The U.S. Presidential Elections

Every presidential election has elements of circumstance, given by conjecture or substance and related to the great problems of a country, and there are distinct ways of dealing with them. There are moments when the elements of substance predominate. It was the case of Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression. There are moments when the elements of substance fall to the side during the electoral process and the elements of circumstance predominate. It was what happened in the first election of George W. Bush, in an international context favorable to U.S. predominance in the world.

The current dispute in the U.S. between the Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, has as its background the end of Bush’s second term and his discredited administration. Other ingredients in the current election are the differences between the lives of the candidates and their running mates. In any case, much more than the ingredients of circumstance, substance is at play in this election. In effect, the profundity of the economic-financial crisis caused the insufficiencies of the gestation of the country and the internal and external limits of American power to come out. This is why both candidates talk about change.

In the U.S., change has an international dimension in two senses. It will affect the world, as a function of the relevance of the U.S. to the dynamics of the functioning of international life. On the other hand, the U.S. cannot make progress on any of the great themes of the campaign—the economy, security, energy,the environment, immigration—without a concerted effort to work with other countries. Therefore, by virtue of these interdependencies, the substantive agenda of the American electoral debate coincides in large part with the problems present on the international agenda.

Resolving the economic-financial crisis will require more than the capacity of internal action by the U.S. This does not mean that there is no room for action by the next administration in terms of responsibility in the management of the American economy’s accounts. From there comes the discussion that permeates the campaign, about fiscal policy and the distribution of its onus, about the direction of public expenditure, including social security coverage, and about the functioning of the market, which was deregulated and inadequately overseen during the Bush administration, as the housing bubble crisis demonstrated. I predict that the potential of recession will bring out the problem of poverty and job creation in the U.S., which were aggravated during the Bush presidency, complicating the problems of immigration. This will complicate the relationship of the U.S. with Mexico and Central America, and will definitely stimulate the propensity to protectionism, with an impact on international trade negotiations.

In the globalized world in which we live, the crisis transcends the U.S. It has been transformed into a global crisis of liquidity and solvency, a function of “toxic credit” and confidence in the financial system, due to the collapse of financial engineering tied to derivatives. It is generating significant international tension. It can only be abated through a high degree of international cooperation and will require multilateral initiative in the reforming of the global regulatory architecture.

International security, in the Bush administration, had as a priority intervention in Iraq and the fight against terrorism—150,000 American soldiers in Iraq have been fighting for longer than the U.S. troops during the second World War. Because of this, the Iraq theme has a strong presence in the electoral debate. The American position in the world has deteriorated and is contributing to the radicalization of the Muslim world and to the wave of anti-western sentiment. The fight against terrorism, with flagrant disrespect towards human rights, has been compromising the moral position of the U.S. in dealing with the normative ambitions of the international agenda. Because of this, the prison at Guantanamo is prominent in the electoral debate.

President Bush’s successor will inherit, with these liabilities, the reality of limited resources and a decrease in what can be accomplished through American unilateral action. To take on these and other problems that have been growing on the agenda of war and peace, the next president will have to find, as in the economic arena, the cooperation of other states to create new consensus that will permit favorable conditions of international governance of collective security.

The environment, climate change, and the energy matrix are themes of the American electoral debate. This is an agenda of unequivocal global reach, which requires a difficult international cooperation, since it deals with issues that transcend sovereign states. Related to these issues, the challenge of unilateralism versus multilateralism will be on the agenda for the successor of President Bush.

In sum, President Bush’s successor has in front of him the challenge of exerting a kind of leadership that associates innovation and transformation with pacification and harmony. This is true for both internal and external plans, given that globalization promotes the expressive coincidence between the national and international agendas of the U.S. Because of this, the next U.S. president’s success in moving forward with the substantive issues of his country will depend on managing to overcome the impact of electoral parochialism and of the intolerances of the “culture war,” dealing with the challenge of the collective cohabitation on a planetary scale. This depends on competence in understanding common and shared interests, through the administration of inequalities of power and the mediation of cultural diversity and conflicts in values.


Celso Lafer, titular professor at the University of São Paulo Law School, member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the Brazilian Academy of Letters, was Minister of External Relations in president Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration.