I have been a keen watcher of American politics since I was in secondary school in Christ School Ado Ekiti, 60 years ago, when Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon from California and Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy from Massachusetts were running for the White House. I grew up in an intensely political family, so I was naturally drawn to politics of Nigeria and other countries.

America had been a global power from 1918 onwards following the armistice signed by imperial Germany’s High Command with the Allies at the end of the First World War. The United States by the end of the Second World War in 1945 became a super power and the only nuclear power until 1949 when Soviet Russia was able to split the atom and became a nuclear power also, thus beginning the super power rivalry until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994. So, any intelligent person concerned with survival and security of mankind had to show interest in what was going on in the USA and the USSR. World peace and human survival was maintained on the thread thin balance of power between the two super powers and on the fear of mutual nuclear annihilation or what was later described as “balance of mutual terror”.

The excitement of American politics is however no longer there for many observers. This is not because world peace is guaranteed, and it is not, particularly with the proliferation of nuclear weapons among several nuclear weapons states like the USA, the Russian federation, China, France, Great Britain, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel in what a writer described as “peace of the graveyard”. In spite of an international protocol against nuclear proliferation, quite a few countries like Iran and possibly Germany, Japan, South Korea if compelled by security considerations and threats by their neighbors have the capacity within a short time to make the bomb. Interest in American politics has waned because of the advent of the tempestuous and unguarded Donald J. Trump who can say anything without caring of its diplomatic consequences any time any day. In spite of the enormous punch the country still packs, America is just merely tolerated and endured like a bully but hardly respected any more. Trump has no respect for any leader of any country except those dictators like Vladimir Putin of Russia, Victor Orban of Hungary, Xi Jinping of China, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and the new man at the helm of affairs in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. He insults on regular basis Angela Merkel of Germany, Trudeau of Canada and Emmanuel Macron, President of France and the previous prime minister of Britain, Theresa May, the very people who made NATO a truly Atlantic alliance.

It is the hope that nothing lasts forever and that the Trump nightmare would also end possibly by January 2021 that makes us pay unusual attention to the process of who the Democratic Party flagbearer will be in the election against Trump in November this year . The signs are not good. The Iowa debacle in which it took almost a whole week to determine who won the vote of the Iowa caucus of just over 200,000 shows how unprepared the Democrats are in an election year. The man who was eventually announced as winner is Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg, an American combat veteran and a mayor of a small town in the state of Indiana and a graduate of Harvard College who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford university. He is 38 years old. Coming second is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont who is technically an independent who however sits with the Democrats in the Senate of the United States. He is Jewish, a socialist and he is 79 years old. The next two are Senator Elizabeth Warren, a law professor from Massachusetts who has been a senator since 2013. She is 70 years old. Former Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden jr. is from Delaware. He served as Obama’s vice president for eight years and was in the US Senate from 1973 to 2009 making him a veteran politician who should go into retirement if he was a wise man. He is 77 years old. A dark horse who has just thrown his hat into the ring is the former mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, who comes in with a huge war chest from his $55 billion wealth. He is 77 years old. This is the group from which the Democratic Party has to choose a candidate unless some popular governor or senator were to come in from the blues.

The question then is which of this lot would emerge the Democratic nominee? And will he be able to beat Trump. Four years ago, no one believed that Trump would be president and when he decided to run, many people dismissed him as loudmouth inexperienced television showman with a history of failed businesses and philandering. He did not only win the Republican nomination, a party that he was not even a member and also defeated the much fancied cerebral and celebrated Hilary Clinton, wife of a former president, senator from the great state of New York and Secretary of State. Although Hilary Clinton beat him by almost five million of popular votes but in the Electoral College where it mattered, Trump triumphed over Clinton. The import of this is that anything can happen in American presidential elections. Who could have believed that a skinny young black man from Chicago, born in Hawaii to a white young woman driven by more enthusiasm than wisdom, and a philandering married man from Kenya, would become the president of the United States? Anything is possible (Alles ist moglich”) as the Germans would say.

From the Democratic wannabes none stands above the others. The oldest of them Bernie Sanders is a Jew and a socialist, who has had a previous heart attack seems to attract a large following among college students and educated young people. This may be due to his policy of universal health insurance coverage and free college education and writing off of all college debts. He also wants to scale down the influence of the military industrial complex in American politics and reduce military spending while increasing spending on social security and welfare. The question is whether Old Bernie Sanders is electable. I have my doubts. The shrill professor from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, is also perhaps too extreme for America which is by and large still afflicted by misogyny and may not yet be ready for a female president. Joe Biden on account of his son’s shenanigan in Ukraine and China, earning millions of dollars for doing nothing, has probably irredeemably damaged the candidacy of his father. Michael Bloomberg, the Jewish billionaire may be resented for his money and his religion in the heartland of America where Jews are still not favorably looked at. Peter Buttigieg who now sees himself as the “gay Obama” is regarded by some as a patsy of the Wall Street crowd and who may be acceptable to liberal America of New York and California, but is not likely to be acceptable to rural America, the blacks and the Bible Belt where homophobia is rife.

So where is the candidate to beat Trump in a campaign which will be bitterly fought in which Trump will not take prisoners? The world in my own estimation, is doomed to endure Donald J Trump’s second term as president of the United States. Trump during his second term, when he has nothing to lose, may be tempted to fight Iran and possibly North Korea and that is the danger the world would face because of the Democratic party’s failure to come up with a credible and electable candidate in November 2020. The election is nine months away; this is a long time in politics. My prediction is a long shot but any intelligent reader of politics can predict the end from the beginning.

By Prof. Jide Osuntokun