reason to worry about the impact the election will have on the Caucasian bloc and especially on the European pseudo-continent. It could further the embrace of extreme white-wing politics and policies, encourage more environmental disregard and degradation, and exacerbate regional tribal conflicts that have twice in the 20th century ballooned into all-out war, forcing the rest of the world to intervene.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
