Faculty panel examines potential global effects of upcoming presidential election

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Five professors in the Penn State School of International Affairs (SIA) discussed the upcoming U.S. presidential election from a global perspective at a panel event on October 9, 2024. The professors examined the election through various lenses and topics, including international relations theory, global media, economics, and foreign policy.

“I think we would all agree that what happens in the U.S. is consequential globally,” said Dr. Mitchell Smith, director of SIA and professor of international affairs, who delivered opening remarks and served as moderator for the panel. “The crucial question is, where precisely are there consequences and how do we determine what they might be?”

The panelists each ventured to answer that question within their field of expertise.

Ambassador Dennis Jett, professor of international affairs and former two-time U.S. ambassador, utilized international relations theory to evaluate the foreign policy priorities of the Democratic and Republican parties. He characterized the differences between the two parties in terms of engagement versus isolationism; unilateralism versus multilateralism; and internationalism versus realism.

“It all comes down, in the end, to which version of the world and America’s role in it do you want to project and will result from the next election,” Jett said. “And that is the reason why there are a whole lot of people in the world wondering what the outcome is going to be, and which America it will be.”

WATCH: Global Implications of the U.S. Presidential Election

Dr. Sophia McClennen, professor of international affairs and comparative literature and founding director of Penn State’s Center for Global Studies, followed Jett with an examination of the current media landscape, which she described as a “global information crisis” in which people are inundated with fake news and disinformation. Our media environment, she said, has serious implications for elections and election security—an impact that transcends the results of any single election.

“You have to have a public education system committed to educating people to spot this kind of fake news so that you can have a healthy democracy,” McClennen said. “With that, the effects of the 2024 election are probably unlikely to change this really, really complex media landscape, and it is in fact up to us to fix it.”

Focusing on the potential economic implications of the election, Dr. Johannes Fedderke, professor of international affairs and African studies, said that pessimism toward the U.S. and global economies is overblown—that the U.S. economy has performed well in the post-Covid era, particularly within a global context. He did argue, however, that the two primary economic interventions promoted by the candidates—new tariffs and increased public expenditure programs—both carry negative economic consequences.

From an international perspective, Fedderke added that perceptions of risk and uncertainty toward U.S. economic policy are lowering growth prospects, both in the United States and across the globe, with particularly significant effects for developing and emerging markets.

“The postwar consensus on multilateralism is certainly at risk, is under pressure, and that carries with it a rising level of uncertainty surrounding the direction of economic policy,” Fedderke said. “The consequences of that, in turn, are negative consequences for the likelihood of improved economic growth because the uncertainty tends to crowd out investment expenditure.”

The final speaker on the panel, Dr. Flynt Leverett, professor of international affairs and Asian studies, said that the United States is at risk—regardless of who wins the election—of simultaneously “screwing up” its policy toward the Middle East and its policy toward China over how it is handling the trade of advanced semiconductors, which are central to most modern electronics and technologies, including artificial intelligence.

With its trend toward tariffs, export controls, and export licenses, Flynt argued, the United States is “going to further incentivize important countries like Saudi Arabia, like the UAE, like Qatar, to make China their most important technological partner rather than the United States.”

Regardless of the topic of discussion, the panel demonstrated that global events are interconnected in complex ways and that the United States, though it can heavily influence international affairs, is also affected by forces beyond its borders.

“The causal arrow that we’re exploring, which is from the U.S. out toward the world, also moves in the other direction,” Smith said.