by WorldTribune Staff, November 9, 2016
While world leaders were quick to congratulate Donald Trump for his historic victory on Nov. 8, shell-shocked foreign policy types were not so sure the sun would come up on Nov. 9 as President Barack Obama had assured.
Egyptian President Abdul Fatah Sisi was the first leaders to phone Trump in the early morning hours, congratulating the president-elect and pledging to seek closer diplomatic ties, an Egyptian presidency statement said.
“The U.S. President-elect Donald Trump expressed his utmost appreciation to President Sisi, pointing out that his was the first international call he had received to congratulate him on winning the election,” the statement said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Trump “a true friend of the state of Israel,” adding “I look forward to working with him to advance security, stability and peace in our region.”
Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who heads the hardline Jewish Home party, said Trump’s victory eradicated the idea of a Palestinian state, as it afforded the “opportunity for Israel to immediately retract the notion of a Palestinian state in the center of the country, which would hurt our security and just cause.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said that he hopes “peace will be achieved” during Trump’s time in office.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who famously told Obama to “go to hell” last month, said he hopes Trump can help enhance relations with the Asian country. Duterte said he is “looking forward to working with the incoming administration.”
Meanwhile, an email from ForeignPolicy carried a note of desperation:
“After votes began to come in across the United States Tuesday night and Trump built a lead in key battleground states, it became increasingly clear that once again, the polls and the pundits had underestimated the Republican and, most importantly, the anxiety, anger, and divisiveness that fed his campaign . . . . As Esben Dahl, who traveled to the United States as part of a Danish delegation observing the election, put it: ‘The establishment not only here in the States but in Europe has to figure out how to deal with the populist right and left, or they’ll be cannibalized and killed … It’s a totally new world.’
“President Barack Obama, with months left in office, will now scramble to safeguard the basic tenets of U.S. foreign policy that Trump has vowed to scrap. The United States, and the rest of the world, will then be left to hope that Trump will somehow not be the president he said he would be.”
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