I ALWAYS expected United States President-elect Joe Biden would win and felt that the pollsters had been so consistent that they could not be wrong. BY EDDIE CROSS Oh dear, very few were anywhere near the mark. But although it was close and was a very tight race, it was clear after three days, that the Biden/Kamala Harris ticket was going to catch the bus. Donald Trump did well, but he was beaten by good old-fashioned politics. And anyone who felt that the US was at last throwing off its burdens of slavery, civil war and rest of the debris that characterise its history, better think again. I hope history will show that Trump and his cohorts were an aberration and not a constant in US politics. I saw many parallels between Trump and the late Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith regime here in Africa. He was a politician who knew his base like the back of his hand. He spoke for them, he fed their fears and aspirations and was totally faithful to his people. They followed him like lap dogs and believed everything he told them. But he was leading his country into a cul du sac out of which there was only one way and that was back down the road he trod. The one thing history teaches us is that we stand on the shoulders of those who went before us and that if we do not carefully plot our way around the mistakes of our past, we will repeat them. In the case of the US, it was their unity as a federation of States, their willingness to take in migrants from all over the world and then treat them all as Americans, that gave the US its present status in the world. I remember my first impressions of America as a visitor, the latent racism, the hard work and innovation, the great US engineering and their generosity. The faults were many — most Americans have little or no knowledge of the wider world, most have never travelled. Then their massive capacity as the one really superpower in the world. What is the way back? First it is understanding that an isolationist US may be good for the US in the short term, but it is not the roadmap into the future. In the days before the Second World War, isolationist policies kept the US out of European conflicts and allowed them to develop the most advanced economy in the world behind the moats of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Pearl Harbour was a wake-up call in that it smashed the illusion that the US could continue to develop and keep its peace in isolation. It revealed a world in which we all have a stake in each other’s future. Secondly, the US is going to have to repair the damage that Trump has done to the alliances that have given us the longest period of relative peace and prosperity in world history. Nato, the TransAtlantic Alliance, the United Nations system and the multilateral agencies. The World Trade Organisation and the trade agreements that have provided the foundation for the most rapid expansion in global markets in history, an expansion process that has allowed billions of people to claw their way out of absolute poverty and degradation. In the process, we have created