On Tuesday, voters in the US went to the polls to choose their next president, electing Republican Donald Trump. Speaking to Sputnik, Professor Tony Monteiro, peace activist and scholar at the department of African American Studies at Temple University, suggested that Trump's election may have just saved the world from World War Three.

Calling Tuesday's vote a "political insurrection," Monteiro said that he was frankly surprised by "the depth and magnitude" of the popular revolt. "I felt it was possible, [but] didn't believe it was probable, given that the Clinton campaign had all of the resources…"

"It's a situation where the pundits and the political experts had predicted based upon an old paradigm of viewing elections. And what we had is a new paradigm – a paradigm grounded in rage, anger and class resentment against an elite which never repaired the profound damage done to the American working people and the middle classes as a consequence of the Great Recession of 2007 and 2009."

The academic explained that he frankly "just had no idea at how deep this was. And we saw it – it was a sweep. In fact, Donald Trump did to Hillary Clinton what the experts were saying she would do to him. It's quite unbelievable – it's a historic outcome. I think finally, that temporarily, the world has dodged the bullet of World War."

"If Clinton had won, we would be on a fast track to war with Russia, either in the Baltics, Ukraine or in Syria. She made that perfectly clear." Trump, meanwhile, "had over the course of this election cycle said the very opposite. Many people thought that by coming out against war with Russia, he had disqualified himself. In fact he went so far as to attack the generals and those who are running foreign policy."

Ultimately, the expert stressed that more than anything, this election was "a serious rebuke to the corporate media, who were all against Trump and for Hillary Clinton. Now in saying all of this…I don't think Trump is a pure vessel…However, what is significant, and what we have to pay close attention to, is not Trump the individual, but that movement that made it possible for him to win the election."

Monteiro suggested that consciously or not, this movement was animated by their class interest – based on popular anger over stagnant wages, and at the same time, trillions of dollars in offshore banks held by oligarchs, the transnational corporations and hedge funds.

"You've got all of these young people who are graduating from university, with tremendous debt, with no jobs that pay them enough to pay off their debt. And then of course Trump made a kind of heavy-handed and awkward appeal to the Black community – but there was some truth to it! When he said that the political forces that the Black community has aligned with has done very, very little for them. And he said to Black people 'you have nothing to lose'. I think that in the Rust Belt, the former industrial mid-west, more Black people voted for Trump than we are aware of at this time."

Taking office, Trump faces political, class and racial divisions of an almost unprecedented scale. "The nation is divided; it has not been this divided since the civil war in the 1860s." The difference this time, according to the analyst, "is that the divisions are not so much sectional, but are more economic and social class-[based]."

"Can he unite the country around a program of rebuilding the nation economically, and a policy of peace abroad? I'm not yet certain," Monteiro stressed. But he was encouraged by Trump's acceptance speech, where "he said that he was for cooperation with nations and finding common ground. I felt that the paramount issue in this election was the question of war and peace, even though it was not the major issue discussed in the corporate media. It was the paramount issue, because I am of the opinion that had Hillary Clinton won, she was going to fast-track belligerency and even war with Russia, and that could have spun out of control into a thermonuclear war."