The US is a statistical outlier in almost every single metric. Almost nothing about the US generalizes, not to the world as a whole, and not to other Western countries. Certainly not to functioning liberal democracies.

The US suffers from Duverger's Law which means that any vote for anything other than one of the two big parties is wasted. In my country, we currently have 17 different parties, each with different variations of policies. Some are outliers, but many of them have or have had power to some degree over the years. Your cable-tv problem still exists, but to a much smaller extent.

In this case, one of the packages is uninspiring and the other is fascism, so the choice is fairly clear.

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Which is enough to make the rest of the world hold their breath, waiting to see what the sum of little choices will be.

Candidates don't find it difficult to express the most popular opinions in the short time before an election. You really do have to know what they did previously if you want to correctly evaluate them.

Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.

From outside the US, nothing about him has really been predictable, except that he consistently lies about everything.

The only predictable thing about this American presidency is the total chaos that has been inflicted on the world by millions of intellectually degenerate Americans. This is what the world sees. Almost nobody is making excuses for him, everybody is trying to move on without the US.

So yeah, in that sense another war is simultaneously an unpredictable outcome and an unsurprising outcome.

How many wars and military actions did he start in his first term? How many times did he do the opposite of what he said he did? The specific case is unpredictable, the general pattern isn't.

The real question is should you have trusted his manifesto after the last time?

During his first term, his continuous threats to north Korea were enough to force congress to restrict presidential powers (the whole fire and fury stuff), and that's not counting Venezuela, Syria and others.

It was evident to anyone aware and paying attention.

I agree with this. What was certain and predictable was that Harris was a war candidate (the Democrats presided over the first year of genocide and were intending to continue).

MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.

Since January 6th it was clear that he would be willing to secure his power in any way. The most obvious way in america is to start a war.

And even if noone could predict that - the worst part is all the Americans sitting by, twiddling thumbs after seeing Trump making the whole world worse. You are the loudest "democracy" on the planet, but noone demands the necessary accountability from the dear leader. Democracy does not only happen on election day.

If you paid attention to his actions while in office, rather than a selection of his words while on the campaign trail, it was pretty clear he wasn't in the least bit interested in being a "peace president;" he just wanted the Nobel Peace Price because Obama got one.

Frankly, bullshit. Harris did not seemed more pro war or aggressive, unless you live in deep conservative bubble.