A governance expert says America’s new President, Donald John Trump’s occasional outbursts are dangerous since it could create chaos in some parts of the world.
The Acting Executive Director of the Centre for Local Governance Advocacy, Dr Vladimir Antwi-Danso, expressing his views on the United State’s Foreign Policy direction, especially towards Africa with Donald Trump as president, urged him (Mr Trump) to exercise a lot of circumspection now that he had been sworn in as president.
Mr Donald John Trump was sworn in on Friday as the 45th president of the United States of America with high expectations regarding how he would handle immigration, taxes, health care and other pressing issues.
He defeated former US Senator, Mrs Hillary Clinton, in the November polls last year in one of America’s shocking election outcomes considering the fact that most opinion polls before the election had predicted a landslide win for Mrs Clinton, the Democrat Presidential Candidate.
But, Dr Antwi-Danso, who is also the Director of Academic Affairs at the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College, noted that Mr Trump had not been consistent with his foreign policies during the electioneering period.
“Today, he says something, the next day, he says something different, and even giving in easily to the Russians,’’ he said, adding, “the whole world did not know his direction.”
Dr Antwi-Danso cited Mr Trump’s flirtation with Russia, China and Taiwan, adding that these were clear instances of his inconsistency and unpredictability.
For instance, he said, Mr Trump abandoning the ‘’One China Policy,’’ which he has been calling for all this while, showed his unpredictability.
“Maybe he is naïve and most of the US senators have called him a “naïve person’’ or he is not well informed because he is a kind of bully who bullied his way to office and doesn’t know what to do,’’ he noted.
Dr Antwi-Danso expressed optimism that the Washington governance institutions would school and shape him in order to conform to the values of America.
“Trump cannot do it alone and people should not panic because he can be eccentric and unpredictable, therefore the state institutions will school him on the dos and don’t’s of America in order to guide his administration.
“Even Barack Obama was stopped by the House of Senate from doing certain things and shut him down and the federal system stopped working for some weeks because the House of Senate and Representatives did not want him to trek certain direction,’’ he said.
An Internal Auditor with one of the ministries, Delove Kuvor, said since Trump won the US elections his comments on migration had not been favourable towards African migrants.
He noted that America could not have reached her current development height without the contributions of others and cited the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade that exploited Africa’s human resource, saying people worked in American plantations and became hewers of wood and drawers of water.
A Businessman from Dansoman, James Sika, appealed to the new US President to be flexible with his foreign policies since any draconian policies would affect most developing countries, especially those in Africa.