Whole world is watching, anxious over U.S. election

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By Andreas Kluth / Bloomberg Opinion

The world is feeling the angst of liminality, as America’s friends and foes await the outcome of the presidential election next week. Will the superpower have Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as commander-in-chief? Until that question is answered, nothing much can move, nothing of note can be resolved. But what if no answer is forthcoming, at least not for a while?

Picture decision makers around the world holding their collective breath right now. In the Middle East, which teeters on the edge of major regional war, envoys from Israel, Egypt, the United States and Qatar are once again meeting in Doha about a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. But nobody will commit to anything until American voters decide who will sit at the Resolute Desk come January.

In the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin is waiting for the result on Nov. 5 to decide his next steps in Ukraine and elsewhere. (He’s rooting for Trump, but wary of that scenario too.) In North Korea, Kim Jong Un is paying close attention to the vote as he brandishes his nukes at South Korea. From Beijing to Tehran, Minsk and Caracas, anti-American autocrats are on tenterhooks to find out who their new adversary will be.

America’s allies are in limbo too. Japan, which was already nervous about a second Trump turn, suddenly has its own government crisis, after an election that left no clear winner for the first time since the 1990s. Germany’s government, a year from the next parliamentary election, is a zombie coalition that may fall apart at any moment. Like all American allies, Tokyo and Berlin wonder if they’ll still have a friend in the White House next year, or instead a nationalist who slaps tariffs on their exports and threatens to abandon them to their enemies.

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