New Cold War

US election: Trump won, but only because Clinton lost

Note: this article is not quite on the usual topic of this blog but given the importance of the election to future US-China relations have posted by views here. This has already appeared on the website www.socialistaction.net. I don't have the facility to include the figures referred to on this blog, so if you are interested you can find them at the website above. The article may have a different title.

The victory of Donald Trump has handed the most powerful office on earth into the hands of someone whose promises include a giant wall across the Mexican border, the expulsion of 11 million ‘illegal immigrants’ – roughly 6% of the US workforce – ‘extreme vetting’ for any Muslim seeking to enter the country, the repeal of Obamacare, keeping existing gun laws and punishing women who seek an abortion. He denies the existence of climate change, proposes to engage in a new era of protectionist trade policies, professes to ‘love war’, and is prone to casual racism, misogyny and bigotry towards Jews, LGBT people, Latinos and any other minority group.

Despite the fact that Hillary Clinton is a hard-line right-wing Democrat, with a particularly hawkish approach to foreign policy, anyone who did not understand that it mattered whether she or Trump got elected are now going to learn a very harsh lesson.

With Republican control over the Presidency, House of Representatives and Senate, and therefore over appointment to the outstanding vacancy on the Supreme Court, Trump will have few checks in pursuing his personal variant of far right Tea Party politics in the US. Moreover the triumph for these extreme right politics in the US – the most powerful country on the planet – will be a huge boost to the exponents of similar politics elsewhere. The carnival of racist reaction unleashed by the Brexit vote in Britain will be insignificant compared to the wave of racism that will sweep the US itself and across Europe.

So how did this happen?

Fundamentally, despite the rosy spectacles with which most of the world now views Obama’s eight years, with the exception of Obamacare, his presidency saw no measures that addressed the falling living standards and growing inequality that have beset the US since the financial crisis in 2008 and before.

The fall in living standards and rise in inequality in the US is quite shocking, and underpins the disruptions that have rocked US politics and brought a maverick, right-wing outsider like Trump to the presidency.

As Figure 1 shows US median household incomes by 2015 were still below the level of 1999, 16 years previously. At their lowest point following the crisis, in 2012, US median household incomes were more than 9% below their 1999 peak level. The improvement after approximately 2012 was not due to any measure taken by Obama but solely due to the anaemic economic recovery meaning median incomes remained depressed compared to prior to 2008.

The US population has therefore suffered more than a decade and a half fall in incomes – which would produce deep political discontent and anger in any country.

Figure 1

The political consequences of this fall in median incomes have been exacerbated by the huge rise in income inequality in the US and the falling share of incomes received by the great majority of the US population. This trend has been continuing for over three decades, having begun with the introduction of neoliberal ‘Reaganomics’ in the 1980s. Figure 2 shows that the share of total US incomes received by the bottom 80% of the US population fell from 56% in 1967 to 49% in 2015. Over the same period the share of total incomes received by the top 20% of the population rose from 46% to 51%. In other words, by 2015, the top 20% of the US population was receiving a more than half the US total incomes.

In monetary terms, the total income of the top 20% of US households in 2015 was $5.1 trillion while that of the entire bottom 80% was only $4.9 trillion. The total income of the top 5% of the US population in 2015 of $2.2 trillion was over seven times that of the bottom 20% of the US population of $0.3 trillion.

Figure 2

These trends, which had begun with Reagan in the 1980s, were not reversed or addressed under Obama. The fundamental economic tenets of neoliberalism were maintained – eschewing state intervention in the economy, relying on the ‘hidden hand’ of the market to deliver growth, and ‘trickle down’ benefits rather than redistributive measures to deliver support for less well off. This was stuck to even in the face of the 2008 economic crisis that these policies eventually spawned. The refusal to make a state-led intervention into the economy to boost growth through a coordinated investment programme aimed at stimulating the productive economy meant the Obama administration’s remedies were limited to ‘quantitative easing’ to prop up the financial markets. US growth averaged only 1.27% since the onset of the crisis in 2007, and only just cleared an average 2% per annum since emerging from recession in 2010. (UNCTADStat 2007-2015 GDP growth rate) Without growth in the economy there could be nothing to ‘trickle down’ – even if the trends in inequality since 1980 hadn’t already clearly demonstrated that this did not work.

In this context discontent has fermented across all sections of the US working class – white, black and Latino – reflected in the emergence of movements like Black Lives Matter as well as in the increasingly polarised politics of the Republican and Democrat parties.

This discontent across the entire working class was reflected in the political divisions that opened up in the Republican and Democrat primaries, but with contrary outcomes.

In the Democratic Party for the first time for almost a century a candidate openly calling themself a socialist, Bernie Sanders, won mass support and very seriously challenged Clinton, despite coming up against the full weight of the party machine that organised to ensure that Clinton won. In the end the Democratic Party selected the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. However polls have consistently shown that Bernie Sanders would have won a higher share of the popular vote in Tuesday’s election and would almost certainly have defeated Trump. Whatever the weakness of Sanders politics – he is certainly not a ‘socialist’ in any sense it is understood in Europe – this would have presented the oppressed and disenfranchised American working class an alternative between the mainstream neoliberalism of Clinton and the racist, protectionist neoliberalism of Trump. This could have galvanised a higher turnout among black and Latino voters, and even won over some of those white voters that supported Trump.

In the Republican Party the outcome was the opposite. One after another the establishment candidates fell before the rising wave of Tea Party, right-wing support for Trump, and the radical, ‘change’ candidate emerged victorious.

The election on Tuesday therefore saw the American working class faced with a choice between a candidate representing continuation of the same policies that had led to falling living standards, and a candidate claiming to stand for fundamental change: to ‘make America great again’, which in the minds of his supporters meant delivering rising living standards through driving out illegal immigrants, erecting real or figurative walls against Mexicans and Muslims, and protecting jobs through tariff barriers and punitive measures against cheap Chinese (in particular, but not exclusively) imports. As with the similarly suicidal vote for Brexit in Britain, a section of white working class voters were deceived into blaming immigrants, black people, Muslims, refugees and ‘foreign countries’ for the rundown of their communities and the pressure on their living standards. (Also in the UK a similar polarisation to that around Sanders propelled an actual socialist, Corbyn, into the leadership of the Labour Party.)

However despite the hype, Trump did not galvanise a new electorate for the Republican Party. His total vote is projected to be lower than that of either McCain or Romney when they lost in 2008 and 2012 respectively. He may have fired up existing Republican voters on a racist basis and created a greater personal commitment among his supporters, but he did not win over a new section of voters. His success in the north central states where the media has drawn attention to the tribulations of the rust-belt white working class is less down to any increase in support for the Republicans that a stay-at-home disillusionment among Democrat supporters, whose vote fell.

While the racism and casual misogyny of Trump’s campaign repelled black and Latino and most women voters, Hillary Clinton’s campaign failed to mobilise them behind her campaign. According to exit polls only 8% of Black Americans who voted supported Trump, and only 29% of Latinos (which would include the hard right Cuban émigré community in Florida that opposed Obama’s partial lifting of the US blockade on the island). 52% of women voters supported Clinton, with 42% voting Trump; whereas 53% of men voted Trump and 41% Clinton.

But despite leading in these sectors, and among poorer white workers, overall Clinton’s vote fell by about 6 million votes compared to Obama in 2012. These voters did not go to Trump – they just stayed home. The turnout in this presidential election – 48.6% – is the lowest since Coolidge was elected in 1924, and compares to 54.9% in 2012, about 7-8 million voters down. The most accurate summary of the outcome of this presidential election is not that Trump won – he did not win over a big swathe of Democrat votes on a racist basis, he lost votes overall – but that Clinton lost. Her right wing, establishment politics could not galvanise an electorate that rejects Trump, but wants a radical change that offers hope for the future. Clinton only offered business as usual.

However, the degree of disdain for Trump is reflected in the fact that – despite the momentum behind his campaign and Clinton’s failure to enthuse the electorate – with a small number of votes left to count it looks almost certain that he lost to Clinton in the overall popular vote, despite winning handsomely in the electoral college. This will be only the fourth time this has happened in a presidential election since the civil war, on each occasion a Republican becoming president having lost in the popular vote to the Democrat contender.

The electoral college itself is of a piece with other undemocratic features of the US’s two-party system – such as the role of the ‘primaries’ in selecting candidates, the function of the ‘super-delegates’ in the Democratic Party convention, and the entire way the system excludes any real chance of representation for third parties – that are precisely designed to thwart the full expression of popular opinion in US politics, even if this time they did not work to the establishment’s advantage.

In fact one of the most telling things about this US election was the inability of the ultra-powerful US ruling class to get the electoral outcome it wanted, despite a very large majority, including most of the Republican Party establishment, opposing Trump. Of course, it would be a mistake to underestimate its continuing strength and to confuse the outcome of an election with the ability of the US ruling class to fundamentally control the situation. Having been elected, Trump in office will undoubtedly drop many of the things he said during the election and on key policies will adjust to the priorities of the US establishment, including on foreign policy (his admiration for Putin for example) and globalisation. But nonetheless it signals the increasing political problems for the US ruling class as its declining relative economic weight means it is increasingly unable to deliver prosperity at home purely on the basis of its international position. The US has lived beyond its means since the 1970s, maintaining an artificially high standard of living for American workers compared to its real economic growth rate and negative trade balances through borrowing secured by the role of the dollar and the US position as military and economic guarantor of the world capitalist system, with all the consequences that eventually came home to roost in 2007-8. As the US ruling class has no intention of taking steps that could seriously turn around the fortunes of the US economy – as this would imply breaking from neoliberalism and the Washington consensus by stepping up the role of the state – it has no choice but to progressively squeeze working class incomes, with all the political consequences that are signalled by Trump’s election.

The consequences of Trump’s victory for the rest of the world are both frightening and painfully clear. A president who claims to ‘love wars’ and question why the US has not used its nuclear weapons, can be relied on to provoke new conflicts and wars. Standing up to US imperialism and its war-mongering will remain an absolutely central task.

At the same time the myth still beloved of Western liberals – and peddled in the rest of the world – that the US is the uniquely reliable source of progressive ideas, democracy and human rights is evidently no longer tenable.

The claims of American exceptionalism are debunked by Trump. With the politics of Trump at the helm, who can seriously content that, in the words of American founding father, Thomas Paine, ‘The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind’. Or who would give any credibility to George W Bush’s claim of 200 years later: ‘Our nation’s founding commitment is still our deepest commitment: In our world and here at home we will extend the frontiers of freedom’. Or believe, along with Bill Clinton and Obama, that America remains the ‘one indispensible nation’.

There is no good to be expected from the victory of Trump, only the need to struggle more determinedly against US imperialism, backwardness and racism and their apologists and acolytes at home. But at least no one should be allowed to claim that the US represents the source of progress in a fallen world or that its wars are fought for the good of humanity and the rights of all.

US ‘pivot’ to Asia hits Filipino rocks

The US foreign policy establishment is reeling after its strategy to reassert itself in Asia and contain the rise of China received a hammering from an unexpected quarter – its long-term ally, former colony and reliable stooge, the Philippines.

Roderigo Duterte, having replaced former president and US acolyte, Benigno Aquino, in July this year, immediately began distancing the Philippines from the US. This culminated in an announcement during an October visit to China that the Philippines’ foreign policy orientation was ‘separating’ from the US and that in future the country would seek to be more aligned with China.

Since 2010, the US has relied extensively on the Philippines to carry out its ‘pivot’ to Asia: a reorientation in US foreign policy aimed at countering the rise of China and securing a new period of American leadership in Asia. With the other Southeast Asian countries proving less than enthusiastic to drive forward a US policy that would damage their relations with China, the US had to depend on the Philippines to spearhead US policy in the region.

A key tactic in the US’s intervention in Southeast Asia has been to whip up tensions around the long-standing, conflicting claims to islands and shoals in the South China Sea, using these disputes to label China a ‘regional aggressor’ and persuade the other countries bordering the Sea to invite the US to act as ‘mediator’ and step up its naval presence aimed at China.

The sovereignty disputes are of long-standing, and had provoked occasional blow ups in the past, but since the 1990s had been largely managed in a multilateral framework led by ASEAN with the engagement of China. China’s approach to how to deal with the disputes had been set out by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, when he said to then president Corazon Aquino: ‘we can set aside this issue [of sovereignty] for the time being and take the approach of pursuing joint development’; and not let ‘this issue stand in the way of China's friendship with the Philippines and with other countries’. In other words, as on other similar disputes – for example with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands – China has pursued a policy of restraint, maintaining its territorial claims, but not seeking to force the issue to a conclusion, while seeking compromise on how to deal with issues like fishing rights, seabed exploration and coastguard and naval activities. In this context ASEAN was able to set a multilateral framework for how the disputants should deal with conflicts that inevitably arose, with the result that any major clash had been avoided for nearly twenty years. While all the countries neighbouring the Sea – including China – had objected to various steps others had taken at different times, the conflicting sovereignty claims had not become the overriding matter in their mutual relations. As Fu Ying, chair of the Foreign Affairs committee of the People’s Congress put it: ‘The disputes… spilled from those islands and reefs… but without spinning out of control.’

Hence when, in 2010, the US suggested the conflicting claims in the Sea required US intervention, this was not particularly welcomed. The other parties to the dispute did not see any particular new threat emerging from China’s behaviour, which remained much as it had for the previous 20 years. China was not aggressively expanding its claims in the Sea; like the other parties to the dispute it had secured its claim to specific rocks and reefs by building some facilities and other features, and maintained coastguard patrols, but this had been going on for years.

None were therefore prepared to risk their rather calm and economically productive relations with China in order to shore up a fading US Asian hegemony by whipping up a confrontation over these conflicting claims. Only the Philippines, under president Benigno Aquino enthusiastically signed up to the new US policy.

Apart from during a brief period in the 1990s, the Philippines had always been the US’s most reliable and subordinate ally in the region, and its economy was also far more dependent on trade and investment relations with the US. It had been the slowest growing of the Southeast Asian economies in the period that saw the ‘Asian miracle’ economic growth in countries like Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia through the late 1980s and 1990s. Following the 1997 Asian financial crisis most of the other ASEAN countries strongly reoriented towards regional trade and investment relations, particularly with China, and also with the growing economies of the Mekong peninsula, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Against this the Philippines’ closer integration with the US market continued, as did its slower growth. Undoubtedly Aquino hoped that the vocal support from the Philippines for US policy in the region would result in a boost to US trade and investment, particularly as the country struggled with the impact of the 2008 world financial crisis.

The Philippines’ key contribution to the US’s new policy in Asia was to provoke a confrontation with China over the disputed Scarborough Shoal. In 2012 it broke the prevailing calm by sending the Filipino Navy to drive Chinese fishing boats out of the area, where both had regularly fished for decades. When China responded in kind – by blocking Filipino fishing boats from the Shoal – Aquino accused China of behaving like ‘Hitler over the Sudetenland’ and, with US backing, referred the disputed oceanic claims between China and the Philippines to the international arbitration court in The Hague.

This was exactly the type of response that the US had been angling for in its ‘pivot’ to China. A crucial aspect of the US policy – which simultaneously played out in a similar 2012 stand-off provoked by Japan with China over the disputed islands in the East China Sea – was to use these long-standing sovereignty disputes over various rocks and islands to create confrontations with China that could give credence to US claims that China was pursuing a new expansionist and aggressive regional policy that necessitated a stepped up diplomatic and military engagement of the US to keep under control.

The problem was that despite the 2012 escalation of conflicts over the Scarborough Shoal with the Philippines and over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands with Japan, neighbouring countries were not convinced of a growing threat from China – not least because they knew exactly how and why these confrontations had come about. Thus despite all its efforts, the US failed to get ASEAN or any of its individual members to openly condemn China’s role in the South China Sea, while South Korea and Taiwan took a distance from Japan’s activities in relation to the Diaoyu. Only Vietnam, at various points, looked like getting hooked by the US tactics in the region, stepping up military collaboration with the US and occasionally echoing some of the stronger rhetoric emanating from the Philippines against China. But even Vietnam backed off from significantly risking its relations with China through itself becoming a protagonist to the Philippines’ case against China in The Hague.

Nonetheless, the narrative of plucky little Philippines against the Chinese communist behemoth had some cut-through in the West. This allowed the US to internationally justify a stepped up naval presence in the South China Sea and provocative actions toward Chinese positions in the disputed Spratly Islands. A number of US ships sailed within 12 nautical miles of Chinese installations in both the Spratlys and Paracels; US air sorties for close reconnaissance increased from about 260 in 2009 to over 1,200 in 2014; US warships and planes began making frequent so-called ‘innocent passage’ transits through China’s territorial waters and airspace. US Pacific commander Harry Harris said that the US intended to send warships to close quarters with China in the South China Sea about eight times a year. 

In July this year the US strategy was crowned by a ruling from the UN arbitration court that China’s claims and activities in the South China Sea were not lawful, finding comprehensively in favour of the Philippines. The US declared China an international ‘outlaw’, and began discussions with Japan, Australia and the UK on joint naval patrols through the South China Sea to defend ‘freedom of navigation’ and international law.

But from the very moment of this tactical triumph, the underlying weakness of the US’s position in the region began to become painfully clear. Apart from Japan and the Philippines, no other country in the region did much more than ‘note’ the Hague ruling; ASEAN could not agree a position. The Vientiane 11^th East Asian Summit ignored the ruling and strongly averred that security issues in the Sea should be dealt with by negotiations, reasserting the role of multilateral regional initiatives to manage the disputes that include rather than confront China.

The message to the US was clear: the escalation of tensions in the region since 2012 had not been welcome, and continuing attempts to use the ruling to militarise relations in the region would not be supported. There was an evident shared desire to return as rapidly as possible to the status quo ante 2012, when a combination of China’s policy of restraint in seeking any final settlement on the disputes and ASEAN’s role in setting a compromise framework for how they were handled had kept conflicts muted and manageable.

However it was the US’s former colony and chief agent in the region, the Philippines, that delivered the US a decisive blow. Announcing the Philippines would no longer deliver the bullets of US policy against China, Duterte first scuppered a proposed meeting with Obama over the summer by insulting the character of his mother, then announced that the Philippines intended to end joint military exercises with the US, finally using a visit to China in October to declare that the US-Philippines special relationship was officially over.

The visit to China and these declarations bore immediate fruit for Duterte. As well as delivering $24bn in Chinese investment deals, a couple of weeks after the visit, without any fanfare or announcement, China once more allowed Filipino fishing boats access to the Scarborough Shoal. Thus after four years of bluster by the US, the situation before the manufactured confrontation in 2012 was restored quite simply, with both Chinese and Filipino boats fishing in and around the Shoal without hindrance from either side. Ultimate sovereignty is once more shelved, with both China and Philippines formally reiterating their continuing opposed claims.

The blow of the Philippines’ announcement was closely followed by similar steps by prime minister Najib of Malaysia, who in late October signed a defence deal with China, reaffirmed that their disputes in the South China Sea would continue to be dealt with bilaterally and indicated a further general tilt towards China and away from the US in Malaysian foreign policy. Unlike the Philippines, throughout the previous 5 years of rising tensions, Malaysia had tried to steer a middle course, but these Autumn 2016 decisions indicated a significant new bias toward China.

While the primary driver for stabilising relations with China is economic, both countries have also strongly objected to US’s interventions into their domestic affairs. While Duterte’s violent ‘war on drugs’ has clearly involved extrajudicial killings and major issues of human rights, his popular mandate is currently unchallenged and he has pointedly rejected the interventions of the US on the issue as attempts to reassert its past colonial prerogatives. In Malaysia the US accuses Najib of direct involvement in a massive fraud scandal, which has also been rejected as unacceptable US interference.  While there are undoubtedly issues for which both Duterte and Najib should be held to account, neither country accepts the right of the US to interfere in its old imperious way on such domestic issues. As Najib put it, it is not for ‘the former colonial powers… to lecture countries that they once exploited on how to conduct their own internal affairs today’.

It is precisely this ability for countries to stand up to US demands on how they run their internal affairs or conduct their foreign policy that the US has sought to pre-empt by its ‘pivot’ to Asia. The option of economic collaboration with a rising China, coupled with the growing value of its military protection, means they can reject the kind of interference from the US that they just had to put up with in the past. This is what the US wants to cut off in its drive against China.

Instead this is all adding up to a looming defeat for the US in Asia and its hopes of preserving its place as the dominant power in the Pacific. Rather than a militarised standoff in the South China Sea between the smaller, weaker countries of the periphery and the mighty China, in which the US could present itself as sailing to the rescue, proposals like joint US-Japan-Australia naval patrols in the South China Sea look like nothing more than provocation.

When Duterte was in Beijing, he declared that ‘the US has lost’, culturally, economically and militarily. This is exaggerated: the US has a great deal of residual strength and once the US presidential election is out of the way, whoever wins, it will find new ploys and means to turn events in its direction. But there is no doubt that the US position in Asia has desperately weakened and its overweening project of ‘America’s Pacific century’ increasingly looks a pipedream.