Nagorno-Karabakh

Six years ago, at the opening match of the new Basaksehir Stadium in Istanbul, an unlikely soccer star emerged. The red team’s aging, six-foot center-forward lumbered toward the white team’s goal, and a delicate chip over the advancing keeper brought a goal that sent the stadium into ecstasy. The scorer was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the run-up to an election in which he became his country’s 12th president.For Erdogan, a former semi-professional footballer, it was brilliant self-promotion. Like Fidel Castro’s baseball pitching or Chairman Mao’s ‘world-record’ Yangtze river swim, Erdogan’s contrived sporting prowess helped make him as much a cult as a politician.

It would strain credibility to assert that this election campaign has enhanced America’s reputation in the world. The best that might be said is that it has been a slightly less gruesome spectacle than the 2016 affair — and that, perhaps, only because the pandemic has limited public appearances. The great puzzle is how a country of 330 million cannot seem to find two more inspiring candidates. Yet should we take seriously those who are forecasting that the country now descends into civil war or that democracy has died? No, and not just because the latter prediction tends to be conditional on the election’s failing to deliver their favored outcome. American democracy, American power and influence are not dying, and neither are they under threat.