U.S. election chaos would endanger the whole world

The world is feeling the angst of liminality, as America’s friends and foes await the outcome of the presidential election next week. Will the superpower have Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as commander in chief? Until that question is answered, nothing much can move, nothing of note can be resolved. But what if no answer is forthcoming, at least not for a while?

Picture decision makers around the world holding their collective breath right now. In the Middle East, which teeters on the edge of major regional war, envoys from Israel, Egypt, the United States and Qatar are once again meeting in Doha about a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. But nobody will commit to anything until American voters decide who will sit at the Resolute Desk come January.

In the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin is waiting for the result on Nov. 5 to decide his next steps in Ukraine and elsewhere. (He’s rooting for Trump, but wary of that scenario too.) In North Korea, Kim Jong Un is paying close attention to the vote as he brandishes his nukes at South Korea. From Beijing to Tehran, Minsk and Caracas, anti-American autocrats are on tenterhooks to find out who their new adversary will be.

America’s allies are in limbo too. Japan, which was already nervous about a second Trump turn, suddenly has its own government crisis, after an election that left no clear winner for the first time since the 1990s. Germany’s government, a year from the next parliamentary election, is a zombie coalition that may fall apart at any moment. Like all American allies, Tokyo and Berlin wonder if they’ll still have a friend in the White House next year, or instead a nationalist who slaps tariffs on their exports and threatens to abandon them to their enemies.

And then there are all the other countries, those which are neither allies nor adversaries of the U.S., but once looked to it, and only it, to provide some semblance of order in an anarchical world. That’s true from the South Pacific to Africa, where nations are feeling pressure to decide between America and China in mapping out future allegiances. The angst is especially acute in places like Moldova and Georgia, which are swaying between a Russian-dominated East and the Euro-American West and just had elections in which Moscow, as usual, ran massive disinformation campaigns.

The liminality extends to the multilateral system, as embodied in the United Nations and other institutions of international law. Already losing relevance in a world of war and disorder, the U.N. may not survive, at least in recognizable form, a second term by Trump, who dismisses the organization as a club of "globalists." Its fate under Harris is almost as unclear.

Even if Trump wins, Nov. 5 might bring some relief as long as it delivers a decision and indicates a clear direction. A worse scenario, however, cannot be ruled out. That’s an absence of resolution, through a contested transfer of power that plays out over months, either in the courts or, heaven forbid, in the streets, with verbal or physical violence of the kind that the United States used to criticize in other countries.

Neither the U.S. nor the world has experience with such a horror script set in America. The close election of 2000 (when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore, but only by a hair and after much lawyering) was a cliff-hanger. But it took place during a "unipolar" moment of geopolitics, when no other power dared to test American might and resolve during the transition.

The contentious handover of 2020 was more dangerous, but found resolution once the coup of Jan. 6, 2021, failed. World politics was already wobbly but not yet careening: That happened more recently, after Putin invaded all of Ukraine, after Hamas massacred Israelis and Israel bombed Gaza and Lebanon, and as China ratcheted up its intimidation of Taiwan. Worse yet, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran began forming an anti-American "axis" in all but name, raising the specter of World War III.

A contested transition in 2024 would be more perilous for another reason. Both domestic polarization and foreign disinformation are old news. This year, though, Russia, China and Iran have plumbed new depths of malign sophistication in the propaganda and conspiracy theories they plant and spread to pit Americans against one another. Trump is likely to build on his Big Lie about the 2020 election with even bigger lies, and the trolls and bots of America’s enemies, as well as "useful idiots" in America itself, will amplify them.

Even if America avoids violence this fall and winter, even if either Trump or Harris arrives uncontested in the Oval Office, even if the White House and Congress go to the same side: This larger "epistemic crisis" will keep the U.S. divided and the world in the lurch. Just as Americans can no longer agree on who won an election, they’re increasingly unable to stipulate who is aggressor and victim in Ukraine, say, what principles and interests are worth America’s trouble abroad, and what America’s proper role in the world should be.

Nature abhors a vacuum, Aristotle said. So does geopolitics. The world risks facing a vacuum in the coming months and years, no matter what the ballot count says next week — a vacuum not so much of power, as of truth, reason and ambition.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics.