What will the US Presidential election change?

Presidential elections will be held in the United States at the end of this year. For this reason, the candidate-selection campaigns in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are continuing at full speed. In fact, Donald Trump's candidacy in the Republican Party has almost been settled. Trump, who has established superiority over his rivals with the vote shares he received in the state primaries, is only expected to be nominated (or not nominated) by the Republican Party. In the Democratic Party the race is still continuing.

Trump's extraordinary personality and the discriminatory, racist language he has used throughout the election campaign have made him one of the most talked-about names of 2016. The hate speech he uses especially against Muslims is being followed with concern by Muslims in the US. This approach of Trump's seems likely to deepen discrimination against Muslims in American society even further.

With Trump's rise to prominence there is a simultaneity, a parallelism, with the increase in discriminatory practices directed at Muslims. In this framework, not a day passes without new news falling onto the wires. Examples could be multiplied. In recent days we read that an Italian mathematician was taken off a plane after the complaint of a passenger who mistook his differential equation for Arabic script. This example alone can help in describing and understanding the schizophrenia that has begun to take root in American society.

On the other hand, the Republican Party is divided over whether or not to nominate for the Presidency Donald Trump, who has clearly based his election campaign on hate speech. Because of this division, eyes had turned to the meeting to be held between the Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.

Ryan is one of the leading names in the Republican Party. It is quite noteworthy that after the meeting Ryan underlined that, despite their differences of opinion, they were determined to cooperate in order to win the election, and that they thought the US could not bear another four years of Democratic rule.

Ryan's statement recalls the 1976 US elections. Gerald Ford, who had been brought to the Presidency by Nixon's resignation from office after the Watergate Scandal, and Ronald Reagan faced each other in the 1976 elections for the presidency within the Republican Party. At that time there was an atmosphere of optimism in international relations created by the Helsinki Final Act, regarded as the peak of "Détente" in the Cold War.

However, in this election campaign Ronald Reagan challenged the optimistic atmosphere created by "Détente" and stressed that the US should start a new campaign directed at the Soviets. Reagan claimed that the USSR was lulling American society to sleep with slogans such as "peaceful coexistence" and was spreading a satanic order.

Reagan's harsh election campaign brought with it a rupture in the Republican Party similar to today's. When the party elites put their weight behind Gerald Ford, Reagan, who had run a quite successful campaign, lost the presidential nomination to Gerald Ford, though by a narrow margin.

But Ford lost the presidential race against Carter, the Democratic Party's presidential candidate. I think what pushes Paul Ryan to cooperate with Trump is this experience from the past. On the other hand, there are many who put forward the thesis that no better rival than Trump could be found to guarantee the presidency of Hillary R. Clinton.

When such an equation is at issue, the first and simplest question that comes to mind is which one's being elected would be in the interest of the region and the world, and would contribute to peace and stability. To be able to answer this question one needs to recall the actions of the Democratic administration under Obama.

The election of Obama, who came from a family that had been Muslim a generation earlier, and who was from the black community that had been oppressed for many years in the US and treated as second-class citizens, had created excitement. But on the day after he was elected, Obama, saying he could not comment on Israel's "Cast Lead" operation against Gaza, in which many civilians and children lost their lives, on the grounds that he had not yet taken office, had given clues for the period that followed as well.

The inconsistency of Obama's foreign policy has a large effect in the deepening of the Syrian civil war, which is about to enter its fifth year in Syria today. In the power vacuum that arose in Iraq and in the developments in Libya, the failure, even the fiasco, of the Obama administration in crisis management is the principal factor. Moreover, the attitude shown by a US President elected with an emphasis on democratic values toward the bloody coup that took place in Egypt is instructive.

After such an Obama administration, it seems that whoever comes could not do worse. Trump, by stating that if elected he would not touch Bashar Assad in Syria and would turn to war with DAESH, also showed to a degree that there are no serious differences between him and Obama.

What Clinton will bring that is different from Obama if she becomes President is a matter of curiosity. In short, it seems that in fact not much will change in the US whoever is elected. Perhaps the matter hinges not on who becomes president but on what the US's position in the world order will be.