Leaders abroad, joyful or wary, face uncertainty of Trump era

MEXICO CITY — There was dismay in Britain, applause in Russia and silence in Japan. French populists found hope, Mexican leaders expressed concern and Germany’s vice chancellor offered an allusion to his country’s dark past.

In his first speech as president of the United States, Donald Trump showed the world he could be as divisive abroad as he is at home. His vow to place America first — and his threat to upend longstanding alliances, trade deals and many other tenets of the liberal democratic order the nation has chosen for nearly 70 years — was received across the globe with fear, silence and glee, sometimes within the same country.

In searching for a historical analogy, some in Britain reached back to the 1930s, when a bleaker vision of the world prevailed with America on the sidelines. China imposed unusually tight state control over coverage of the inauguration, though state media highlighted “violent” protests in the United States. In the Philippines, nationalists set fire to an effigy of Mr. Trump, while the country’s president welcomed his American counterpart’s apparent willingness to stop telling other leaders how to govern.

In Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May said she would tell a skeptical Mr. Trump how important NATO and the European Union are for European and world stability.

The far-right French politician Marine Le Pen, a serious candidate in presidential elections this spring, declared that Mr. Trump’s victory had opened “a new era in the cooperation between nations.”

The mixed reaction reflected the global uncertainty about what a Trump presidency would look like — and the divided world into which he steps.

In Germany, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned of a “drastic radicalization” in U.S. politics and said Berlin stood ready to fill the void left by an isolationist Washington. The only thing missing was a denunciation of Parliament as a “gossip chamber,” he added, using a term that fascists applied to German institutions in the 1920s.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany would approach relations with Washington through the traditional channels of existing international agreements, including the Group of 20, which Germany will host this year.

President François Hollande of France, battling nationalist currents in his own country, did not even wait for Mr. Trump to give his address before offering his take: “We are in an open world economy, and it is not possible nor advisable to want to be isolated from the world economy.”.

In Mexico, which Mr. Trump has made a whipping boy for the false promise of trade and the threat of migration, the response from President Enrique Peña Nieto, who plans to deliver his own address on foreign policy on Monday, was almost immediate. On Twitter, after a congratulatory note, he wrote: “Sovereignty, national interest and the protection of Mexicans will guide our relationship with the new government of the United States.”

Yet the response was not all bad.

Russia, where often vicious mockery of Barack Obama has for months been a state-sponsored national sport, responded with glee to Mr. Obama’s departure from office and the arrival of President Trump.

The inauguration received blanket coverage on state media, with Rossiya 24, a round-the-clock television news channel, broadcasting the entire ceremony and Mr. Trump’s address live, along with scenes of anti-Trump demonstrators smashing shop windows in Washington.

In France, Ms. Le Pen, the National Front leader, lauded the British vote to leave the European Union and Mr. Trump’s victory. “In 2016, the Anglo-Saxon world woke up,” she said. “In 2017, I am sure it will be the year of peoples across the continent rising up!”

And in saying nothing, some world leaders seemed to embrace the new reality.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan said nothing publicly after Mr. Trump’s speech. But in a congratulatory message to Mr. Trump after the inauguration, the Japanese news media reported, he called Japan’s alliance with the United States an “axis of Japan’s foreign and security policies,” even though Mr. Trump was vocal as a candidate in attacking Japanese trade practices and questioning American military support for the country.

In China, which also offered no public response, the silence was notable for another reason.

It appeared to have been codified in an explicit directive. China Digital Times, an American-based website that tracks Chinese media, published a directive that forbade the country’s online news organizations to run photographs of the inauguration.