As Americans head to the polls today in what looks to be a bitingly close cliffhanger of a choice between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, the world seems to be rapt with attention, following almost every one of the remarkable twists and turns, highs and lows of a presidential contest like no other before.
Unfortunately, this contest has not shown American democracy at its best. Indeed, given what a global impact everything that happens in the United States seems to have, its elections are the closest to an electoral contest in which everyone everywhere gets a sense he or she has a real stake, even if only Americans get to participate in.
And, the overwhelming popular reaction to this particular presidential derby globally has been one of bewilderment, even disgust, that it has become one so bereft of the serious airing of real issues of grave importance and so filled with scandalous accusations of either a criminal or sexual sort.
In fact, after 2016, it can no longer be uttered by cynical citizens in lesser countries that only in their respective countries have political discourse sunk so far, so fast and so low. But like all Americans, we will have to live with the aftermath, whatever the election result will be tomorrow.
So, what will tomorrow portend for Malaysia and Malaysians?
First out, we will all likely look back rather wistfully over the eight years of President Barack Obama, if nothing else for the astonishing fact that he is the first sitting American president to have set foot on Malaysian soil in nearly 50 years, not once but twice!
The “bromance” between the American president and Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak may tickle us, but it signalled something far more momentous than the personal chemistry between the two leaders.
The two visits and the personal Najib-Obama rapport are concrete evidence of the so-called American pivot to the region and show how Malaysia has become a centrepiece of the new strategic thinking in Washington.
While it has been long-standing Malaysian foreign policy to be friendly to all the major powers, the new chumminess between Kuala Lumpur and Washington has represented more a realisation on the part of the latter that Malaysia’s relative importance has long been somewhat neglected. That new-found urgency and importance of Malaysia-US ties are unlikely to be much disturbed or even upset whoever becomes the new US president tomorrow. If ties are set against sound fundamental common interests, they will withstand personnel changes even at the pinnacle of US leadership.
US interests, like the interests of all nations, will not change as leaders come and go. Not even someone as politically unorthodox as Trump will sway too wildly away from the parameters set by national interests and will adjust to the straitjacket of broad policy imperatives and limits once settled into office.
And, nowhere are those limits brought more sharply into focus than with the breathtaking rise of China in recent decades. A lone superpower long accustomed to acting largely unchallenged on the global stage will henceforth feel constrained to accommodate Beijing’s looming influence on that stage.
America’s global interests necessarily dictate that a strategic rapprochement — however uneasy and awkward — will come sooner or later between Washington and Beijing. All that either a President Clinton or a President Trump will ever do is to either speed up or delay that inevitability.
As Obama himself has said, whether we like it or not, we live in an increasingly interdependent world. Global progress on so many fronts vital to the wellbeing of us all will in coming years be predicated on cooperation between the two major powers today.
In so many ways, global developments today — not least this most unusual spectacle of American elections — are all too familiar to us Malaysians who live, as it were, in a microcosm of the global village. We struggle almost on a daily basis with the politics of identity that is more imposed upon us by our sociopolitical setting rather than a matter of choice. The “mature” democracies of Western Europe and now even America are similarly having to grapple with the same today.
Malaysia, under Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, pioneered the opening towards China in our region back in 1974 and is still reaping the fruits of that today, dramatically brought home just last week from the visit there by his son and prime-ministerial successor. Dare we even say Malaysia may have a thing or two to teach the world?
John Teo is a Kuching-based journalist