When one country’s vote sets the temperature for everyone
“The dial is in one flat. The bill arrives in all of them.”
The dial
In some old buildings, a single flat controls the heating for everyone. The thermostat is in that flat. When its occupant feels cold, the whole building sweats; when they go on holiday, the neighbours dig out the blankets. Nobody has done anything wrong. The installation is simply badly designed.
On this 3 November, the world looks a lot like that building. Some 250 million Americans are called to renew the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. If turnout follows recent midterms, roughly half of them will vote. A domestic affair, on the face of it.
Only on the face of it. This election will shape decisions on energy prices, ongoing wars, tariffs, markets and the climate. Switzerland has learned this first-hand: in August 2025, a decision taken in Washington hit our exports overnight with an additional 39% tariff. Watches, machinery, jobs. It took more than three months of negotiations to bring it down to 15%.
The dial is in one flat. The bill arrives in all of them.
Let’s be clear
This text is not putting Americans on trial. The vast majority of them are welcoming people who mean no one any harm. As everywhere, there are extreme fringes; they do not define a people.
When American voters cast their ballot, they think about their rent, their petrol, their health insurance, the safety of their street, their children’s future. That is the very nature of voting: we elect representatives to defend our interests, not the planet’s. No one can blame a farmer in Ohio or a nurse in Detroit for not thinking, in the voting booth, about Swiss exporters or civilians in the Middle East. Nobody gave them that mandate.
The occupant sets the thermostat by the temperature of their own room. Who wouldn’t?
The neighbours’ bill
The problem is not the occupant; it is the plumbing. American power is such that its domestic choices become global realities. The dollar, the military, technology, financial markets: every pipe leads back to the same dial. A sovereignty that spills this far beyond its borders creates an unusual situation: a power exercised over everyone, but accountable to only a few.
History has a name for this. “No taxation without representation”: it was in the name of this principle that the American colonists rose up against the British Crown in the eighteenth century. Two and a half centuries later, a good part of the world pays taxes it never voted for, set by a government it never elected. The irony at least has the merit of elegance.
The neighbours pay for the heating. They just weren’t invited to the residents’ meeting.
A fraction of a fraction
Add the arithmetic. In 2024, the winner of the presidential election won around 77 million votes, roughly a third of Americans eligible to vote. In midterms, where turnout hovers around half, a majority in Congress can be won with the votes of barely a quarter of the electorate.
A fraction of a fraction therefore decides for eight billion people. It is nobody’s fault: it is how a national democracy normally works. It simply happens to apply to a house that isn’t only its own.
Space heaters
The neighbours, for their part, are not sitting there shivering. The more unpredictable the thermostat becomes, the more everyone equips themselves. Europe is reinvesting in its defence: in 2025, NATO members committed to raising their spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. Trade agreements are being struck without Washington. Central banks are buying gold at a record pace, more than a thousand tonnes a year from 2022 to 2024, to depend a little less on the dollar.
Here lies history’s paradox: the instability that makes this hegemony so heavy to bear is precisely what speeds up its decline. Leadership built on trust is strengthened by predictability; it erodes as soon as it becomes a source of worry. Every space heater plugged in next door is a little power leaving the central dial, quietly and for good.
People don’t leave central heating because it heats badly. They leave because they never know whether it will heat at all.
Questions for the road
All my life, I have seen that lasting relationships are built as equals. In a company as between nations, concentrated power ends up disappointing, because it cannot serve everyone. Shared power creates stability, because everyone finds their place and their voice in it. This text does not claim to design the new installation. Instead, it leaves a few questions:
- Is it healthy for an entire world to depend so heavily on the choice of a single electorate, however well-meaning?
- What are our own decisions worth, economic, energy, military, in a building where the dial is somewhere else?
- Are the space heaters everyone is installing preparing a fairer balance, or just a colder building?
- And on our own scale, in our teams, our companies, our towns: who holds the dial, and who pays the bill?
Tonight, whatever the result, let us wish Americans a calm election. And let us wish the building that it finds, little by little, an installation where one country’s vote no longer sets the temperature for everyone.
Sources: Pew Research Center, eligible voters in the 2026 midterm elections (September 2026); University of Florida Election Lab, turnout in the 2018, 2022 and 2024 elections; Swiss Federal Council and FOCBS, press release of 10 December 2025 on the reduction of US tariffs from 39% to 15%; NATO, The Hague Summit Declaration (June 2025); World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends 2022–2024.