Frazzled world holds breath as the U.S. chooses its leader
JERUSALEM >> If the world could vote in Tuesday’s presidential election, Israel would be one of the reddest places on the globe.
Israel’s right-wing government has been showered with political favors by the Trump White House and backed to the hilt, culminating in normalization deals with three Arab countries that made the Middle East suddenly feel a bit less hostile to the Jewish state.
A victory for former Vice President Joe Biden would be a substantial loss for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sallai Meridor, a former ambassador to the United States, said there would be “more daylight” between the White House and Netanyahu than under President Donald Trump. “We may lose what we achieved, and we may not gain more,” he said.
American presidential elections always seize international attention, but this year is exceptional: Trump has dominated news cycles and frayed nerves in almost every corner of the earth like few leaders in history. Having lived through his impulsiveness, and his disdain for allies and dalliances with adversaries, the world is on tenterhooks waiting to see whether the United States will choose to stay that rocky course.
Germans are obsessing over the contest on newspaper front pages, in countless podcasts and in a string of documentaries with titles like “Crazy Trump and the American Catastrophe.” Australians are working out their worries by gambling on the outcome, with the odds tilting heavily in Biden’s favor.
And in Ukraine, where Trump’s demand for political dirt on Biden got him impeached, some are worrying that in a close election he could press
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for another favor, a congratulatory message to bestow legitimacy on a premature claim of victory.
“We are vulnerable because we are dependent on U.S. political support,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the New Europe Center in Kyiv.
No country has watched the American election unfold with greater anger and grievance than China — and few have more at stake. Tensions over trade, technology and the coronavirus have brought relations to their worst level since Washington first recognized the People’s Republic in 1979.
Even so, few Chinese officials appear to harbor much hope that a defeat for Trump would usher in any improvement. Rather, given Biden’s increasingly hawkish “get tough on China” campaign rhetoric, they seem to be treating him as a more complicated challenge.
State media and ordinary Chinese online have portrayed the presidential campaign as an embarrassing battle between two geriatrics, with one magazine, Caijing, asking, “Why does the American presidential debate look like a quarrel in a wet market?”
But President Xi Jinping appeared to be taking a direct shot at Trump recently when he said, “In the contemporary world, any unilateralism, protectionism or extreme egoism will never work.”
In Russia, which the CIA accuses of mounting a clandestine effort to reelect Trump, pro-kremlin news organizations have played up the possibility of violence and chaos, allowing commentators who depict American democracy as rotten to the core to declare the campaign an I-told-youso moment.
“Is America one step away from civil war?” read a headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the country’s most popular tabloid.
But a majority of Russians say it makes no difference to them who wins. “Trump was a good president for Russia, but it didn’t matter,” said Arsen P. Arutyunyan, 25, a small-business owner in Moscow. “Let Putin be a good president for Russia.”
To the Europeans, a Trump reelection would confirm that the United States is giving up its leadership role in the Western alliance.
Beyond questioning membership in NATO, Trump has labeled the European Union a competitor and rival, tried to drive wedges among European countries — supporting Brexit and wondering to German and French leaders when they intended to leave the bloc — and promoted rightwing populism.
Many Europeans fear a more radical and even less constrained Trump in a second term, freer to act on his instincts — like those that guided his response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which he ignored epidemiologists, mocked mask wearers and insisted the virus would just go away.
A Biden presidency, by comparison, would be welcomed as “a return to civilization,” said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst.