What’s in store for Asia if Trump really wins? Or doesn’t?

Even by the gladiatorial standards of US presidential elections past, the contrast between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on foreign policy presents the American voter with an aberration – a choice between a near-seamless continuity with America’s core values versus their complete rejection as little more than a farrago of weakness and inaction stitched together by lily-livered, out-of-touch elites.

If Trump wins, the Republican presidential contender has made plain, American foreign policy as we currently know it would be turned upside down. To judge by his statements alone, trade deals would be ripped up, longstanding alliances questioned, nuclear non-proliferation called into question, international humanitarian law flouted, and tyrants, petty or less so, lauded and apparently rewarded for their shows of strength where once they would have been shunned or held in watchful abeyance.

Small wonder that Kurt Campbell, former assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs and a chief architect of President Barack Obama’s so-called “Pivot to Asia”, noted on Thursday at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank in New York, that the most salient concern he discovered in recent travels across Asia wasn’t the nuclear provocation of North Korea, nor the growing assertiveness of China, the potential instability of various Southeast Asian locales, or worries about slowing economic growth. Instead, he heard a pan-Asian consensus of anxiety at the spectacle currently unfolding in America.

But let’s say Trump loses. Which, judging by the most recent polling data, he may. What foreign policy damage will he have left in his wake? Will Trump’s supporters simply disperse and vanish? Or has he fired up a new populist movement that will, like the “Tea Party” activists that emerged in 2009, spawn a generation of like-minded politicians who will irredeemably change the balance of power in Congress and ultimately make lasting legislative decisions? Is it possible that the need to take back votes from Trump, particularly from ambiguous-minded “swing voters”, might force a radical shift in Hilary Clinton’s long-time support of, say, the Trans-Pacific Partnership?