The Geopolitics Of Trump’s Victory

Geopolitics played a central role in the US’ latest presidential election. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris weren’t just competing against the other’s envisaged socio-economic organization of the country, but also their respective worldviews. The world is on the brink of another major war between Great Powers as the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine and the back-and-forth Israeli-Iranian strikes push everyone closer to the edge of all-out conflict. Tensions also continue rising between the US and China.

All three fault lines have been exacerbated as a result of American meddling in Eurasia. The US has emboldened Ukraine, Israel, and the Japan-Taiwan-Philippines trilateral to aggressively confront Russia, Iran, and China, the three most powerful engines of multipolarity on the supercontinent. These plans were already in motion long before Joe Biden entered office, but they were prioritized by his liberal-globalist administration that perfectly aligned itself with likeminded “deep state” forces.

What’s meant by the latter is the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, though additional forces like academia, wealthy state-connected philanthropists and investors, and others are sometimes included in this definition as well. Regardless of however one defines the “deep state” and whether they consider it to be a unified actor or a disparate group of competing forces, it’s responsible for policy formulation and implementation.

What unites them is their belief in maintaining US hegemony, but they sometimes differ over the most effective means for doing so. The “deep state’s” establishment traditionally sought to contain Russia – whether the Russian Federation or the Soviet Union – but gradually began to take notice of China’s rise in the early 2000s and consider prioritizing its containment instead. 9/11 offset both plans, after which the “deep state” settled on containing Russia first as a means for facilitating China’s containment after.

Its establishment members fiercely hate Trump since his unexpected election in 2016 saw him pivot towards containing China instead, but his promised rapprochement with Russia was ultimately sabotaged by their subversive efforts, after which they contributed to defrauding him of his 2020 victory. With Biden in power, they were able to pick up where they left off with and implement the strategy that they had originally devised for Hillary Clinton, namely worsening the NATO-Russian security dilemma.

China once again took second seat to containing Russia, which prompted Vladimir Putin to share his security guarantee requests in December 2021 with a view towards reforming the European security architecture in order to alleviate worsening New Cold War tensions in this half of Eurasia. His proposals were rejected, however, which compelled him to resort to the use of force for ensuring Russia’s national security interests in Ukraine, where NATO had clandestinely expanded as part of this containment policy.

The resultant proxy war that’s raged since February 2022 brought Russia and the US closer to the brink of nuclear war than anytime since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Over a year and half later, Israel felt emboldened by full US support for Ukraine to launch its all-out war on Gaza after Hamas’ 7 October attack. This was then expanded to include surgical strikes against Iranian targets, both inside that country and Syria, which provoked their back-and-forth strikes that brought that region to the brink too.

The Asia-Pacific is comparatively stabler, but the US took advantage of global attention towards those other corners of Eurasia to quietly expand AUKUS through unofficial partnerships with Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, which created the basis for an Asian NATO that has yet to be formalized. China sees what’s happening and has thus reacted very carefully in order to avoid inadvertently triggering a larger conflict like the one that followed Russia’s special operation. The situation is still very dangerous though.

Trump promised to end the wars in Eastern Europe and West Asia while hinting that he doesn’t want a similar war to break out in the Asia-Pacific even though he’ll probably resume his trade war on China. He’s a businessman who believes in prioritizing his country’s domestic development, including replenishing its empty stockpiles that were given to Ukraine and securing the border with Mexico, over warmongering for ideological or financial reasons. This worldview is the polar oppose of Harris’.

She and the “deep state” establishment that are behind her want endless wars for the aforementioned reasons related to aggressively exporting their radical liberal-globalist agenda and profiting from the military-industrial complex’s consequent explosion in business opportunities. They also adhere to the divide-and-rule policy pioneered by the late Zbigniew Brzezinski of waging Hybrid Wars for sowing “creative chaos” across Eurasia while Trump is more a Henry Kissinger-influenced geopolitical balancer.

The first school of thought has been predominant among the American “deep state” since the end of the Old Cold War while the second had its heyday under Nixon, and it’s the latter which Trump and his minority of sympathizers in the “deep state” want to revive in the contemporary geopolitical conditions. It’s unclear what form modern-day “Triangulation” could take, and it might not fully succeed if the “deep state” sabotages him again, but it’s expected to be much more peaceful than the Brzezinski-like policy.

Having explained the differing “deep state” worldviews represented by Trump and Harris, it’s now time to speak about the influence that this had on the electorate. In general, Americans presumably voted with economic issues at the forefront of their minds, but many also knew that a vote for Trump represented a vote for peace while a vote for Harris represented a vote for war. The fear that many have of World War III nowadays therefore arguably played an important role in his victory.

There are other related motivations behind why specific demographics voted for him. The Polish American community that largely resides in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and whom Harris had tried to court in recent months was considered by the NYT to be a kingmaker. Politico earlier warned, however, that Harris’ scaremongering about Trump preparing to hand Poland over to Putin could backfire since most of these Rust Belt voters only care about economic issues.

It remains unclear at the time of writing whether Polish Americans ultimately played this kingmaker role in Pennsylvania or not, but many don’t have the close ties to their ancestral homeland that Harris assumed that they do and thus likely weren’t swayed by her rhetoric. Interestingly enough, the Amish ended up voting in what the New York Post described as “unprecedented numbers” due to the efforts of one passionate activist, and this could have complemented Polish Americans’ reported role.

What can be safely assumed though is that Latinos and particularly Puerto Ricans in the pivotal swing state of Pennsylvania didn’t turn against Trump en masse like the media claimed they would after a comedian made an off-color joke about the latter’s island in the days before the election. Data analysis is underway, but it seems that they placed a higher importance on his socio-economic policies, including his hard line against illegal immigration, than they did on the Democrats’ divisive identity politics.

In all three cases, Trump’s domestic and foreign policy appeals to these demographics succeeded in getting enough of them to vote for him to turn Pennsylvania red, which won him the election. More research should be undertaken once all the data is available to discover the extent to which particular policies convinced them to support him over Kamala, especially the role that his worldview played. For now, however, it can be posited with a comfortable degree of confidence that it wasn’t insignificant.

All of this would have been for naught though if it wasn’t for the cyber geopolitical dimension of Elon Musk liberating Twitter (now X) from the “deep state” establishment’s draconian censorship upon concluding his purchase of that social media giant in late 2022. Had the prior status quo still been in effect, then Americans would have struggled to discover that many of their compatriots doubted the government’s narratives just like they did, thus possibly demoralizing them enough to not vote.

By providing them with a platform on which to freely share their views without fear of political censorship like before, which helped them network with one another and do what was needed to get out the vote this year, Musk made an enormous contribution to Trump’s victory that can’t be overstated. Although imperfect, the reforms that he made greatly liberated the American internet, which ended the “deep state’s” de facto monopoly on the domestic discourse that was previously upheld by Twitter.

That had the effect of transforming Twitter from a gatekept “national internet” to something more akin to the “global commons” that it was initially conceived as being. Musk himself contributed to generating thought-provoking discussions on domestic politics and even geopolitics through his tweets about the election and the Ukrainian Conflict. While his critics claimed that he was influencing users, what he was really doing was encouraging them to discuss these sensitive issues and learn more about them.

He created an environment where people finally felt comfortable expressing themselves without having to self-censor out of fear that they’d be shadow banned or have their account suspended for violating unwritten liberal-globalist ideological dogmas. Once again, his reforms have been imperfect and some people are still shadow banned, but Twitter (now X) is a very different platform nowadays under his ownership than the one that he inherited, and this helped defeat the “deep state” establishment.

What’s unique about Musk is that he does business with some of these same “deep state” establishment forces like the Pentagon, but he’s still autonomous and powerful enough (due to his immense wealth and ownership of Twitter/X) to advance a competing agenda. Like Trump, his worldview is much closer to the Kissingerian balancing one that prioritizes Nixon-era domestic development than the Brzezinski-like worldview that wants to unleash “creative chaos” across the world for divide-and-rule purposes.

Neither Trump nor Musk are “threats” to the “deep state” as an institution, they simply represent the minority school of thought that hasn’t been predominant for decades and was thought to have been on the brink of ideational extinction for lack of a better description. At the same time, however, it’s precisely because of Trump championing this particular worldview that its ideological rivals were obsessed with sabotaging him and even arguably trying to assassinate him.

They might still succeed just like how they ruined his earlier promise to repair ties with Russia, but it’s premature to predict what’ll happen and unwise to lend credence to “doom and gloom” narratives after Trump’s historic comeback emboldened his base and “deep state” supporters like never before. Whatever unfolds, and it’ll become clearer with time, observers should remember the role that geopolitics played in his victory and researchers should study it more closely after the data is available.