What if Al Gore Won in 2000? (a non-american's take)

ok so i was down a wikipedia rabbit hole again at 2am (classic) and i couldn't stop thinking about the 2000 US election. you know, the one where george w bush won by like 537 votes in florida. FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY SEVEN VOTES. for the most powerful country in the world. insane.

and yeah everyone makes this argument but as someone who is not american i think i have a slightly different angle on this. because honestly? the rest of us had to live through the consequences just as much as they did, sometimes more. so here's my take on what a Gore presidency looks like from the outside.

the one that makes me most emotional is climate. Gore basically wrote the book on climate change — literally, his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" came out in 2006 when he had nothing better to do because he wasn't president. imagine if instead of making powerpoints he was actually running policy. the US refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol under Bush. just refused. walked away. and because the US walked, other countries used it as cover to drag their feet too. with Gore? the US probably ratifies, and when the US ratifies, the pressure on everyone else is completely different. we're talking about starting serious decarbonisation policy maybe a decade earlier than it actually happened. is it possible things still go too slow? sure. the american political system is a mess. but the trajectory would have bent, and that matters for the whole planet, not just america.

then there's Iraq. this is where i think the non-american perspective really matters because people in the US debate it as a political question, but for people in the middle east and beyond it was a catastrophe that is still playing out today. would Gore have invaded? almost certainly not. the Iraq War was a Bush/Cheney project years in the making — the neocons, the Project for a New American Century guys. Gore wasn't in that world. no Cheney means massively different foreign policy DNA in the administration. no Iraq War means no power vacuum, which means ISIS probably doesn't exist in the form it did. no destabilisation cascading into Syria and Libya. hundreds of thousands of lives not lost. millions of refugees who never have to flee. and the US spends two-plus trillion dollars on literally anything else. i can't stress enough how much better this is for people who actually lived in that region. it isn't abstract.

now, 9/11. i'll lose some people here but i have to be honest: it probably still happens. the planning was well underway before Bush even took office, the CIA warnings were going out regardless, and Gore would have faced the same intelligence failures. but how he responds is completely different. the Afghanistan operation probably still happens, and probably more focused and better executed without the Iraq distraction splitting resources. the "War on Terror" branding, the colour-coded threat levels, the torture programme, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo — all of that is Bush-era stuff that a Gore administration likely doesn't do. the Patriot Act might still exist in some form but probably not as sweeping. from the outside world's perspective: less "with us or against us" rhetoric, more multilateralism, NATO allies more on board, UN not bypassed. better for global relations even in a really dark moment.

on the economy it's more complicated. the dot-com crash was already happening when Bush took office — that's not his fault and not something Gore stops. recession in 2001 probably still happens. but Gore was a fiscal hawk. the Clinton surplus would probably have been protected. no giant tax cuts for the wealthy in 2001 and 2003. which means going into 2008 the US is in a slightly better fiscal position. does 2008 still happen? probably yes — that was a structural financial crisis baked into deregulation from the 90s that neither party really stopped. but the recovery might look different with less debt from two wars. so, mixed.

and then there's soft power, which from a non-american perspective is huge in ways that are hard to quantify. the Bush years destroyed american credibility on a scale that took decades to even partially repair. Abu Ghraib photos going around the world. "freedom fries." unilateral invasions. the whole world watching and going "...what is happening." a Gore presidency keeps that intact. the US as a credible voice on democracy and human rights, actually showing up to climate negotiations with something real, working through institutions instead of around them.

okay but i have to be fair — some things might have been worse. Republican opposition to a Gore win would probably have been vicious. he was seen as illegitimate by half the country and they went after Clinton for way less. stricter environmental rules early on would have caused real economic pain for workers in fossil fuel states, even if the long-term is better. and honestly, Gore himself was not a great politician — stiff, awkward, sometimes preachy. he might have been a one-term president crushed in 2004 after a rough first term, handing power to someone maybe even worse than Bush. that's not a small risk.

but look. no alternate history is a utopia. president Gore would have made his own mistakes, faced his own crises, maybe failed in ways we can't predict. from where i'm sitting though, outside the US, watching how american decisions ripple out across the planet — the Iraq War alone is enough. if nothing else changes but that one decision, we're already in a profoundly different world. add climate action starting a decade earlier and things look meaningfully better. not perfect. not a utopia. but better.

537 votes. one court decision. and the whole world went a different way. crazy to think about.