I am a little surprised by how excited people on this side of the world are about a Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris victory. 

One of my friends watched the victory speeches yesterday and started crying, another one got a lump in the throat, there were clap-hand emojis all over the show and good riddance messages for Donald Trump and basically people as invested in it like it’s our own election. 

Of course, we need to appreciate that as nice as it is to have someone who looks like a reasonable human being elected to the Presidency and the first woman and person of colour elected as his lieutenant, very little is going to change overnight.  Any change is going to take time. 

Having said that, a Joe Biden victory is a good thing for New Zealand. We are likely to get more benefits from a Biden Presidency than we would’ve from a Trump presidency.  

Most obviously through the possibility that Biden might be able to repair the damage Trump did to the WTO. The WTO’s appellate body, which is essentially its appeal court for international trade disputes, has seven judges.  It needs at least three at a time to convene.  Trump’s administration has blocked all new appointments so there is only one judge left, which means it’s essentially crippled.

So as a trading nation reliant on this international body to mediate disputes, we stand to benefit. 

There’s also the alignment of values between our government and Biden’s government.  I think it’s obvious that Trump was not a fan of Jacinda Ardern or her status in the world.  It’s pretty symbolic that she wasn’t invited to the White House like the three prime ministers before her.

But Biden and Harris are cut from the same cloth as Ardern and might actually see value in promoting themselves as friends of Ardern’s and New Zealand’s at the moment. That, again, will be of some benefit to us. 

And then finally, like it or not, the US is still a cultural leader in the western world.  Often the problems that they have culturally, we have eventually or to a lesser degree.  So the hope is that if Biden can start to repair some of the cultural wars in the US, that repairing might reach over to other parts of the world also suffering divisions including here in NZ. 

All of this is good for us, but most of it will take a long time to fix.  The US is a big ship for Biden to turn around. 

So yes, a Biden presidency is good, but it’s also worth tempering expectations.