Who would make America safe?

"THE only thing we have to fear is fear itself," President Franklin D Roosevelt famously stated in his inaugural address in 1932, as Americans were beginning to cope with the devastating economic effects of the Great Depression, with millions of them losing their jobs and standing in soup kitchen lines.

And less than 10 years later, he was called to help Americans overcome the sense of national trauma that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and to mobilise them to win a long, costly world war.

America is neither in the midst of a terrible recession or fighting a world war today. But as the United States continues its slow economic recovery following the 2008 Great Recession and is still fighting two conventional wars in the Greater Middle East and an unconventional war on the terrorism front, Americans clearly have reasons to be anxious about their future as a nation - and they are certainly very, very angry, as demonstrated by the political insurgencies of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders during this presidential campaign year.