Welcome to our Policy special issue on the 2024 American presidential election. These days, any treatment of American politics — including and especially this presidential election — comes with thedisclaimer that any previously unthinkable plot twist can make your snapshot of the status quo obsolete in short order. At this writing, we’re focusing on the major issues while prognosticating on the default assumption that incumbent President Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee and that twice-impeached RICO defendant Donald Trump will be fronting the Republican Party. We have a collection of excellent reads from our usual lineup of intrepid Policy contributors. Many thanks, as always, to our authors, readers and advertisers for making Policy possible.

September 15, 2023.

We open with foreign policy expert and former ambassador to Russia, the EU and the UK Jeremy Kinsman with the big-picture implications of the 2024 outcome. “The Biden presidency,” writes Kinsman in A US Election Like No Other, “gets higher marks for international cooperative leadership from foreign leaders than any in my professional lifetime.”

From United Nations Ambassador Bob Rae, the moral stakes as viewed from the unique perspective of theworld’s diplomatic cockpit in a time of war and heightened geopolitical ruthlessness. “Isolationism, global disengagement and retreat are, like appeasement in the 1930s, based on the false notion the abandoned world will be a safe one,” Rae writes in Sic Transit Gloria: Isolationism and its Consequences.

On the all-important economic implications of this election, former Clerk of the Privy Council, IMF executive and BMO VP Kevin Lynch and former White House economic aide Paul Deegan provide the must-read primer Protecting Canada’s Economy from US Election Disruption.

Business Council of Canada President Goldy Hyder and former UN ambassador and consul general in Atlanta Louise Blais have filed the essential brief, Why America’s Election is Canada’s Business. “With so much hanging in the balance for Canada in this upcoming election cycle – and all those to follow – we cannot afford to be passive and therefore caught off-guard,” they write.

With the world on fire and Americans facing a choice between an arsonist and a firefighter, our climate expert extraordinaire, Dan Woynillowicz, has the excellent Every Election is Now a Climate Election. “It’s far from hyperbole to say that President Joe Biden’s efforts to scale up the United States’ fight against climate change have been a game changer,” Writes Woynillowicz. “And whether to build on these efforts or tear them down is very clearly on the ballot.

On the surreal spectacle of a former president under multiple indictments running to recapture the office, Carleton University’s Fen Osler Hampson and longtime international journalist Mike Blanchfield lay out thestakes in The Rocky Road to November 2024. “There is little appetite for a return to the stormy and unpredictable years of the Trump presidency,” they write, “but the rocky road to the election we are now on may well get even rockier.”

Amid intense debates in both America and Israel about the future of democracy, presidential historian Gil Troy has Will Israel be an Issue in the 2024 Election? “Politics and voting are not just about what you believe in,” writes Troy, “but how intensely you believe in what you believe in.”

On how Canadian diplomats should react if Trump is re-elected, Colin Robertson, himself a former career foreign service officer, brings you Forewarned is Forearmed: The Bilateral Lessons from Trump One.

In one of his trademark pieces that prove the value of having a novelist on our masthead who can tell fact from fiction, longtime Liberal strategist John Delacourt has Trump’s Second America First Agenda and the Looming Propaganda War.

Donald Trump did more to imperil human rights worldwide than any American president in history. Kyle Matthews, executive director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, brings his deep expertise to the question of The Global Stakes for Human Rights in America’s Election.

With the subject of Joe Biden’s age serving as an easy target, Policy contributing writer Robin Sears tackles the argument of whether age matters with The Foolishness of Political Ageism. “Whether or not 80 is thenew 60,” Sears writes. “It certainly, in more and more cases, is not the old 80.”

In Is the 2024 Election Something New or Déja-Vu?, Concordia University political scientist Graham Dodds explores the counterintuitive proposition that much of this election cycle is plus-ça-change.

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