Obama too handed Biden a wreck, as much as Trump

The US elections are, in a sense, the elections of the whole world. The ironic part is that they are elections in which only American citizens vote, yet everyone is concerned with the results, and the results affect everyone.

For months the whole world has been following the presidential race between Trump and Biden as closely as if it were its own election. Everyone is trying to determine a position by looking at who will win the election. This includes China, Russia and even the EU countries, of course, but more importantly the countries of the Middle East and the Gulf. Each of them, in order to be directly involved in the US elections, did not even refrain from channeling funds to election campaigns through lobbies in the US.

Of course, the disappointment that certain countries rumored to have channeled serious funds to Trump experienced after the election can easily be read from their demeanor. However much we said the US elections were none of our concern, the position adjustments of other countries inevitably affect us as well. Positively or negatively, but they will affect us.

I generally pay no attention to those who say that, whoever the president in the US may be, especially its foreign policy never changes. In fact, we have had a very serious experience, particularly with the Trump example, of what a leader's personality and character can do when they meet the authority he holds. Thus, on this occasion, we have seen with our own eyes that presidents who represent a continuity in US politics were playing that role by their own choice as well, and that if they wished they could change a great many things. Trump perhaps was an extreme example in this regard. He left no institution and no tradition untouched in nearly 250 years of American governance. As a crazy president, he turned all the routines of US domestic and foreign policy upside down.

Of course, we cannot say that everything he did was good. There is a deep oligarchic structure in the US that has taken the economy and politics captive. In fact, all the democratic processes in the US are nothing more than a charade to conceal the deep power of this oligarchic structure, which the famous sociologist C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite.

Trump himself actually came out of the midst of these power elites. He knew them very well. He knew very well all the mechanisms and protocols they had built to maintain their own order of sharing, and he stepped on their corns. No one can say, of course, that he was revolutionary enough to propose a new order. But it is quite clear that he displayed a discord within those elites and put them in difficulty by throwing the tricks they were playing back in their faces.

It was an important step that, by trampling on many rules and conventions of so many years of American democratic government, he showed that a president can do politics as he wishes within the American system, and that the paths of politics are not as blocked as was thought. But this does not show that the steps he took, once he set about doing politics, were the right ones. He opened the political veins that had been closed within the US not in the name of more positive values but, on the contrary, in the name of far worse choices.

The xenophobia, racism and anti-globalization rhetoric he resorted to in order to revive the US economy and political influence put the US, whose record was already bad enough, on an even worse path. Above all, the processes he started in the Middle East made the US more Zionist, more Islamophobic and a stronger patron of dictatorships. He did not care at all about the human rights violations that had become routine in the countries of the Arab world; he looked only at the money he would make. He never shied away from stating this opportunism openly. Perhaps in the eyes of his own voters he even earned points for his bluntness. In the same way, he openly paid the Egyptian coup-maker president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi what he considered a compliment, calling him "my favorite dictator", though he did not care what position this compliment would put him in. Just as he did when he exposed his disrespectful dialogue with the King of Saudi Arabia in a party rally speech.

Despite all his objections to the election results, we can of course expect the shocks Trump caused in the political routines of the US to subside. We can expect that Biden, who has been present at every level of US politics for forty years, will be busy for a long time clearing the wreckage he inherited from Trump. That on the very first day he signed decisions returning to some of the international agreements Trump had withdrawn from, and above all signed the decision lifting the travel restrictions imposed on some Muslim countries, are hopeful steps.

The serious loss of prestige that the US has suffered in the region, particularly because of its Middle East and Turkey policies, is not only a problem of the Trump era. Throughout the eight years of the Obama administration as well, the US's policies on Syria, Palestine and the Arab Spring in particular headed in a direction that rendered America's values and its claims to world leadership void. If Biden is to have a strategic policy for US leadership, he will have to deal not only with the wreckage of the Trump period but also with the wreckage handed down from the Obama period, his predecessor from his own party.