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As the dust settles after a tumultuous U.S. presidential election, the magnitude of Donald Trump’s victory becomes clearer. His decisive win to become the 47th president of the American Republic is an emphatic popular mandate for change.

This could enable Trump to bring the disastrous U.S.-led proxy war in Ukraine against Russia to a peaceful end, as Francis Boyle, a respected American professor of international law, remarked this week.

Going into the election, the stakes could not have been higher. A continuation of the nearly three-year-old conflict – as would have happened if the Democrats had remained in power – was potentially leading to World War Three and a nuclear conflagration. Trump had starkly warned of that imminent danger. A central part of his election platform was a pledge to push for a diplomatic resolution.

At 78, Donald J Trump becomes the only second president in U.S. history to win two non-consecutive terms. The last figure to do that was Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, in 1892, as noted by Martin Sieff, a seasoned observer of American elections.

What makes Trump’s political comeback so astonishing is the defiance of the establishment and the mainstream media, which for the most part was staunchly supporting his rival, Kamala Harris. “Every dirty trick, lie and scare tactic in the history of American politics – which is filled with them – was used against him. They all failed,” wrote Sieff this week.

The pre-election polls, right up to voting day on November 5, weren’t even close, as it turned out. Trump swept the electoral map, taking even the supposedly battleground states, to win by more than 4 million popular votes. He also stormed past the crucial threshold of 270 to win over 300 electoral college votes.

The key factor for his triumph was the economy which Trump tapped into. Bound up in the economic tribulations for ordinary Americans is the militarism and warmongering that the Democrats have become associated with. The callous lack of priority to address pressing social and economic needs of poor, working Americans that the Biden administration and his vice president Kamala Harris had displayed over the past four years was matched by their license to fund the war in Ukraine to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

There was also the factor of the Biden administration’s appalling complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza over the past year. Millions of Muslim, Arab and young voters who would normally vote Democrat were outraged and disgusted. They refused to give Harris their votes. Trump is no friend of the Palestinian people, but at least he could not be accused of complicity in genocide the way Biden and Harris indelibly are.

Not only does Trump win the White House decisively, his Republican Party also took back control of the Senate and looks like maintaining its majority in the House of Representatives. With that dominance in the executive and legislative branches of government, the second Trump administration will be able to implement his program without impediment. His previous administration (2016-2020) was hampered by Democrats and the corporate-controlled media over spurious claims about “Russia collusion”. That propaganda farce is obsolete.

The authority of Trump’s political position makes it propitious for him to follow through on his election pledge to end the conflict in Ukraine.

Trump has boasted that he can end the war in 24 hours. That is typical bluster from the former real estate magnate. The signs are that Russia has its own clear-sighted objectives and will not be swayed from achieving them. Russia is done with Western duplicity. It is determined to defeat the Kiev NeoNazi regime, to retain its newly regained historic territories, and to ensure whatever is left of the rump Ukrainian state that it will never join the NATO military alliance.

Russia’s military victory in Ukraine is as assured as it is righteous and legally correct. Moscow will set its own terms and is not looking for U.S. approval under Trump or anyone else.

What Trump can do to expedite the end of the bloodshed and establish peace is to immediately sever the reckless military aid to the Kiev regime.

Trump’s “America First” manifesto suggests that is what he will do. By closing down the war racket that was driven by the Biden administration, the conflict will come to a much-needed prompt end.

This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Trump on his election and said that Moscow was open for reasonable dialogue. But it seems patent that the dialogue will be about accepting the eminently reasonable conditions that Russia had always offered – no NATO expansion into Ukraine and recognition of the principle of indivisible security for all.

As Putin categorically stated in a speech at the Valdai forum this week, the United States and its NATO allies must henceforth disabuse themselves of any notion about “strategically defeating Russia”. Putin’s speech was a wide-ranging philosophical worldview in which he also said the era of Western hegemony is definitively over – and for the common good of the planet.

The United States can choose to be part of a multipolar world coexisting as equals with all other nations abiding by international law. But its nefarious ambitions of unipolar privilege are no longer tenable. The conflict in Ukraine and Russia’s defiance of U.S.-led NATO aggression has demonstrated the new geopolitical reality. In this new more just order, NATO is an anachronism.

The emergence of BRICS is another harbinger of Western imperial demise.

Trump is a pragmatic deal-maker. He is not imbued with the ideological obsession of empire as the U.S. establishment and the Democrats are. There also seems to be a decent sense of humanity in Trump despite his brashness. When he denounces the horror of the war in Ukraine, it seems to reflect a genuine abhorrence at the slaughter and a desire for diplomacy to prevail.

It now remains to be seen who Trump selects as his cabinet when he takes office in 70 days following the presidential inauguration on January 20. If he surrounds himself with people like Robert Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard who have been vociferous in their criticism of the Ukraine proxy war and who have urged a reasonable, diplomatic attitude towards Russia then the signs are hopeful that the U.S. has made a significant step towards pursuing peaceful relations.

If on the other hand Trump returns hawkish figures like Mike Pompeo and Richard Grenell then his second term will end up like his first one and there will be a woefully missed historic opportunity for detente with Russia.

One thing seems clear. The election shows that the American people have repudiated the warmongering establishment and their lackey warmongering media. All the messaging, gaslighting and perception management was ignored. The Mighty Wurlitzer, as the CIA operative Frank Wisner once marveled as the power of the U.S. propaganda media, is now badly out of tune and wheezing.

Trump needs to listen to the American people and deliver on his promise for peace.