LONDON — World leaders who have sparred with the “America first” President Trump greeted the rout of his Republican Party in the U.S. midterm elections with a measure of relief on Wednesday, allowing themselves to hope for a less combative U.S. foreign policy.
But that hope was seasoned with expectation that American voters’ rebuke would not necessarily end the U.S. conflict with Iran or change Trump’s policies on tariffs or his lukewarm-at-best support for Ukraine and America’s European allies.
Iranians on Wednesday struck a defiant tone, celebrating U.S. voters’ rebuke of Trump while many in the Middle East waited to see how the results could affect the Iran war.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father and predecessor was killed in the opening strikes of the war in February, dismissed the prospect of any major change in the U.S. approach to the Islamic Republic.
“If there are still those who harbor even a slight hope for a change in behavior or partisan and factional shifts within the system of domination, or who imagine that by giving concessions to America they can dissuade it from hostility toward the Iranian nation, they are gravely mistaken,” he said on his social media account.
Progressive politicians cast the results as part of a trend of liberal comebacks around the world, following recent defeats for populists on the right in Hungary, Brazil and Serbia.
Spain’s social democratic Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote on X that Americans had voted “Against hate. Against machismo. Against climate denialism and against the privileges of the elites.”
“It happened in Brazil. It just happened in the US. And it will happen soon in Spain,” wrote Sánchez, who faces an election on Nov. 29.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said the majority of Americans had sent a clear message that “they have had enough of MAGA and now want a different course. Enough of polarization.”
European leaders are hopeful but wary
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham expressed hope the election results would focus minds in Washington and other capitals on ending the Iran war, which has sent fuel prices soaring — a major source of frustration for voters.
“The world has an opportunity now to unite around the issue that is affecting us all, and that’s the cost of living,” Burnham said during a visit to the Commonwealth summit in Antigua. “But I can’t get people’s cost of living pressures down until the conflict in the Middle East is resolved.”
That and “the conflict in Ukraine started by Russia. These are the things we have to focus on now, and I hope the world has a moment to do that.”
But others in Europe cautioned that, with Trump in power for two more years, there would be no quick change to American foreign policy, which has strained defense, economic and diplomatic alliances to the breaking point. The president has berated European leaders over everything from immigration to wind farms, roiled their economies with tariffs, threatened to pull the U.S. out of NATO and expressed a desire to take over Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.
Austrian Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger said that “independently of the election outcome, our security and prosperity in Austria and Europe must not depend on how people in Kansas or Iowa vote. That’s why we are strengthening our own defense capability and our own competitiveness.”
Laurel Rapp, director of the U.S. and North America program at the Chatham House think tank, said there won’t be “a ‘we’re back’ moment in the U.S. relationship with Europe.”
“I don’t expect this will significantly change the administration’s approach to Europe,” she said. “It’s been a very transactional one, one that has deep skepticism about the value Europe can offer the U.S. In terms of a defense relationship.”
Russia hopes Trump will stick to his current approach
The Trump administration also has tried to pressure Ukraine to end a war that Russia started with its full-scale invasion in 2022. Ukraine accused Washington of delaying the delivery of vital interceptor missiles and reported that a temporary disruption to the Starlink and Starshield satellite internet service impeded its ability to defend against Russian attacks.
Last month, even as he fired insults at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump waived sanctions on Russia even though Congress had overwhelmingly approved the measures as part of legislation aimed at supporting Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that Russia hoped Trump “will continue his peacemaking efforts” regardless of the election outcome.
A prominent German lawmaker urged Republicans to see the result in part as voters’ verdict on Trump’s “wrong foreign policy.”
Jürgen Hardt, a foreign policy spokesperson for the parliamentary group of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right bloc, told ARD television he hopes that Trump will “exercise more reason” on foreign affairs.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who has been a target of Trump’s baseless claims that his government discriminates against the country’s white minority, said the Democrats taking control of both houses of Congress would “introduce a new era in world relations.”
But Rapp, from Chatham House, said that Congress will have an easier time constraining Trump domestically than in foreign policy.
“On a lot of the foreign policy tools in his tool kit, Trump retains a lot of latitude to use them at his will,” she said. “Democrats have said they’re going to hold votes on the Iran war, but meaningfully being able to constrain him on some of these unilateral pieces is going to be tough.”
Lawless writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Geir Moulson in Berlin, Suman Naishadham in Madrid, Claudia Ciobanu in Warsaw, and Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa, contributed to this report.
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