The panel discussion ‘What Does Trump’s Presidency Mean for the Rest of the World?’ on 25 November clearly highlighted this as it careened wildly, swerving from the global implications and election autopsies, to passionate debates over racism and fascism.

Journalist and author Laurie Penny damned the evening as a ‘normalising’ discussion about ‘a fascist’. Echoing this, Shelina Janmohamed (a commentator on Muslim social and religious trends) urged the audience to think about the framing of the stories told. ‘The way we talk about identity,’ she argued, referring to the coverage of the trial of Jo Cox’s murderer, ‘…affects real peoples’ lives’. There is a potential ‘ripple’ effect on women’s rights movements globally, she argued, legitimising misogyny as ‘locker room talk’, disregarding women’s place in society, and signalling that it’s okay to talk about your daughter in ‘repulsive’ ways.

Trump’s rhetoric around climate change has some fearing the death of climate politics. He talks about ‘setting free coal,’ says Steven Erlanger, London bureau chief for the New York Times. But, this won’t go far: ‘No one’s going to invest in coal, it’s not worth their money,’ Erlanger argued. Many countries are ‘invested in a cleaner world’ for their own reasons, so ’just because the president thinks it can happen’ it doesn’t mean it will.

Having previously referred to NATO as ‘obsolete‘, will Trump oversee a shift in the global security landscape? Dan Roberts, The Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, argued Europe will be ‘looking after itself’: for Trump, world security isn’t ‘an American problem’. Erlanger demurred, pointing out that the USA’s NATO membership isn’t altruistic, but in American ‘interests’. President of the British International Studies Association, Inderjeet Parmar, agreed, ‘I don’t think America’s retreating’.

Author, broadcaster, and the chair of the event, Michael Goldfarb asked if Trump caught a ‘wave’ that’s sweeping the world. There is a ‘systemic’ element, Parmar mused; the populist surge is the ‘unravelling of an order’ unable to sustain the ‘Western’ dream. But did Trump’s supporters see themselves as part of a larger wave? One audience member disagreed, arguing that many who voted for Trump sought a conservative supreme court, and didn’t consider the ‘world economy’ or ‘globalism’.

To what extent Trump fulfils his campaign promises remains to be seen. ‘The office has a moderating influence’ argued Alex Sundstrom of Republicans Overseas UK, he will ‘tack to the centre to get stuff done’. Janmohamed disagreed, arguing that his appointees are ‘proof that he’s going to make good on those statements.’ Parmar, however, saw compromise ahead. ‘The education of Donald Trump is going to be the title of a really great book,’ he quipped, ‘that education began as soon as his election was through.’

On Wednesday 20 January 2016, in front of a sold out audience at the Frontline Club, a panel of experts – chaired by journalist Michael Goldfarb – set out to discuss what is in store for this election year in the United States.

With Donald Trump a serious contender for the Republican ticket, and Bernie Sanders challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democrat candidacy, much of the discussion focused on exactly how and why this unprecedented turn of events had arisen.

Chair Michael Goldfarb kicked off the discussion by asking: “Hand on heart, a year ago had you any idea that this is where we’d be in the presidential campaign of 2016? With Donald Trump well ahead of the pack of the Republican party, and with Bernie Sanders gaining traction on Hillary Clinton?”

“No… but perhaps we should have been,” said Xenia Wickett, head of the US programme at Chatham House.

Peter Trubowitz, professor of International Relations at LSE, highlighted the depth of white resentment “on both sides” of the political spectrum as a reason for Trump’s success. On the right, Trump is tapping into the blue collar and evangelical demographic; on the left, it’s the “college age, highly educated (…) turned off by Hillary and turned on by Sanders or at least some alternative (…) They want something that is more progressive,” said Trubowitz.

“I think they are angry both on the right and on the left, because they believe the political system isn’t working (…) I don’t think it is white resentment, I think it’s a matter of issues and it’s more complicated,” said William Lowery, vice-chair of the Republicans Overseas UK.

“People are sick and tired” of the current state of politics, said Lowery – Trump is successfully tapping into that.

The panel then discussed whether Trump would continue to feature so heavily on the agenda in six weeks time. Trubowitz pointed to Iowa as a potential turning point: “If they [Trump supporters] show up there then something serious is happening.” Washington-based journalist Adam Brookes agreed, and commented that “the bubble will pop” if Trump were to lose in Iowa.

With Clinton’s name most likely on the Democrat ticket, Goldfarb posed the question: “Who can beat Hillary?”

Wickett responded that the candidacy will be Clinton’s to lose, but that “she’s doing a really good job of losing.” The panel agreed that the abortion issue and Clinton’s gender will ultimately pull voters. Women – whether Republican or Democrat – will be more likely to vote for Clinton.

However, Lowery argued that “anyone can beat Hillary Clinton” – as Americans are reluctant to return to the drama of the Clinton family. Lowry also commented that Republic voters often believe that any of their candidates can – and will – beat Hillary Clinton.

V informative & thought-provoking @frontlineclub panel this evening on #USElection looking at how much more polarised US politics is getting

— Emily (@emily_wight) January 20, 2016

“Presidential elections are won in the swing states and at the centre,” said Brookes. The Vice President nomination for both the Republican and Democrat candidate could be vital for winning the swing states. The panel pointed to Michael Bloomberg as one to watch as a potential independent candidate.

In terms of implementing genuine change through policy, the panel noted that the topic of immigration seemed to present the most significant opportunity.

One audience member asked the panel to comment on how American citizens tended to vote – with a view to policy, personality or history? Lowery observed that the portion of voters motivated by policy is diminishing: “it’s very hard to make a policy re-tweetable.”

With just under a year to go until the presidential elections, Brookes concluded that there are still “all kinds of possible outcomes.”

With the 2015 State of the Union address showing a rejuvenated and confident Barack Obama, a panel of experts met at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 21 January to debate his legacy, the partisan nature of US politics and whether racial divides have been healed by the nation’s first black president.

l-r: Robert Carolina, Xenia Wickett, Matt Frei, Kim Ghattas, Michael Goldfarb

Chair Matt Frei, former Washington correspondent and current Europe editor for Channel 4 News, began by asking the panel what they thought Obama’s legacy would be.

Xenia Wickett, formerly of the US State Department and now at Chatham House, replied: “His legacy is going to be economic. President Obama came in in 2009 after the great recession, and if you listened to his state of the union, [now] America is strong, the economy is strong.”

Kim Ghattas, BBC correspondent based in Washington, offered her view of Obama as “the president who always struggled to convince people in the US and abroad that he was a good president, that he did a good job, because the narrative of him being a reluctant president stuck, no matter what he achieved.”

To kick off @mattfrei challenges tonight’s panel to give Obama’s legacy in a minute and a half – live now pic.twitter.com/htmL7vKMKM

— Frontline Club (@frontlineclub) January 21, 2015

The panel also discussed the difficult situations Obama has found himself in throughout his presidency. Veteran journalist and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb said: “He was a president at a time when no-one was really in charge, the world was in a terrible state of drift.”

Frei questioned whether “Obama’s legacy is a legacy of absences – the absence of a war that he started, the absence of an economic calamity. Preventing economic calamity is more difficult to get brownie points for than actually causing a great economic success.”

However, as chair of Democrats Abroad UK Robert Carolina pointed out: “Coming back from economic collapse was by no means assured.”

One of the biggest difficulties that Obama has faced as president has been a deeply partisan Republican congress. The panel wondered whether America’s finely-tuned system of checks and balances is unable to cope with such partisan politics. “If it’s trench warfare, it’s not checks and balances,” said Frei.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Democrat Robert Carolina laid the blame with the Republican party for this state of affairs. He said: “They have become a party whose governing philosophy is almost nihilistic. A failure to achieve anything is almost a victory.”

A member of the audience highlighted Obama’s historic status as the first African-American President of the United States. Xenia Wickett commented:

“The greatest achievement in that respect is that you have five people here and that isn’t what we’d put as his legacy. In terms of a statement about where America is today, I think that’s a huge statement.”

With recent events in Ferguson exposing the ongoing deep racial divides that exist in the United States, Ghattas said: “the only people who talk about America as a post-racial society are white.”

Goldfarb added: “He decided, as many successful African-Americans do, ‘I’m not going to make a thing of my race, I’m not going to play that card’. He chose to downplay it.”

The panel also debated whether Obama had gained or lost international respect for his handling of US foreign policy. “What you get from world leaders today is that there is a failure of leadership and Obama is missing in action,” said Ghattas.

Wickett closed the discussion with a comment on the factors that have most hindered Obama’s presidency:

“He’s in a fundamental dilemma. Everybody wants American leadership, everybody wants America to use its leadership to keep sea lanes open, Middle Eastern energy flowing, the Chinese in their box, Europe safe through NATO. But the trouble is they only want it when it’s their way and they all want something slightly different. He cannot win!”

Watch and listen back below:

A president’s second term is usually regarded as the one in which he has the potential to reinvent the world. On 13 June, a panel chaired by author and journalist Michael Goldfarb explored the foreign policy legacy of the Obama administration.

Michael Goldfarb, Kim Ghattas and Nick Schifrin.

Kim Ghattas, BBC State Department correspondent and author of The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power, opened the discussion by asking:

“How much power does the US really have to implement its decisions? There is still this image out there of an omnipotent superpower. ( . . . ) People often ask ‘Why doesn’t the US just intervene and end the conflict in Syria?’”

On Syria, Professor Michael Cox, founding co-director of LSE IDEAS and Professor of International Relations at LSE, said:

“I think the US strategy on Syria is entirely right. The idea of the US getting involved in another war without an end in sight, against whom and for what we don’t know, strikes me as the craziest thing the US could do.”

Nick Schifrin, foreign correspondent for ABC News, drew the attention to Obama’s speech on drones and Guantanamo on 23 May this year, at the National Defense University.

“He [Barack Obama] said ‘All wars must end,’ it seemed an attempt to define that legacy and say ‘We’re going to move beyond the post-9/11 world.”

Nick Schifrin, Professor Michael Cox and Dana Allin.

Ghattas remembered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s reaction to the uprising in Libya: “Once the Arab league and the Golf Corporation Council had called for a No-Fly-Zone, Clinton was already convinced that something had to be done.”

Schifrin, who was reporting from Benghazi during this week, added:

“From the ground it was very simple: If the No-Fly-Zone hadn’t passed by the weekend, tens of thousands of people would have died. ( . . . ) There were a lot of mercenaries behind the other planes who would have been happy to flatten Benghazi.”

Dana Allin, Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs and Editor of Survival: Global Politics and Strategy at The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), brought the Israel-Palestine peace process into the foreign policy evaluation:

“Focusing on the settlements clearly failed when [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu said ‘No’ [to build 3,000 new homes in the West Bank and Jerusalem for Palestinians] and Obama didn’t have a Plan B. This was the largest foreign policy defeat of the president. ( . . . ) Sometimes Obama seems overwhelmed by the power of his own eloquence.”

Obama has detoxified (not ended) the war on terror by officially repudiating #torture @frontlineclub

— Elisa Peter (@ElisaPeter) June 13, 2013

The panel identified that Afghanistan has become Obama’s war. Professor Cox explained:

“He detoxified the war on terror but continued it and increased the number of troops and drones in Afghanistan. ( . . . ) We get to the point where we can’t blame George W. Bush for everything anymore.”

A member of the audience is contributing to the debate.

The debate was then opened to the public. One member of the audience asked: “He’s pouring more and more money in Afghanistan, but the country seems to be a drain that absorbs troops and money. Pakistan is an unreliable ally, to say the least. What could he [Obama] have done differently?” Schifrin mentioned failed American attempts to support and strengthen Pakistan.

“For every Dollar he spent in Pakistan, he spent 30 in Afghanistan. ( . . . ) But people need to see more than ‘more troops and drones.’ They tried to open an American hospital in Islamabad but that wasn’t successful. Overall, there would have to be more effort.”

Moving on to the unpredictable and time-consuming problems with Assad in Syria, Ghattas concluded:

“The problem with US policy is that it’s often based on hope. And it doesn’t work like that in the Middle East.”

Watch and listen to the event here: