 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Prof. Vijay Prashant and we will try and understand this phenomenon called Trump, who has become now the 45th President of the United States. I think the rest of the world was misled by the US media and believing that he was completely in aberration. Now it seems that he is the norm for America as it exists today. Vijay, do you think it's fair to say that Trump failed to defeat Trump, but Hillary succeeded where Trump had failed? She defeated Hillary. Look, as far as the American ruling class is concerned, that is to say the entire elite that is close to the Democratic Party and the entire elite that's close to the Republican Party, including of course the family of the Bushes, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, his brother Jeb Bush, who was defeated by Donald Trump in the Republican primary. The entire swathe of the American ruling class went for Hillary Clinton and they assumed that somehow the buffoonery of Donald Trump, the outrageous statements made by Donald Trump, his missteps, the tape released with him speaking in an incredibly predatory way about women, they assumed that all these things, in other words, Donald Trump defeating Donald Trump would essentially bring Hillary Clinton to power. The issue is also that Hillary's corruption, what WikiLeaks disclosed, the way DNC, the Democratic National Committee, sabotaged all other opposition, including Bernie Sanders. All that, you know, why did the American media believe that it would make no impact on the elections? Well, look, there's two things to say. One is that I think I just want to repeat that the media presentation was almost entirely a mirror of not society in general, but the anxieties and in a sense the hopes of the American ruling elite. You know, Hillary Clinton's history and agenda was perfectly compatible with all strands of the ruling elite, whereas Trump was decidedly unpredictable. So the media itself was extremely, you know, difficult to take seriously because it wasn't capable of understanding American society. It was merely mirroring the views of the elite. That's fine. You can mirror the view of the elite, but to say that all those leaks that WikiLeaks documents provided were put in. Now that is taking the people to be stupid, isn't it? Well, look, you know, it's very interesting. Trump began to say that the election is rigged and he began to say this on two counts. One, he sort of said, suggested that there might be actual rigging at the polls. But most of his advisors cautioned against that interpretation and said what they mean is that the media is roundly against Trump, you know, all the way from the liberal media, New York Times, et cetera. And right after Fox News, where there was a split, you know, ordinarily Fox News is a hundred percent from the Republicans. In this case, several of the Fox commentators had their doubts about Donald Trump, which means that across the entire swath of the media, there was an attempt, you know, not to highlight the flaws of Hillary Clinton and also to underplay the WikiLeaks, you know, revelations from the emails of one of Hillary Clinton's closest advisors, John Podesta. In fact, when the Clinton campaign of the Democrats started to bang this drum that it was the Russians interfering in the American election and that, you know, Donald Trump somehow was in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. And that's how WikiLeaks got the material to basically undermine the Democrats and give the election to Trump. When they pushed this view that this is a Russian plot, every time the mainstream media mentioned any of these WikiLeaks cables, they said, alleged to be given by the Russians. In other words, they underplayed what was in these emails and they continue to insinuate, despite the fact that there's no conclusive evidence that somehow this was Russia interfering in the elections. Well, Hillary would really be the new liberal normal. And that's why the neoliberal establishment supported Hillary. In some sense, we have to say that Trump is the neoliberal abnormal. But getting out of the American context, if we come to the rest of the world, you know, looking at it from outside, if we don't give, you know, a fig about what happens to the United States people, if we don't do that. And we look at what happens in, say, West Asia, in Ukraine, in other places. One would argue that Hillary, we have had a certainty. We were going to, that world was going to enter more wars. With Trump, we have uncertainty. We have uncertainty. Is he going to tweet or is he going to nuke, as a cartoon says. But at the same time, we have the certainty with Hillary. She was going to go in for more aggressive policies supporting Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, much more against Bashar al-Assad, widening the war in Syria. We've already seen Iraq and Libya, what it has done to West Asia. If not Afghanistan, Iran, we don't know what Trump will do. Neither do we know what Hillary would have done. But one thing was certain that she would have been far more adversarial with Russia than Trump may or is likely to be. So given that, is the world sort of in a more uncertain, but at least not in as bad a place as it would be if Hillary had won. And to me, it seems that we, outside the United States, if we don't really care for what happens to the Vijay Prashant of the world, shall we say, then we are better off with the Trump presidency than Hillary. Well, I like the fact that your question is filled with uncertainty. And you say that, well, with one, we know what would have been. And the other, we don't know. So, yes, of course, Hillary Clinton would have pursued a foreign policy far more belligerent than Obama, you know, just to give you an example of how we would know that in 2011, when the the drums of war beat over Libya, Obama was reticent to enter that conflict. In fact, he was not willing to enter the conflict. And when the French in particular and their ambassador in Washington, Gerard Arnault, approached the Obama White House, there was great hesitancy from Obama. It was Hillary Clinton that picked up the torch for the intervention in Libya and essentially drove the agenda through the White House all the way to Benghazi and to cert where Gaddafi was then killed and she laughed over his execution on the street. So, yes, we have ample evidence that Hillary Clinton is much more belligerent than Obama. This was also in evidence during the campaign when this issue of Russia came up. And as I said, the Democrats from almost nowhere began to suggest that Russia was interfering in the American election. And she said extraordinary belligerent things about Russia, about retaliation, about the need to show Putin that we are strong, things like that. So there's no question that her instinct is far more belligerent than Obama. That's very clear. Obama had a different kind of understanding of getting involved in things. And this doesn't mean, of course, that Obama is a peacenik. He did win the Nobel Prize for Peace, but he was far from a peacenik. He was a normal American militarist. And perhaps Hillary Clinton here was a little closer to George W. Bush, who was a much more aggressive American militarist. Now, with Trump, you have a strange phenomena. Trump, on the one hand, because of his deep antipathy to Islam, is very easy to see terrorists in the Muslim world and therefore suggests that America shouldn't get involved. You know, there's a right wing non-interventionism that's there in the West, which suggests Muslim countries cannot be made democratic. So it's actually from a disparaging of Islam that they would leave these regions alone. Now, of course, what's good about it is that they are non-interventionists. What's bad about it is that you never know how they'll intervene, when they intervene. So Ted Cruz, who ran against Trump on the Republican side, made a comment in the debate where he talked about fighting ISIS. And he said, we'll bomb them till the desert glows, which of course is echo suggesting a nuclear use of nuclear weapons. And then Trump, in those same debates, came out and said, we're not hitting ISIS hard enough, we have to hit them harder. He says, I'll take off the fetters from the military, including, of course, the right to torture, to go after the families of those who are fighting. You know, he would say all these things, which were a direct violation of the Geneva Convention and brought people from the military into the public domain saying, you know, we can't do that. We can't go and kill people, because that's a direct war crime. Now, whether the US government does it or not is not the point. The point is we can't have a president talking like that. So probably on the one side, I agree that Hillary Clinton would have been predictable, would have been very much an aggressive militant terrorist in the mold of George W. Bush. What we have now is an erratic militant. So I wouldn't say that, you know, Trump is going to withdraw from conflicts. I think he's going to have a much more unpredictable, but also perhaps very dangerous approach when he gets into conflicts. You know, for and in the sense that he's unpredictable and dangerous, he might run against some opposition, not in Iraq, not in Syria, but inside the US military. You know, the kind of things that he said that the United States should do. And I don't just mean, you know, killing families of terrorists and such like. But the way he's articulated the need to fight ISIS, for instance, I can see people in the military saying, wait a minute, that's not strategically viable as an approach. You know, we can't just send 50 bombers and go and flatten Mosul or flatten Raqqa, you know, there's millions of people, civilians in these cities. We can't do that. So I wouldn't say that the world is safer with Trump at the helm, safer than if Hillary Clinton was there. I think if Hillary Clinton was there, we'd know exactly what to expect. We'd expect essentially a third term of the George W. Bush presidency. If with Trump on this in the saddle, I think we're more in the position of having a new Teddy Roosevelt in the White House. You know, we're not sure what this guy's going to do, but he's certainly not going to bring peace to the world. You know, the question is Trump does not does not having held public office ever lacks the hypocrisy, which Clinton, of course, has practiced over a period. But the reality is that if you want to settle the restation today, Russia in the United States and all the big powers have to work together. Then it cross purposes. Otherwise, we are facing a much bigger disaster in the world. And it's not only with respect to West Asia. It's already hit half of Africa. It's percolating eastwards up to Southeast Asia now. So we really need to address that. And if you want to address that, the real crux of the issue of Saudi Arabia and with the Clinton Foundation getting money from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, it does seem that she's much closer to the Saudi and the Gulf monarchies establishment for her to be viable as somebody who'd solve the or address the restation problems. So Trump being uncertain and certainty of the Hillary kind. I'm not sure in this case and I do agree that's uncertain. I am not sure that the world is not better off with the Trump presidency, even though it is certainly going to mean harder times in the United States. No question. You're going to see rise of all kinds of nasty stuff there. I'm actually not sure if this is even a worthwhile thing to have a calibrated metric of who is better or worse, because I think they're both pretty bad for the world. I mean, after all, American imperialism doesn't get better or worse when the president changes. There's a structure in place. And in a sense, here we have, you brought up Saudi Arabia and Trump, after all, is entirely a bought and paid member of the Netanyahu brand of Zionism. And you know that the alliance that's developing between Saudi Arabia and Israel and then narrative of West Asia is something that Trump is entirely, you know, a proponent of, including, as he said, on many occasions, tearing up the Iran deal. Now, you know, the thing is, it's going to be interesting how this works out. How does a man who commits himself to actually resetting the agenda with the Russians, in other words, opening dialogue with Putin, smoothing out some of the problems over, you know, the American and European reaction to Ukraine and the Crimea, you know, how is a man who wants to have this a new kind of relationship with the Russians? How is he going to square this? If he, in the very first hundred days, tears up the U.S. agreement with Iran and decides to walk away from that when Iran has a very close understanding with Russia over Syria and is indeed a crucial partner for Russia and Syria. So, you know, the contradictions either way, whether Hillary had won or Trump has now won, either way, the contradictions don't favor world peace. This is all the time we have for NewsClick today. Keep watching us for further episodes of NewsClick.