It all came as a tale of the
unexpected. After eight years of Democratic presidency at the White House, the
Republican camp surprisingly placed their bets on Donald Trump, which proved an
inspired choice, as Trump eventually won, in the wake of a campaign marred by
controversies and scandals.
Portrayed by her opponents as a person
of the system, Hillary Clinton had to answer questions about the way she had
received funding for the foundation she jointly owns with her husband, the
former US president Bill Clinton. Also, Hillary had to answer for the way she reacted as a Secretary of State
when the US Consulate in Benghazi was attacked. Also as a Secretary of State,
Hillary Clinton used a private email account, which triggered an FBI
investigation, but which eventually failed to find any real grounds for her
indictment. In the opposite camp, with no political experience and failing to
prove, in the three debates that brought together the presidential candidates,
that he had the required knowledge on key issues of the state, Donald Trump
made all sorts of controversial declarations throughout the campaign, which
made all the difference for Hillary Clinton’s challenger. His main promise
concerned the building of a wall along the Mexican border, to stop immigration.
Another controversial proposal was that of temporarily denying Muslims access
to the US, a declaration Trump subsequently reconsidered, stating some of the
details needed rethinking.
Also, Trump was involved in a scandal
regarding women and the way he treated them.
Nonetheless, shortly after his win was announced, Trump made an appeal
to unity and vowed to place Americans’ interest over and above anything else. He said: Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of
division, have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and
independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as
one united people. We have a great economic plan. We will double our growth and
have the strongest economy anywhere in the world. At the same time, we will get
along with all other nations willing to get along with us. I want to tell the
world community that we will always put America’s interests first.
For many, Trump’s victory was surprising,
all the more so as his challenger was credited with great chances of winning,
up to the very last minute. But how can we explain the way the Americans voted
? Here is foreign policy pundit Vladimir Socor attempting an answer:
I can explain it as the
outcome of the dissatisfaction of the American middle class, in particular of
the white middle class, since the racial factor played a key role. This is how
I can explain Mr. Trump’s victory. For quite some time now, the middle class,
but also the working class, that of industrial workers who traditionally made
the Democrats’ electorate, have
switched sides and joined the Republican camp. This trend of outsourcing the fixed
capital invested in the USA, to countries where the workforce is a great deal cheaper, such as China, Mexico,
states in South-East Asia or even Latin America had a devastating effect on the
middle class and the American working class. In this way, the traditional
American workforce, highly-skilled in terms of technical competences and
well-paid, ended up being thrown into some sort of common pot where they found
themselves competing against the poorly-paid workforce of third-world
countries, as a result of which the living standards in the US stalled and even
declined. The income gap between the well-to-do or the rich class and the
middle-class, the working class, has dramatically deepened. And that partly
explains the massive transfer of votes from the Democrat to the Republican
Party
No less important is the issue of
migration. Vldimir Socor belives that the liberal circles, which have held sway
over politics and, more importantly, over US mass media in the past years, have
overtly opted for the transformation of the USA and its population, into a some
sort of reflector of the world’s population. To put it differently, because of
uncontrolled migration, an acceleration process occurred, with the percentage
of white people across the USA diminishing, and the percentage of non-European
population increasing. Candidate Donald Trump specifically addressed such
worries of the vast majority of American voters and managed to voice the
anxiety of that emerging majority. These are in brief the factors that led to
Trump’s win, Vladimir Socor explained. Are there any changes likely to occur as
regards American security policy in Europe? Could the commitments made by the
US at the NATO summit in Warsaw this summer possibly change? According to Vladimir Socor, the Pentagon
has enough political leverage to influence the decisions the North Atlantic
Alliance may take, in order to carry through the initiatives adopted at the
summit in Warsaw. On the other hand, a dysfunctional America cannot but make
the West more vulnerable.
According to political expert
Iulian Fota, what we need is an America capable of understanding Europe’s
specific problems. A recent guest of one of Radio Romania’s programs, Fota has
said that president Obama had at least promised Europe support in its bid to
sort out the serious problems it was facing and it is extremely important that
president Trump carries on with this course of action in the US foreign policy.