World reaction to the recent US election results

[Abwaan]

U.S. Vote Cheered in China, Rued in Russia .

 

A Wall Street Journal Roundup

 

Global observers broadly concurred Wednesday that Republicans' mid-term election gains would plunge President Barack Obama deep into a domestic political fracas—a looming distraction that cheered China and parts of Israel, disheartened much of Asia and Russia and raised little response in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

The results contrasted starkly with the 2008 U.S. presidential election, which elevated the first African-American to the White House and was viewed from the U.K. and Germany to Africa as a watershed political moment.

 

Republicans' recapture of the House "confirmed that Obama's election wasn't the deeply transformative moment in American politics that many Europeans hoped it would be," said Thomas Klau of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Paris.

 

The question internationally was whether the prospect of fresh domestic battles would affect international U.S. initiatives such as shoring up ties with Asian nations and attempting to "reset" relations with Russia.

 

Southeast Asia's main fear is that the Obama Administration could be distracted from its efforts to position the U.S. as a counterweight to China's growing influence in the region. The U.S. has recently urged some countries to stand up to China's growing influence and has angered Beijing by suggesting an international forum to resolve maritime conflicts with Southeast Asian nations and Japan.

 

Beijing, on the flip side, hopes Congressional Republicans' domestic focus will take the wind out those efforts. China generally favors Republican presidents over Democrats, who tend to focus more on human-rights issues. It considers the Obama Administration more confrontational than its predecessor, for whom foreign policy was dominated by Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

But Chinese foreign-policy officials and experts are also wary of growing concerns on both sides of the House about how China plans to use its rapidly expanding economic and military power, and what effect that will have on U.S. interests.

 

Officials in Russia voiced fear that a Republican resurgence could threaten Mr. Obama's attempt to warm mutual relations. On Wednesday, the chairman of a key committee in the Russian parliament said it would withdraw its recommendation that the legislature ratify the U.S.-Russia treaty reducing nuclear weapons—a major achievement of the so-called reset—while it assesses the chances the U.S. Senate will ratify the treaty.

 

"If they can't do this in the lame-duck session in the next couple of weeks, the chances for ratification by the new Senate will be radically lower," said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the International Affairs Committee in the State Duma.

 

The U.S. results heartened some right-leaning Israelis, including settler leaders, who have seen President Obama's Mideast policy as antagonistic and now view his repudiation in the polls as a sign he may be less able to pressure Israel into concessions in stalled peace talks.

 

Danny Dayan, head of the Yesha Council, which represents Jewish settlers in the West Bank, said he hoped the new Congress "will facilitate a more reasoned and open-minded approach to Israel's needs than what we've experienced over the last two years."

 

In countries where the U.S. has its deepest involvements, the reaction was muted. The election merited little coverage, and elicited little response, in Afghanistan. The U.S. midterm also barely registered among Iraqis, whose own politicians have wrangled for eight months over forming a new government amid a renewed campaign of deadly insurgent attacks.

 

"I as an Iraqi citizen don't care for the American elections as much as I [want] Iraqi politicians to form the government," said Eman Abdul Razzaq, a 36-year-old housewife.

 

Mr. Obama's campaign promise to wrap up the Iraq war, and his accelerated timeline to withdraw U.S. combat troops, has torn Iraqis. Many are happy to see the Americans leave, but many others have watched with apprehension as U.S. forces head home, worried about whether Iraq's security forces can fill the void.

 

Africa advocates, meanwhile, lost an aggressive champion of human rights with Tuesday's ousting of Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold. As the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee on African affairs, the long-serving Democrat advocated a more comprehensive policy on Somalia that focused on resolving the conflict rather than just combating terrorism. He helped to pass legislation to develop a regional strategy to combat the Lord's Resistance Army, a murderous band of rebels that roams in northern Uganda and border areas.

 

The senator was also an early advocate for a more nuanced policy on Sudan, a multifaceted conflict that involves the genocide in Darfur and a decades-long civil war between the north and south. As part of the resolution to that struggle, Sudan is currently preparing for a critical referendum in January that could split the state in two. The U.S. has made the referendum a top foreign-policy priority, and Sen. Feingold, Sudan activists say, was instrumental in keeping it on the agenda.

 

"The biggest missing piece will be that steady drumbeat from Sen. Feingold, pushing the administration to keep the attention on these issues," said Sam Bell, executive director of the U.S.-based Save Darfur Coalition and Genocide Intervention Network, a group of civil society groups focused on Sudan.

 

Many world observers saw the mid-term pendulum swing as a given in U.S. politics, where even popular presidents such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton lost support in by-elections.

 

"We all understand the reason for this [defeat]: disappointment that Obama isn't a magician," said Sergei Markov, a senior legislator from the ruling United Russia party. " Unlike voters in the U.S., we in Russia already knew he wasn't a magician."

 

But Mr. Markov called the vote result was a worrisome sign of growing polarization in U.S. politics, with what he called "radical provincialism" rising on the right. "In the U.S., the center is weakening, it's evidence of rising instability in the U.S."

 

"It's not just a problem of Republican victory but that the Republicans are changing, they're becoming more of a dark force," Mr. Markov said. "Europeans are very scared that Obama will be replaced something monstrous like Sarah Palin."

 

"For Europe, America stopped being a problem after Obama was elected. But it could become a problem again, even worse than it was under Bush," he added.

 

In France, politicians and analysts shared a concern that the Democrat party defeat would hamper Mr. Obama's capacity to make decisions on key issues such as financial regulation and taxes and lead to a "stalemate in Washington."

 

Some feared a paralysis of U.S. politics would have international consequences, at a time when most industrialized nations are limping out of recession and struggling to co-ordinate policies. "That would be the worst situation," said Frédéric Lefebvre, spokesman for Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the ruling party of France's President Nicolas Sarkozy. "We can't afford to shift into reverse mode; France and Europe need the U.S. to move forward."

 

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle sought to reassure German TV viewers that President Obama's authority on international affairs isn't badly damaged. The U.S. leader remains popular in the EU's biggest country, whereas many Germans associate the Republican party with former president George W. Bush's unilateralism and invasion of Iraq. Mr. Westerwelle has repeatedly praised Mr. Obama's commitment to diplomacy and to the goal of nuclear disarmament.

 

"One would massively underestimate the president of the United States if one wanted to think that he would be weakened in foreign policy," Mr. Westerwelle told German state broadcaster ZDF on Wednesday.

 

The U.S. election campaign was dominated by "domestic and economic issues," Mr. Westerwelle said, adding: "The American president is a very strong and decisive president."

 

Even as much of the world considered Tuesday's election a rebuke to President Obama, it may only increase his popularity in Turkey.

 

At the Karakoy Gulluoglu landmark bakery in Istanbul, the "Baraklava"—giant image of President Obama made in Turkey's flaky, sweet baklava pastry —is still pleasing the crowds two years after it was made in honor of Mr. Obama's election, says proprietor Nadir Gullu.

 

"Maybe the mistakes [that led to the Democrats' drubbing in midterm elections] weren't his, but the people around him," says Mr. Gullu. When he pulls out the Baraklava, "even Iraqis and Iranians start smiling and snapping pictures," he says.

 

Mr. Obama remains personally more popular in Turkey than his policies or the U.S. itself, a curiosity, given the series of disputes and wrangles the two Cold War allies have had over Armenia, Israel, Iran and other issues since he came to power. But Turks appear to have disassociated Mr. Obama from the U.S. administration as a whole.

 

"Turks generally believe Obama is sincere, but has not been able to do what he wanted," says Kerim Balci, a columnist who describes himself as speaking for Turkey's "religious majority" and is now editor of a recently launched foreign policy magazine, Turkish Review.

 

According to Mr. Balci, among religious Turks sympathy for Mr. Obama may even have risen over the past two years. Often called "Black Turks" and excluded for decades from power by a dominant, military-backed secularist elite, religious Turks sympathized with Mr. Obama as the first black American president, he says. They likened his struggle to get things done once in power with similar entrenched resistance that has faced Turkey's Islamic leaning government.

 

"They had sympathy for him when he was elected because he was black, and in the view of these religious Turks, now seems even more black," says Mr. Balci.

 

—Stephen Fidler in Brussels, Gregory L. White in Moscow, Jeremy Page and Andrew Browne in Beijing, James Hookway in Bangkok, Chip Cummins in Dubai, Marcus Walker in Berlin, David Gauthier-Villars in Paris, Marc Champion in Istanbul, Sarah Childress in Nairobi, Paul Beckett in New Delhi and Yaroslav Trofimov in Kabul contributed to this article.

 

Copyright 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All

 

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[Ismalura]

I totally understand what the Iraqi woman said... and most of the rest of the world's reaction.

 

Any ways I can't believe that this is happening so soon after obama's election. I am so pissed off ! Good news is there is no reason why Obama can't win the next election. This has happened in the US history twice and both times the president won the next election.