World leaders who sparred with Trump express relief mixed with caution at GOP rout

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 Wednesday, allowing themselves to hope for a less combative U.S. foreign policy.

But that hope was tempered by the 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 Washington’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, after 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 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.”

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.”

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. The president has berated European leaders over issues including immigration and wind farms, roiled their economies with tariffs, threatened to pull the U.S. out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and expressed a desire to take over Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.

Austria’s 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.”

The United States’ immediate neighbors reserved judgment on whether the Republican defeat would smooth rocky relations with Washington.

“We must wait and see,” said Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

Canadian Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc said it was unclear whether the election would strengthen Canada’s hand in negotiations to end its bitter trade war.

“Well, I guess we’ll see in a few weeks,” LeBlanc said.

He noted that the new Congress would not take office until January and that Canada would continue negotiating with Trump’s administration.

But Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whose province has been battered by Trump’s tariffs on automobiles and steel, celebrated the Democratic victory as a win for Canada and the world, saying it gave the country “a little more leverage.”

“I was doing cartwheels down the street,” Ford said.

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.”

Juergen 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, of 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.

Lawless and Gillies write for the Associated Press. Gillies reported from Toronto. AP writers Geir Moulson in Berlin, Suman Naishadham in Madrid, Claudia Ciobanu in Warsaw, Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa, and María Verza in Mexico City contributed to this report.