Toxic campaign chokes American credibility

By Wednesday morning Bangkok time the world will know who will become the 45th president of the United States, occupy the White House and inherit a daunting array of challenges both at home and abroad. Both of the leading candidates, should they win, would make history in their own way, Hillary Clinton as the country’s first woman president and Donald Trump, among other distinctions, as its first president to emerge from reality TV. 
In their campaigns they have touted different messages – Clinton’s “Stronger together” versus Trump’s “Make America great again” – both slogans designed to galvanise voters otherwise lost in a muddle of distasteful rhetoric, personal attacks and partisanship more polarising than the US has witnessed since its civil war. During the course of the two-year campaign foreign observers have been subjected to appalling revelations about the state of American society and its hazardously flawed political system. The world’s most powerful country has been under a microscope, its weaknesses as clearly visible as its strengths. 
While Clinton has been rightfully criticised for shortcomings ranging from secretiveness over a mysterious bout of pneumonia to possibly criminal recklessness as secretary of state, real-estate mogul Trump has cut a worrying swathe through the electoral machinery. Even if he loses, his bellicose rants about Mexicans and Asians threatening American prosperity – and the readiness with which his supporters accepted them – will not soon be forgotten.
The end result of this presidential campaign is that the US can no longer be the same as it was. The international community must now face the reality, not borne this time of television scriptwriters, that America is no longer a superpower to be relied upon for protection and guidance. The attitudes of its citizens and their leaders have dramatically changed under the influence of biased news media, pressure groups and right-wing extremism. The outcome of this election will indicate the role the US will play in the world in the decade to come.
Two key issues – immigration and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) – present a good gauge of current American temperament. Gone is the long-prevalent belief that newcomers are to be welcomed into the great “melting pot”, to bolster the economy by their contributions to the “American dream”. In its place is a fear of newcomers, a conviction that they stealing jobs, undermining traditions and subverting that dream. Meanwhile the TPP, a global trade pact in which America was supposed to take the lead, is regarded by a majority of its citizens as a danger to US wellbeing. This attitude has taken hold despite 11 other nations signing on to the trade deal and widespread expectation in the financial community that it would benefit all of the signatories mutually.
Even if the Republican candidate loses, the so-called “Trump factor”, generally dismissed as a joke at the beginning of the race, has become embedded in the American psyche and is sure to remain there long after the election. Regardless of who wins, the residue of a toxic campaign is going to hamper the new president and his or her administration for months. Transition periods invariably involve such a vacuum, in which little of import gets done, but this time the world is pressed with threats – from ISIS, the worsening warfare in Syria, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and many others. 
These crises will only worsen without rapid and determined direction. And yet the new president’s first order of business will be to repair America’s credibility. Possibly that can be accomplished through decisive action on global issues. Though numbed by the spectacle of an election campaign so exhaustively covered in the news internationally, the world anxiously awaits a verdict.