American presidential election and Pakistan

The world is changing, and the election of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States sends a clear message to the whole world: the will of the people matters; and if history is not only about the past but more about change, then democracy is the most suitable way to bring about this change. Trump calls his victory the biggest in America’s political history. In some ways he is right, since he has not been able to achieve a second term in the 2020 election and was defeated by Joe Biden, his return to power with a huge support of the American people is a fabulous election victory for him.

More than anything else, the current US election has brought about regime change. Any regime will be defined as a system that is rule-based and also based on political structures and institutions through which rules are exercised. The outgoing Biden regime presided over the violation of international rules and would easily stand out as the worst American regime to prefer inaction when human rights were violated in Gaza and elsewhere in the world. The regime’s epitaph can be written in words that highlight how it handled two international issues of great global importance that it misread, misled and mishandled – the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine. The unnecessary provocation of Russia, NATO’s continued eastward expansion, disregard for the Russian sphere of influence, and the Biden regime’s reliance on conducting provocative and predatory geopolitics were factors that contributed to limiting the chances of ending the war in Ukraine and prolonging and pushing it into in its third year. . The war in Gaza is the greatest humanitarian disaster the helpless modern world has been forced to witness. In a changing world where human rights and civil rights matter to people and societies around the world, the Biden regime lost all counters of checks and balances and supported Israel to find a solution to the problem the old fashioned way – through brute force.

The people of America gave a verdict that such a regime never deserved another chance. For the American people, domestic politics mattered, and for them the voting issues may have been race, gender, cost of living, etc. But overall, you can easily say that the resounding factor has been to see a change of regime.

America is lucky because when people realize and express their preferences through the electoral system, that realization is allowed to become a reality and create opportunities for governmental realignment. Under the new American regime, the American people hope to see an end to the war in Ukraine. They also hope to see an end to the Israeli military operations that result in the worst human atrocities ever committed against innocent civilians in modern history. Domestically, they want to see the backs of illegal immigrants, especially those with criminal records. America, they hope, will become clean again, safe again, and cheaper to live and survive.

In Pakistan, the US presidential election and its outcome mean two clear things. The current regime should be unhappy with the loss of Joe Biden and would be unsure how the US under Trump can engage with them. Their major concern would be what Trump might do when the post-mortem report on Pakistan’s democracy is presented to him. Of course, democracy has been allowed to die a slow death with a thousand cuts under the current Pakistani government. When the president of the greatest power in the world takes the highest office based on how the people of his country were allowed to express their feelings, supported and allowed to make their preferences, he absolutely would not side with any regime that does otherwise and creates a political chaos instead of accepting the will of the people. The defeat of the US regime that supported such political chaos in Pakistan has brought more smiles on the faces of the people than the fact that Trump will be heading the new US administration.

For Pakistan, the day of the US presidential election was a day of soul-searching. The system of government in America, like Pakistan, is guaranteed by the constitution. But unlike in America, the state in Pakistan rules people without benevolence and without taking into account their preferences. In Pakistan, too, something other than democracy has begun to emerge – oligarchy, the group of rulers who are no longer accessible to people. If the desire to channel people’s wishes and preferences into a system is not a priority, and if the rules and laws are arrived at without consulting those affected by them, then it is no longer a democracy – it is an autocracy. Autocracy is derived from the Greek words auto meaning self and kratos meaning power or strength. Thus, it creates an absolutist central authority that deprives the people of their right to vote in or vote a regime out of power. Autocracy is anything that is not democratic, and today Pakistan is a good model of a regime that exhibits the noble example of autocracy.

There is a big debate going on in Pakistan about what the new America under Trump will do for Pakistan. To pour cold water on the debate, I would like to suggest that the US will only indulge Pakistan if it can serve some of its strategic purposes. At least that has been the story of US-Pakistan relations so far. There is no involvement of Afghanistan and USA there that Pakistan can profit from. China, which is the major American competitor, is also not making much progress in the way it would have envisioned culminating its CPEC project in Pakistan. So there does not seem to be any urgency in the US establishment to see China-Pakistan relations as a good springboard to project Chinese power in the region and escalate its progress towards assuming a global leadership role. Pakistan is too far away and too irrelevant to seek President Trump’s attention. Not any time soon, when he would have so many other burning issues to attend to.