Donald Trump's improbable ascendancy to the American presidency in 2016 confounded the global left-liberal intelligentsia. Shrieks of ideological horror could be heard from around the world. How could this have occurred? How could Americans do this to themselves? How could they destroy our cherished idea of America as the land of the free holding forth the torch of liberation and justice to the masses dying to touch its gilded shores? Oh, what a calamity this is!

Trump's return to the most powerful office in the world this month has raised similarly apocalyptic visions of destruction and devastation. Will he destroy whatever remains of the global order? Will he embolden Israel to the point of treating Gaza and Lebanon as a launch pad for the military transformation of the Middle East? Or will America retreat into isolationism, leaving the world at the tender mercy of autocratic Russia, China, North Korea and Iran? Will he pull America out of NATO and walk away from Taiwan?

Perhaps not. The key to answering global questions about the Trump presidency is look at domestic America.

America is a broken country. It is fractured along two crucial lines: a globalised economy that has little time for and less patience with the millions struggling with inflation and other everyday problems; and a globalised politics in which polished left-liberals such as the vanquished Kamala Harris speak about America as a land of freedom and opportunity, particularly for migrants, when millions of generational Americans born and bred in the country of their ancestors wonder how their descendants will live.

Trump appeared as the protector of that other America, an uncomfortable, raw, native, marginalised and subaltern America on which others depend, whether by way of their gilded access to Silicon Valley and other economic nirvanas of the United States, or by depending on America to protect them from regional or proto-global bullies (and sometimes not carrying their fair share of the military burden that the United States incurs in the process). The way in which Trump managed to garner the votes of working-class whites, Hispanics and blacks was a resounding rejection of the elite internationalism in whose terms Harris spoke of freedom and democracy. Americans take those public goods for granted, but they are more interested in keeping their jobs and putting food on the table at a time of rising costs.

Now, Trump is no socialist. That anyway is a bad word in America. He is an unrepentant capitalist who has made his fortune from the workings of the American market, aided by the workings of the global market that American military imperium upheld during and after the Cold War. But Americans do not care. Most of them are not socialists either. They do not mind the global market working for them: They mind working for a global market that does not care a fig for whether they live or die. It is to them that Trump reached out. He would save them from the world, he said. And they believed him. Whom else should they have believed?

This, then, represents the sources of Trump's domestic appeal: His promise of a viscerally new America. Of course, he may find it difficult to live up that promise. Placing punitive tariffs on imports will raise the prices of local products given that American demand exceeds American supply. And so on. But he is a politician, whom voters take at face value. Should politicians in America, or anywhere else, keep their promises, the world would become a paradise.

It is not.

Trump Abroad

The American political system is based on checks and balances. There will not be an onerous lot of them on Trump since he has won both the electoral and popular vote, and the Republicans have taken control of the Senate, have come within a whisker of controlling the House of Representatives (at the time of writing) and enjoy a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. The executive, legislature and judiciary could be expected to further Trump's radical political agenda.

Not so the rest of the world: It is another country. Its workings rest on the balance of power. Not even American hegemony can disturb that fundamental principle of international relations.

How would the global balance of power look under Trump? His expected rapprochement with Russia would be welcome, since it would end the war in Ukraine which began with NATO's provocative use of that country as a proxy to bring the organisation's eastward expansion to the very borders of great-power Russia. Trump's lack of affection for China (reciprocated with equal fervour) would see him trying to cut the country down to size, but China has outgrown America so much already in Asia that even a China reduced in power would remain Asia's preponderant regional power. However, Trump would probably succeed in diluting the Sino-Russian entente that emerged recently because of their common hostility to America. That would be a tremendous success for American foreign policy, perhaps the greatest success since the Sino-American rapprochement of 1971 inaugurated the last phase of the Cold War, which had earlier brought Moscow and Beijing together against Washington. President-elect Trump might follow in the footsteps of presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the first of whom oversaw American overtures to China and the second of whom presided over the fall of the Soviet Union.

Outside Pacific Asia, though, things are less benign for America. In Europe, any American wavering in its commitment to NATO would destroy the basis of European security and embolden Russia. In the Middle East, Trump's almost biological support for Israel might not help the Jewish state beyond a point because it would bring the two arch-enemies, Saudi Arabia and Iran, closer since an American carte blanche for Israel would create problems for both Arabs and Persians ultimately. After all, they live in the Middle East, whereas Americans live in North America. One can exchange hegemons, but one cannot exchange neighbours.

In short, the global balance of power will begin to reassert itself if Trump goes overboard in his America First zeal.

The world will continue to be itself.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow at the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com