WHAT'S AT STAKE in the CLINTON-TRUMP SHOWDOWN?
Despite this unprecedented election campaign, the needle of American policy doesn't usually move dramatically when a new resident moves into the White House.
When it does matter is in moments of crisis - and the next president is likely to face more than one.
Eurasia Group President
Ian Bremmer takes a clinical look at what today's long-awaited US presidential election will mean for the world.
Video and full transcript below.
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So what's at stake today? US elections. On the one hand, we've been caught up with it in the United States for a year and a half, so it feels momentous to us. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but we should put it in context. I was talking to a group of almost 100 American CEOs a few months ago. And asked with a show of hands, how many of them would change their investment strategies in the United States if Trump were to win. I got no hands. I pushed harder. I finally got one.
If I asked the same question about if Xi Jinping was no longer in China, Erdogan not in Turkey, or even if Putin was no longer in Russia, everyone that was thinking about investing would have a significant view there.
The fact is that developed markets are more resilient, they are more stable. It's also much harder to get things done. So the needle doesn't move as much when you have a presidential election, even a presidential election with outcomes as dramatically, even unprecedentedly different, as what we see in the United States right now.
Having said that, there is no question that although the domestic environment will probably not move so much under a new American president, we're not going to see grand bargains on infrastructure, or tax, or healthcare, that suddenly changes the way you think about the American marketplace. You are going to see a very different reaction in American footprint all over the world.
We think about Trump and the fact is, that from a foreign policy perspective, the only people that support him are those that actually want the United States to do less well in terms of its projections of power.
It's Putin, it's Kim Jong-un, it's Viktor Orbán in Hungary, it's a bunch of populist non-leaders across continental Europe and the UK.
Where anyone you talk to internationally, any head of state or foreign minister or cabinet member of any American ally, feels comfortable with Hillary.
So, even if we don't care about foreign policy, the main reason to consider Trump versus Clinton as important in the United States, is what would happen if there were a crisis.
We know that when the economic crisis hit in 2008, even though people said Congress can't do a damn thing, the president can't do anything, at that point, both the Bush administration and the Obama administration acted, and acted decisively, in a fairly unfettered way by governmental institutions that were otherwise were completely log jammed. And you saw this. Over a trillion dollars of infused stimulus to bail out the banks, to bail out the auto sector.
Now, we are presently facing a profound geopolitical crisis, a geopolitical recession. What would happen if suddenly there was a massive, an immediate crisis? A major cyber-attack. A major terrorist attack. That sort of thing. There, Trump versus Clinton matters a lot.
And you know what we have seen. We saw the Patriot Act after 9/11, we saw what Snowden revealed in terms of American surveillance behaviors. Things that don't smell good from the perspective of an advanced industrial democracy. That's when steps taken by an American president can truly undermine American values in a much more permanent way.
And frankly, whether or not you care about US foreign policy, that's a reason to be worried about what would happen if there were a Trump administration. Anyway, we will find out within just a few hours. And with that, I am Ian Bremmer at Eurasia Group.
Elle Kesler, 10, with face paint of the Hillary Clinton campaign logo on her cheeks, listens to the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate during her final rally at Independence Hall on the eve of election day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania November 7, 2016.
