The Great American Election. Yawn.

**Just enjoy the drama, if that’s your cup of tea.

This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.

**
Every four years the news-consuming people of India get caught up discussing politics—US politics. They seem to know a lot about the potential candidates, the nominees, the primaries and so on. Things seem to get a lot more exciting when the candidates square off on television. It’s a grand spectacle, much song, dance and drama, rivalling the Olympic Games and the Cricket World Cup.

It’s all very nice if you see this as good harmless entertainment. But if you are not a voter, and perhaps if you are not a certain Russian political leader, you don’t have a, er, dog in this fight. Enjoy the television if that’s your favourite poison, but hey, don’t even begin to ask “what will it mean for India?” Not even this time.

Now, I’ve had a lot of fun over the past year trolling my American friends with questions like “So, how will this change under President Trump?”, to sophisticated explanations of how the US party systems and electoral colleges work; and to decreasingly confident pronouncements of why that will never happen.

For the rest of the world, you play the ball as it comes to the bat. Perhaps Mr Trump will do this if he becomes president, but then again, maybe the policy roulette will point in a different direction. Perhaps Mrs Clinton will do that if she becomes president, but then again, global events might cause her to chart a different course. Or the other way around. We just don’t know. Analysts claiming to predict foreign policies under future presidents are demonstrating more conceit than analysis.

In foreign policy, it is mostly better to be prepared to manage consequences than try predicting the future. Let’s wait for whoever US citizens vote in as their president. And then let’s deal with him. Or even her.

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