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the “kingpin strategy” of Washington’s drug wars of the 1990s. As a former senior White House counterterrorism official confirmed to me in a 2013 interview, “The idea had its origins in the drug war.  So that precedent was already in the system as a shaper of our thinking.  We had a high degree of confidence in the utility of targeted killing. There was a strong sense that this was a tool to be used.” Had that official known a little more about just how this feature of the drug wars actually played out, he might have had less confidence in the utility of his chosen instrument.  In fact, the strangest part of the story is that a strategy that failed utterly back then, achieving the very opposite of its intended goal, would later be applied full scale to the war on terror — with exactly the same results.

the agency’s price charts showed little movement and so gave no indication of what events were affecting the price and therefore the supply. In 1994, however, a numbers-cruncher with the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Pentagon’s in-house think tank, began subjecting the data to more searching scrutiny. The analyst, a former Air Force fighter pilot named Rex Rivolo, had been tasked to take an independent look at the drug war at the request of Brian Sheridan, the hardheaded director of the Defense Department’s Office of Drug Control Policy who had developed a healthy disrespect for the DEA and its operations. Having tartly informed DEA officials that their statistics were worthless, mere “random noise,” Rivolo set to work developing a statistical tool that would eliminate the effect of the swings in purity of the samples collected by the undercover agents. Once he had succeeded, some interesting conclusions began to emerge: the pursuit of the kingpins was most certainly having an effect on prices, and by extension supply, but not in the way advertised by the DEA. Far from impeding the flow of cocaine onto the street and up the nostrils of America, it was accelerating it. Eliminating kingpins actually increased supply.

coca farmers didn’t need obscure economic theories to understand the consequences of the kingpin strategy. When the news arrived that Gilberto Rodríguez-Orijuela had been arrested, small traders in the remote settlement of Calamar erupted in cheers. “Thank the blessed virgin!” exclaimed one grandmother to a visiting American reporter. “Wait till the United States figures out what it really means,” added another local resident. “Hell, maybe they’ll approve, since it’s really a victory for free enterprise. No more monopoly controlling the market and dictating what growers get paid. It’s just like when they shot Pablo Escobar: now money will flow to everybody.” This assessment proved entirely correct. As the big cartels disappeared, the business reverted to smaller and even more ruthless groups that managed to maintain production and distribution quite satisfactorily, especially as they were closely linked either to Colombia’s Marxist FARC guerrillas or to the fascist anti-guerrilla paramilitary groups allied with the government and tacitly supported by the United States.

The hysteria, no doubt, is a passing phenomenon. Some diehards will continue, perhaps even plot to assassinate him, but the rest will settle down to the demands of routine existence. We, on our part in Africa, need to make a cool, strategic assessment and consider what these elections mean for us.

He is described by his detractors as racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynist, and much else besides. I think these are exaggerated adjectives, but I understand where they come from, given the political climate and the degeneration of American democracy.  It is difficult to say how much of these were expressions of Trump’s generally macho personality and “locker-room” talk[i] in order to attract media attention. Trump had a running feud with the mainstream media, but the latter could not take their eyes off him. He is a dramatist par excellence. Hillary Clinton was simply no match.

If Trump defies the WTO and introduces protection for local American industries to create jobs, then he is on my kind of nationalism. We in Africa need to do the same. If he rejects (as he says) the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) pushed by Obama, then he can count on my support. He might scrape AGOA (which is divisive of Africa) and Obama’s “Power Africa” $7 billion initiative. That’s good too. These “initiatives” of Obama are to help corporate America, not Africa. If Trump talks with Russia, China, Iran and Syria, and defies Clinton’s war-mongering, then he could help forces of peace and reconciliation that the world badly needs.