An American friend told me recently of how, following the death of president Jimmy Carter, YouTube’s algorithm had sent him an excerpt from one of the three presidential debates from 1976, when Carter defeated the incumbent Republican Gerald Ford. This one had been all about foreign policy. “It was extraordinary,” said my friend. “They debated the status of the Panama Canal for 16 minutes. Can you imagine that happening now?”
No, I couldn’t. Running up to November’s presidential election there was just that one debate with Kamala Harris — the one in which Donald Trump claimed Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. It was only after his victory that Trump unveiled his undebated determination to take control of a waterway which runs through a sovereign foreign nation.
