At a recent conference I attended, I was seated next to a prominent American trade policy expert. We began to talk about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which President Donald Trump has blamed for American workers’ woes and is trying to renegotiate. ‘I never thought NAFTA was a big deal’, the economist said.

I was astonished. The expert had been one of the most prominent and vocal advocates of NAFTA when the deal was concluded a quarter-century ago. He and other trade economists had played a big part in selling the agreement to the American public. ‘I supported NAFTA because I thought it would pave the way for further trade agreements’, my companion explained.

A couple of weeks later, I was at a dinner in Europe, where the speaker was a former finance minister of a eurozone country. The topic was the rise of populism. The former minister had left politics and had strong words about the mistakes he thought the European policy elite had made. ‘We accuse populists of making promises they cannot keep, but we should turn that criticism back on ourselves’, he told us.

Earlier during the dinner, I had discussed what I describe as a trilemma, whereby it is impossible to have national sovereignty, democracy and hyper-globalisation all at once. We must choose two out of three. The former politician spoke passionately: ‘Populists are at least honest. They are clear about the choice they are making; they want the nation-state, and not hyper-globalization or the European single market. But we told our people they could have all three cakes simultaneously. We made promises we could not deliver.’

We will never know whether greater honesty on the part of mainstream politicians and technocrats would have spared us the rise of nativist demagogues like Trump or Marine Le Pen in France. What is clear is that lack of candor in the past has come at a price. It has cost political movements of the centre their credibility. And it has made it more difficult for elites to bridge the gap separating them from ordinary people who feel deserted by the establishment.

Many elites are puzzled about why poor or working-class people would vote for someone like Trump. After all, the professed economic policies of Hillary Clinton would in all likelihood have proved more favourable to them. To explain the apparent paradox, they cite these voters’ ignorance, irrationality or racism.

But there is another explanation, one that is fully consistent with rationality and self-interest. When mainstream politicians lose their credibility, it is natural for voters to discount the promises they make. Voters are more likely to be attracted to candidates who have anti-establishment credentials and can safely be expected to depart from prevailing policies.

In the language of economists, centrist politicians face a problem of asymmetric information. They claim to be reformers, but why should voters believe leaders who appear no different from the previous crop of politicians who oversold them the gains from globalisation and pooh-poohed their grievances?

In Clinton’s case, her close association with the globalist mainstream of the Democratic Party and close ties with the financial sector clearly compounded the problem. Her campaign promised fair trade deals and disavowed support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but was her heart really in it? After all, when she was US Secretary of State, she had strongly backed the TPP.

This is what economists call a pooling equilibrium. Conventional and reformist politicians look alike and hence elicit the same response from much of the electorate. They lose votes to the populists and demagogues whose promises to shake up the system are more credible.

Framing the challenge as a problem of asymmetric information also hints at a solution. A pooling equilibrium can be disrupted if a reformist politician can ‘signal’ to voters his or her ‘true type’.

Signaling has a specific meaning in this context. It means engaging in costly behaviour that is sufficiently extreme that a conventional politician would never want to emulate it, yet not so extreme that it would turn the reformer into a populist and defeat the purpose. For someone like Hillary Clinton, assuming her conversion was real, it could have meant announcing she would no longer take a dime from Wall Street or would not sign another trade agreement if elected.

In other words, centrist politicians who want to steal the demagogues’ thunder have to tread a very narrow path. If fashioning such a path sounds difficult, it is indicative of the magnitude of the challenge these politicians face. Meeting it will likely require new faces and younger politicians, not tainted with the globalist, market fundamentalist views of their predecessors.

It will also require forthright acknowledgement that pursuing the national interest is what politicians are elected to do. And this implies a willingness to attack many of the establishment’s sacred cows—particularly the free rein given to financial institutions, the bias towards austerity policies, the jaundiced view of government’s role in the economy, the unhindered movement of capital around the world, and the fetishisation of international trade.

To mainstream ears, the rhetoric of such leaders will often sound jarring and extreme. Yet wooing voters back from populist demagogues may require nothing less. These politicians must offer an inclusive, rather than nativist, conception of national identity, and their politics must remain squarely within liberal democratic norms. Everything else should be on the table.

Donald Trump’s victory marks the biggest political upset in living memory. A man without solid party support nor any major newspaper editorial or celebrity endorsements has defeated  Hillary Rodham Clinton, the queen of the political establishment in Washington. His presidential victory represents a defeat for globalism, political correctness, identity politics, climate change mitigation and a Pax Americana. In the process, it has confounded most of the pundits (including this writer), the polls and the forecasting agencies.

Nothing better demonstrates the significance of Trump’s economic nationalist appeal than his victories in not just Ohio, but the other rust-belt states Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin or what Michael Moore has called the “Brexit states.”

Wisconsin had not voted Republican since Ronald Reagan’s landslide in 1984 and Pennsylvania and Michigan had voted Democrat in every election since 1992. The exit polling indicates that significant segments of white working class living there voted for Trump. These are folks who’ve seen decades of wage stagnation and rising income inequality; many resented career politicians; others fed up with losing wars in the Middle East; and many had been generally apathetic about politics and voting.

The prevailing wisdom suggested not enough of those voters would turn out on election day, and in any case couldn’t compete against the well-organised Clinton machine with its awesome ground game to get-out the Democrat vote.

Compounding the Republican Party’s problems, Trump was a rude, crude and lewd buffoon. This was the bloke who said John McCain was no hero, that some Mexican illegals are ‘rapists’ and some women ‘pigs’. A candidate who wanted a temporary ban to Muslim immigration. A bully who fought with a Gold Star mother and father. A vulgar sexist who allegedly made several advances on a dozen women and uttered extremely lewd remarks about women. And yet Trump’s supporters stood by him through all the controversies.

What we experts didn’t take into account is a new phenomenon: the Shy Trump voter.

In other words, the raw polling findings overstated the support for Hillary Clinton, because some people were ashamed of admitting that they would vote for Donald Trump. The logic is clear: if you’re a Trump supporter, you aren’t just depicted as a self-serving throwback, but also as a racist, a xenophobe and a misanthropic ignoramus who has missed the point of most of the cultural progress of recent decades. A popular bumper sticker read: Vote Trump. No One Will Know.

For years, British pollsters have had to deal with the Shy Tory factor, where people fear being bullied out of admitting that they’re Conservative voters because they believe Conservatism to be associated with selfishness or just being generally old-fashioned. So they pretend they’re voting for the more progressive parties, such as Labour and the Liberal Democrats. At the 1992 election, Shy Toryism was endemic: the polls pointed to a clear Neil Kinnock victory, but the Shy Tories crept into the polling booths in their millions and voted for the conservative candidate.

Ditto America today. And one wonders whether Shy Toryism is rampant throughout Europe. Already various populist, nativist movements are on the rise in response to sluggish economic growth, lax border controls and a genuine fear of Islamic terror. All this has been exacerbated by the decline of the mainstream media and the rise of noisy angry outlets that allow populists like Trump to propose simplistic solutions to fantastically complex problems.

After the celebrations over Donald Trump’s astonishing victory, come the hangovers. It would be pleasant to think everybody would now close ranks and get on with the nation’s business. The sad thing about this election, however, is that it hasn’t clarified America’s problems — but deepened them. It hasn’t unified the people but divided them. To put it mildly and politely, it was an immoderate campaign, coarse in its tone and unedifying in its substance, and the nation’s politics are likely to stay that way for the next four years and beyond.

At the presidential level, it was too personal, negative and downright ugly. Neither long months of fierce campaigning nor Trump’s wins in crucial battleground states have produced any general agreement—even within his own party—about the policies that should guide the American people through the next four years.

Instead, it has left Trump with no clear policy mandate, and Clinton, despite her defeat, without much public regret. And, crucially, it has also left US allies with profound doubts about the future of American global leadership.

Obviously there’s been a populist sweep of opinion in the nation—not only against Clinton but also the Republican establishment. Trump, remember, was the least conservative candidate in a crowded field of 17 GOP primary candidates. But it doesn’t follow that a Trump administration can impose a dramatic, nativist set of policies on a Congress still dominated by conservatives.

Trump is undoubtedly exhausted by the struggle and stunned by the result and will need time to rest and reflect on the consequences of the vote and the implications of his promises, such as building a wall, banning Muslim immigrants and launching a trade war on China. Indeed, it’ll be surprising if Trump and his supporters, after their celebrations, try to insist on the policies they pronounced during the campaign or assume they can govern without the help of those they defeated.

The ongoing presidential campaign in the United States stands out for its lack of civility and the vast differences between the candidates: the anti-establishment businessman Donald Trump on the Republican side and the polished politician Hillary Clinton representing the Democrats. The contest has exposed deep fault lines within American society and damaged the country’s global reputation. No surprise, then, that one of the few things Americans seem to agree on is that the campaign has gone on for too long. But soon it will be over. The question is: what comes next?

Polls suggest that Clinton, a former senator and secretary of state, will defeat the controversial Trump. But polls are not to be confused with reality. After all, going into June’s Brexit referendum, most observers believed that a victory for “Remain” was a sure thing. More recently, Colombian voters rejected a peace accord that was widely expected to receive popular approval.

All of this is to say that, while a Clinton victory may be likely, it is no certainty. The only poll that counts is the one on November 8. Until then, all we can do is speculate.

Yet some predictions can be made with greater confidence. There is little doubt that the US will emerge from this election a divided country with a divided government, regardless of who is president or which party has a majority in either chamber of Congress. Neither Democrats nor Republicans will be able to realize their objectives without at least some support from the other.

But no one should think that the only divide in American politics is between Republicans and Democrats. In fact, splits within the two major parties are just as deep, with large and highly motivated factions pulling each to their respective extremes—Democrats to the left and Republicans to the right. This makes compromise on centrist positions all the more difficult to achieve.

The rapid resumption of presidential politics will undermine compromise further. If Clinton wins, many Republicans will assume that it was only because of Trump’s flaws, and they will judge her likely to be a one-term president. A country favoring change, they will conclude, is unlikely to keep a Democrat in the Oval Office for a fourth term. Many Republicans (especially those who deny the legitimacy of a Clinton victory) will thus seek to frustrate her administration, lest she be able to run again in 2020 as a successful incumbent.

Similarly, if Trump manages to win, most Democrats (and even some Republicans) will—after recovering from their surprise and dismay—make it their highest priority to ensure that he does not have an opportunity for a second term. Given how much of Trump’s agenda his fellow policymakers would likely find objectionable, governing would be very difficult during his administration.

In either scenario, it may still be possible to make progress in a few key areas. The next US government might manage to enact legislation to fund the modernization of America’s aging infrastructure, a policy that both candidates and many in Congress favor. It might also be able to cobble together a majority to reform the US tax code—in particular, lowering the high rate for corporations and raising taxes on the wealthy. There could even be some reform of health care, President Barack Obama’s signature achievement, owing to serious implementation problems with the current system.

But other issues requiring cooperation between Congress and the president are unlikely to be addressed any time soon. One is immigration reform, which is as controversial in the US as it is in Europe. Another is trade: because the domestic political environment makes policymakers wary of supporting positions with dedicated opponents, both Trump and Clinton oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, even though its ratification would benefit America’s economy and strategic standing. Meanwhile, America’s deficit and debt are certain to rise, as there seems to be little or no will to reduce entitlement spending.

The foreign-policy implications of the election are somewhat different, because, under the US Constitution, the president enjoys considerable latitude. While only Congress can officially declare war or ratify treaties, presidents may use (or refuse to use) military force without explicit congressional approval. They can also enter into international agreements other than treaties, appoint powerful White House staff, and change US foreign policy by executive action, as Obama recently did regarding Cuba.

Under Clinton, this discretion could translate into establishing one or more safe areas in Syria, providing more defensive arms to Ukraine, and taking a tougher line toward North Korea as it continues its nuclear and missile buildup. It is more difficult to guess what Trump would do. He is, after all, a political outsider, so no one knows how much of his campaign rhetoric would be translated into policy. Still, one could anticipate a Trump administration distancing itself from some traditional allies in Europe and Asia and standing mostly aloof from the Middle East.

What exactly will happen to America after the presidential election remains an open question. Though some outcomes can reasonably be expected, the only genuine certainty is that the 96% of the world’s population that does not vote in US elections will feel the effects no less than Americans will.

The US presidential election on 8 November could have grave implications for Australia’s security. The next US president may retreat into international isolationism.

If President Trump wins there could well be serious consequences for our crucial alliance relationship with America and for our regional security partners, such as Japan. A President Clinton would be preferable for Australia in foreign and defence policy terms, but she’ll have a major battle on her hands at home with the economy and a dysfunctional Congress.

Both presidential candidates have serious personality shortcomings. Neither of them is well liked by the American people. The opinion polls are showing them to be neck and neck. Much will depend upon the voter turn-out on Election Day in a country where voting isn’t compulsory.

If Clinton is elected, her foreign and defence policies in terms of using US power and standing up to Russia and China may be more decisive than those of her predecessor, Barack Obama. But Clinton’s priority will be to repair damage domestically to the institutions of government and this will mean an inward looking America.

The centre of gravity of US opinion has been shifted by the Trump candidacy and there will be an enduring effect politically, even if he loses. There’s anger about state of the economy, the damage to traditional jobs caused by countries such as China, and yawning gaps in standards of living.

A President Trump may prove to be an isolationist and a destroyer of alliances. Former US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, describes Trump as unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief. He says that Trump is stubbornly uninformed about the world and ‘temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform’.

Some 50 national security and foreign policy officials, who served in Republican administrations dating back to President Nixon, have also issued a statement describing Trump as lacking self-control and acting impetuously. They state that Trump ‘has alarmed our closest allies with his erratic behaviour’.

Canberra will be relieved if the election in November results in Hillary Clinton becoming President of the United States. She’s well known in official circles in Canberra from her time as Secretary of State. She’ll be seen as reassuringly orthodox and American foreign policy will hopefully be reset to ‘normal’. She’ll be expected to support robust alliances and intervention in important instances when the US led global order is challenged.

However, whether she’ll rebuild a strong US military and support free trade, as distinct from protectionism, remains to be seen. There may be modest hope that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement could be rescued through a deal in which congressional opponents get some compensation outside the scope of TPP, but that’s a long shot.

Clinton would be the more reliably sensible and policy trustworthy president from Australia’s perspective. Importantly, the pivot or rebalance of the US presence in Asia was essentially an idea that she and Kurt Campbell came up with. Campbell is likely to be influential in a Clinton administration.

The implications of a Trump administration are much more difficult to predict. But one thing is certain: he’s determined to make radical changes in how Washington is governed and to rebuild America and ‘make the US strong again’. He stresses the need to build jobs, reject free trade and immigration, and make US allies (including Japan and South Korea) pay more for their defence. That’s not good news for Australia.

Former Australian ambassador to Washington, Kim Beazley, asks where Australia is to begin to work with a victor in the presidential race who has trashed the the alliance system and liberal international rules-based order that have underpinned American leadership since 1945 during the campaign.

Others have confidence that the US constitutional system of checks and balances will counter Trump’s worst excesses. However, a US President has many powers to mount negative initiatives. He can undermine confidence among allies that he’ll initiate actions to support them, and he can use the broad license of US trade laws that give an American president powers to pursue punitive action against trade partners.

If Trump wins, it’ll be crucial from an Australian perspective to immediately bring our concerns to bear with the new administration.  That should focus on the critical nature of our alliance with the US and the importance of American commitment to a forward military presence in Asia. But we also need to think through a worst-case contingency that involves the very future of the ANZUS alliance and our trust in America. The potential for a disaster in the relationship shouldn’t be dismissed.

Regardless of who wins, we’ll see more intense polarisation in Washington and continuing savage political struggles. That’ll make it more difficult for a middle-sized power like Australia to gain traction. Our life will be harder.

Cybersecurity continues to be a prominent issue in the US election race. An FBI bulletin, uncovered two weeks ago, reveals that the Bureau has been investigating recent hacking attempts on two state election websites. The hackers, suspected to be agents of a foreign state, targeted voter databases in Arizona and Illinois, accessing up to 200,000 personal voter records.

It’s only been three months since security firm Crowdstrike held two Russian groups responsible for the high-profile hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks. Wikileaks later published almost 20,000 DNC emails, and Romanian hacker Guccifer 2.0 released DNC opposition research on Trump—both ostensibly obtained from the breach. The incident had a significant impact on the Democratic Party and its convention, and was deemed an act of kompromat—the Russian practice of using compromising information to smear officials and influence events.

Gaining access to voter databases isn’t particularly ground breaking: the information isn’t well protected and some is actually available for purchase from platforms such as NationBuilder.com or VoterRecords.com. But the incident, preceded as it was by the DNC hack the breach of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a further DNC document dump by Guccifer this week, has intensified concern over of the fragility of computer systems and the interest foreign hackers have in meddling with them.

Specifically, there’s concern around the security of the voting machines themselves. Following the troubled 2000 presidential election count, there was a move to modernise parts of the US voting process from paper punching to digital machines. Unfortunately, changes took place without much consideration of security and systems haven’t been diligently upgraded since installation. The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology laments (PDF) that as a result, most voting machines are ‘less secure than a modern children’s toy’.

Computer science professor Ed Felten tried to bring attention to this weakness over 10 years ago, successfully installing vote-altering malware to an e-voting machine in such a way that digital forensics would find no trace. Such security flaws remain today, with Felten’s Princeton associate Andrew Appel recently taking only minutes to demonstrate his ability to remodel a voting machine’s circuitry to sabotage vote counting. That same model machine is still used in New Jersey, Virginia, Louisiana and Pennsylvania.

Alternatively, hackers could compromise the voter access card used by citizens to cast their ballot at an e-voting machine. At the Black Hat hacking conference last month, the Symantec stall demonstrated that, if accessed ahead of time, the cards can be reprogrammed to allow an individual to fraudulently submit hundreds of votes at a time.

The integrity of voting data remains vulnerable outside the booth. Hackers could exploit the network connections that communicate the votes to the central database server (where election results are collated), intercepting and modifying the unencrypted data in transit. Or simple manipulation of voter databases, like those accessed in Arizona and Illinois, could lead to targeted disenfranchisement on Election Day, generating panic and a loss of confidence in the process.

While Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson maintains that his organisation doesn’t have reason to believe there’s a specific threat posed to the election, he has nonetheless proposed measures to mitigate any risk. DHS has offered to provide states with federal cyber security experts to review voting systems for bugs and vulnerabilities. However such moves have been painted as unconstitutional government overreach and several vital swing-states, such as Georgia and Pennsylvania, declined the offer in favour of reliance on in-house security capabilities.

Generating a tangible impact on an election outcome remains challenging, given the highly decentralised nature of voting networks and the fact that 75% of votes still leave a verifiable paper trail. However, lax cyber security standards could still allow doubt to be cast on an election outcome—a dangerous recipe in a potentially tight race and given Trump’s public conviction that the election is likely to be rigged. Disturbingly, the current system makes it almost impossible to verify the authenticity of the results as 15 out of 50 states don’t create paper voting records in all their jurisdictions, and several states, including Georgia, South Carolina and New Jersey, keep no paper trail of votes whatsoever.

Either way, the high-profile debate around digital voting has certainly highlighted the strategic significance of election systems as national security assets. As Rice professor Dan Wallach advocates, election security is a national security concern. In this vein, Johnson recently suggested digital voting systems be rebranded as critical national infrastructure. Putting election infrastructure in the same category as national power grids and water supply systems would allow DHS to maintain tighter controls and improve the transparency of voting system security, which has been lacking to date.

It’s too late to completely remedy the situation for the 2016 US presidential election, but at a minimum some form of paper trail evidence should be mandated for digital votes. Elevating the security of electoral systems to the federal level may be the only way to enforce a bare minimum security standard before polling day and facilitate more robust risk mitigation into the future.

Debates are underway around the possibility of e-voting in Australia’s next election. These discussions must be informed by an awareness that the ability to secure and corroborate votes is a pre-requisite for going digital. The US experience demonstrates that electronic voting has to be done correctly or not at all, and if it’s pursued, it must be prioritised as an extension of critical national infrastructure.