Asia shrugs off chaotic US election but braces for potential knock-on effects
- Lack of decisive victory in Trump-Biden presidential battle fails to impact regional markets
- Analysts attributed the muted reaction in Asia to experience in dealing with uncertainty surrounding Trump the last four years
Speaking to South China Morning Post reporters across Asia, observers and analysts said buoyant regional markets on Wednesday reflected the distinct lack of panic in the region.
Sacred flame for Trump in India, bars back Biden: Asia’s take on US election drama
As of press time, reports said the outcome could be decided based on the final results in a handful of states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.
Trump falsely claimed victory over Biden in a statement from the White House just hours after polls closed, even though millions of votes had yet to be counted at that point. Earlier, Biden urged patience from his supporters as ballots were being counted, saying “we believe we’re on track to win this election”.
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“The possibility that the results could not be known for days also featured prominently in the press. So even if one hoped for one side to score a decisive victory, the current situation should not have come as a surprise,” he said.
Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at the Tokyo campus of Temple University, said media coverage about the perplexities of the US electoral system meant “people had been prepared for worse”.
Investors had priced in the uncertainty but retained confidence in the US given its better-than-expected growth figures released last week, he said.
“The Asian markets look at those figures, they see that the fundamentals are solid and they see hope,” Kingston added.
In Indonesia, former vice-presidential adviser and politics professor Dewi Fortuna Anwar said that while markets “hate uncertainty”, she believed “whether Trump or Biden comes out as the victor of the election, the impact to the market will only be temporary”.
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James Carouso, a veteran Asia watcher and ex-senior US diplomat, said if the markets were taken as a barometer, they indicated a degree of calm that violence had not broken out across the US on election night – as had been predicted by some commentators ahead of the vote.
The election “actually went off with nothing like that, and that has given people confidence that whatever happens it will be a normal transition – despite all of Trump’s tweets – or Trump will win and life will go on”, said Carouso, now a Singapore-based managing director for the BowerGroupAsia political risk consultancy.
Other observers said governments in the region likely had mapped out scenarios for both outcomes. Neither candidate is seen as being overwhelmingly favoured by Asian governments. While Biden is seen as possibly a more predictable leader, Trump – despite his haphazard manner of conducting foreign policy – is seen in some quarters as the better option because of his muscular stance towards China.
Choi Kang, vice-president of South Korea’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said Seoul, like its regional counterparts, was likely to have drawn up “various possible scenarios that would become reality, depending on who wins the election and how long it would take for the final victor to emerge”.
In India, former ambassador to the US Meera Shankar told the Post that the trajectory of US-India ties would remain “irrespective of who becomes the president in the United States”.
“There is a bipartisan consensus in the US to build a strong relationship with India,” she said. “This is propelled by our increasing strategic convergence in the Indo-Pacific and by our shared democratic values.”
Others were parsing the implications of the impasse should it drag beyond just a few days.
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John Blaxland, a professor in intelligence studies and international security at Australian National University, said he found the prospect of a cliffhanger “deeply unsettling” owing to its implications both for “domestic destabilisation within the United States and the knock-on effects of such destabilisation on the delicate balance of security affairs in several parts of the Indo-Pacific, not the least of which concerns the question of Taiwan and other regional flash points”.
There was also the question of whether the vote result remaining unresolved would impact the US’s involvement in coming high-profile Asian meetings.
Leaders from the 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) grouping are then slated to meet on November 20, also in a virtual format.
Carouso, the Singapore-based former US diplomat, said that if Trump has been declared the winner by that time, he would likely attend the meetings.
Trump has in the past been criticised for avoiding these annual meetings – save for his sole showing in 2017 – and sending representatives such as Vice-President Mike Pence or other subordinates.
“Let’s say Trump wins. I think he would like to have a platform to show the world that he won, so he might very well participate in at least part of those things especially as he does not have to get on a plane,” Carouso said.
With contributions by Resty Woro Yuniar in Jakarta, Park Chan-kyong in Seoul, John Power in Hong Kong, Sonia Sarkar in New Delhi, Julian Ryall in Tokyo and Dewey Sim in Singapore.
