Main Hoon Donald: So, what does the oldest US prez hold for his country and our world?

New Delhi: It would help not to over-analyse Donald Trump's victory in terms of America's bewildering and tedious cultural wars. True, those did play a role in voter preferences. The degree to which issues such as mixed-gender bathrooms animated voters simply astounded most of us.

Nevertheless, this mandate was grounded in economic and existential anxieties. Like every US election this century - certainly since 2008 - it captured the roiling and churning of a remarkable society seeking a new equilibrium.

The slow pushback and then clamour against globalisation, hollowing out of industrial economies and communities by unbridled trade and immigration, gnawing self-doubt about wider US relevance in the world: all these have been dominant themes for contemporary America. A multifactorial dislocation has thrown up many responses, identity and race among them.

Yet, these have not been the only markers. If they were, then White blue-collar workers - today, Trump's solid base - wouldn't have voted for a Black president just 16 years ago; Blacks and Hispanics wouldn't have plumped significantly for Trump on Nov 5. There is something more at play here.

Other than the popular vote, the Trump trifecta has delivered the presidency and both Houses of Congress to Republicans. Beyond Trump the individual's appeal, this suggests an expansion of Trumpism. It's the new consensus in America.

Even Democrats have had to borrow from the recipe of narrow and domestically feasible trade arrangements, and foreign policy commitments that have a structured return on investment. Given this agenda and mandate, what does Trump 2.0 hold for his country and our world?

For a start, Trump is not harking back to an isolationist America. He knows the value of trade - for which he obviously needs other countries to sell to and buy from. Yet, he loathes large trade deficits and prefers transaction-based access to the US market. A tariff war is certainly coming. Its principal targets will be Beijing and, perhaps, Berlin. New Delhi could suffer collateral damage.

For India, the priority must be to continue its strategic, defence and technology partnership with the US. The Biden presidency was a willing compatriot, building on the earlier Trump presidency. It's entirely in India's interests that the new Trump administration, in turn, builds on the Biden team's efforts. This will call for enlightened strategy from the White House after Jan 20. But it will also require nuanced incentivisation from India.

Immediate drivers of the bilateral tech relationship will include cybersecurity and AI. Immediate bargaining chips could be tariff and trade flexibility on themes as far apart as data and ecommerce, and - Trump's old hobby horses - Harley-Davidsons and energy purchase. No doubt both the Trump administration and the Narendra Modi government will bargain hard. Unlike the 2016-20 period, it's important that negotiation doesn't become an end in itself but fructifies into some sort of a mutually workable deal.

Next come the two wars of our age. While Trump is unlikely to simply hand over victory to Putin, he embodies a fatigue with the Russia-Ukraine war in the US and, despite the public posturing, in Europe as well. A fragile formula that gives Ukraine a security blanket and reconstruction package - and allows Russia tenancy rights on some but not all the territory it claims - is conceivable. It will not lead to lasting peace, but at least a non-war or frozen conflict.

Trump would probably be comfortable selling weapons to Ukraine - but with Europeans, rather than the US taxpayer, paying. Separately, as US shale oil and gas production inevitably cranks up, it could compete with Russia in the latter's traditional and non-traditional energy markets.

While India would welcome such a resolution, however tentative, to the Ukraine conflict, West Asia is more fraught. The Israeli assault on Hamas following the Oct 7, 2023, terror strikes has expanded and evolved into a thrust against Iran, its auxiliaries and its very regime integrity. Arab countries in the Gulf region recognise the shift and are not uninterested parties.

The casting vote now lies with Trump. Elements in his inner circle will urge further sustenance to Israel, to tighten pressure on Iran and gamble on a reimagination of West Asia. As previous experience has shown, this is not an unfamiliar narrative in Washington. Trump's decision will be watched closely.

Finally, how should Indian diplomacy see post-election America? In its characteristic manner, with moderation and calibration. Trump is a familiar political actor but his willingness and ability to work around institutional and bureaucratic India sceptics in his system - some of whom have been particularly active in recent months - is still uncertain.

That apart, there is the paradox of a Trump who has electorally conquered Washington, but has simultaneously enhanced distrust of the capital's systemic impulses in the US heartland.

What could this mean in practice? In a country that's in any case so decentralised and internally multipolar, and continues to be politically divided, America's external engagement - if not quite its formal foreign policy - will be even more federalised and disintermediated. As a derisking mechanism, at the very least this would likely mean India opening more consulates in the US in Trump's final four years.