This week’s Democratic convention, which follows Hillary Clinton’s selection of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate, is a historic occasion with the former secretary of state becoming the first woman ever to become a presidential nominee for either of the major US parties. This is a massive moment in the country’s history, particularly coming so soon after the 2008 selection of Barack Obama as the first black nominee and subsequently president.
While Clinton has a lead in many recent national polls over Republican nominee Donald Trump, the outcome of the US race is far from sure in what looks likely to be a brutal, negative contest. However, the world wants her to win, and if foreigners were also allowed to vote in November’s election, she would prevail by a landslide, despite the reservations held by some about her.
Clinton was the stand-out winner, for instance, in a poll by Handelsblatt earlier this year with some 20,000 people in the G20. Among the G20 countries other than the United States (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, and the United Kingdom), her support was strongest in Mexico, Italy, Germany and Brazil.
Indeed, the only country of the 19 where Trump bested Clinton was Russia where he received three times as much support as her. At least part of the explanation for this can be found in the fact that the billionaire businessman has struck up a warm rapport with President Vladimir Putin with Trump making a series of pro-Moscow comments during the campaign, including last week when he asserted that the US shouldn’t necessarily intervene to protect Nato members such as the Baltic states from a Russia incursion.
The fact that Clinton would win hands-down in a global contest against Trump, despite the reservations some hold about her, partially reflects bigger concerns that many foreigners have about the billionaire businessman’s fiery rhetoric and often controversial policy positions from his apparent favourability of nuclear war on the Korean peninsula, to the clampdown on Muslim immigration to the United States. It is no coincidence, for instance, that the country where Clinton receives most support is Mexico which Trump has widely assailed as part of his incredible proposals to build a nearly 2,000-mile border wall.
Quite aside from this anti-Trump effect, however, many international audiences want Clinton as president given the strong role she played as secretary of state in the Obama administration in helping to restore the US reputation in the world following George W. Bush’s presidency. Coming into office in 2009, Obama and Clinton confronted a situation in which anti-US sentiment was at about its highest levels since at least the Vietnam War, a situation that could easily be repeated if Trump is elected in November.
The key factor driving this international public opinion tsunami was the unpopularity of the Bush administration’s foreign, security and military policies in the so-called “war on terror”. Led by Obama, and his two secretaries of state Clinton and John Kerry, significant efforts have been made in the last seven and a half years to turn around this climate of international perception.
Even within a year of Obama and Clinton assuming office, for instance, several opinion surveys showed that anti-Americanism was generally on the decline again, with favourable perceptions of the US having increased by about 30 percentage points in some countries in 2009 over 2008, according to the Pew Global Attitude Projects. Clinton was particularly instrumental by championing a smart power strategy that sought to re-balance the overwhelming emphasis on hard power (especially military might) during the Bush presidency more toward soft power (including enhanced diplomacy) during the Obama administration.
And Kerry has picked up on this smart power road map since taking over from Clinton by continuing to put emphasis on priorities like championing a new global climate change deal in Paris last November; the US opening up initiative to Cuba; and also the nuclear deal with Iran. Unsurprisingly, these key foreign moves, which are broadly popular with much of the rest of the world, have been lambasted by Trump.
To be sure, US global public diplomacy has not been without setback during the Obama years and perhaps the biggest failure has been towards what the president has called the Islamic world. Despite the early promise of his Cairo speech in 2009 in which he sought to reset US relations with Muslim-majority countries, there remain pockets of very high anti-Americanism in several key states, including Pakistan and Egypt, which have not been substantially addressed.
However, this is precisely one of the key reasons why much of the world wants Clinton, rather than Trump, in the White House. For at the very time when the United States should redouble its efforts to win the battle for “hearts and minds” in Muslim-majority countries, the controversial businessman has all the makings of a diplomatic disaster.
Many internationally are concerned, for instance, about Trump’s sabre-rattling call for a “fundamentally different military strategy”, including carpet bombing, in the campaign against terrorism which appears to involve intensification of US military commitments in the Middle East. Moreover, his indiscriminate plan to “shut down” immigration into the US by all Muslims has provoked anger and been called “unacceptable ... an insult to our religion” in the UAE, while Egypt’s top religious authority decried his “hostile view of Islam and Muslims”.
Taken overall, while a Trump victory cannot be ruled out in November, Clinton would win by a landslide if foreigners were allowed to vote. The world wants her to win not just to avoid the diplomatic disaster of a Trump presidency, but also her vision for US foreign policy is widely shared by many across the globe.
Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS (the Centre for International Affairs, Diplomacy and Strategy) at the London School of Economics