Unpacking America's puzzling election dynamics

Several weeks have passed since last month's televised debate between U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, who was just formally nominated as the Republican Party's official candidate. Many longtime observers and self-appointed experts of U.S. elections, both in the United States and abroad, seem perplexed and a bit bewildered by this year's race.

I suspect that many U.S. political commentators feel both happy and sad as if they are looking through a so-called political kaleidoscope, the landscape of which is changing from day to day. I, for one, have left CNN running all day long in my study to help me better understand what has been going on since the debate.

The first astonishing development that jumped out at me was Biden's lackluster performance in the debate, which resulted in calls for the incumbent president to step down from the race.

Naturally, the first calls for him to recuse himself came from incumbent lawmakers whose reelection bids are in jeopardy in this year's elections. But behind the scenes, the “drop Biden” movement spread to several Democratic state governors and influential members of both the House and Senate. Although Biden and his aides have consistently refused to withdraw from the campaign, calls for him to do so have grown rapidly this month.

However, the situation abruptly changed last Saturday when candidate Trump was shot and wounded by a 20-year-old man during a campaign rally in the small town of Butler, Pennsylvania, part of once-prosperous industrial areas in the Eastern and Midwestern United States.

We may never know what motivated this young man to take such action or what was in his mind. It is quite possible that similar incidents could occur again.

The assassination attempt appears to have greatly affected the atmosphere at this week's Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. As I was taking in the gathering, I was caught off guard when it was reported that candidate Trump had chosen Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, not yet 40 years old, as his running mate.

Vance embodies the very idea of an American life. Born in 1984 and raised in a single-mother household, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, served in the Iraq War, graduated from Yale Law School and became a successful lawyer, venture capitalist and bestselling author.

Once a fierce critic of Trump, Vance is now an influential young hard-line conservative politician and a strong supporter of the former president. Combining nearly all the political virtues that his new boss lacks, Vance has the intelligence, courage and youth to sustain the “Trump movement” that may dissipate after the real estate mogul and businessman's lifetime. The first-time senator will almost certainly be one of the successors to this legacy, which could prove to be a formidable opponent for the Democratic Party in the future.

Furthermore, although predictable, I must admit that I was greatly disappointed by the speech given by former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley at the convention. Until March of this year, she had criticized Trump for being “unfit” and too “unhinged” to be president. So I ask, Nikki, you too? This sentiment is shared not only by me but also by many of the U.S.' allies in Europe and Asia.

In her speech, she stated, “Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period.” She also went on to say, “We should acknowledge that there are some Americans who don’t agree with Donald Trump 100% of the time. I happen to know some of them,” and “Take it from me. I haven’t always agreed with President Trump, but we agree more often than we disagree.”

Well said, but if she was truly on the front lines of global politics as the former ambassador claims, she must have disagreed far more often than agreed with Trump's foreign policy. No matter how much she wanted to preserve both her political career and the unity of the Republican Party, I did not want to see Haley support a president who despises U.S. allies, engages in futile negotiations with a dictator unwilling to give up his nuclear weapons and listens more seriously to foreign dictators than to his advisers.

According to American political scientist W. R. Mead, the undercurrents of U.S. foreign policy include Jeffersonian diplomacy, which selectively considers national interests on the basis of American international engagement; Hamiltonian diplomacy, which sees the benefits of American diplomacy in active international engagement; Jacksonian diplomacy with a populist tendency that is not willing to use military force to defend national prestige and interests; and Wilsonian diplomacy, which aims at promoting democracy and human rights with the moral mission of U.S.-led initiatives in mind.

Trump's diplomacy, however, falls into none of these four categories. The bottom line of Trump's diplomacy, it seems, is a 21st-century version of the Monroe Doctrine, i.e., the temptation of a declining superpower to return to the isolationism with which the country was founded.

If the Republican Party sacrifices the true interests of the United States and its allies in order to win the presidency this year, it will no longer be the Grand Old Party that we all used to remember and respect.