We don't think of US politics as an abstraction, something that we can point fingers at, laugh about and then just move on and forget about. Whatever the US does, right or wrong, tends to get reflected in what happens to us, later if not sooner.
sjm, myself and other thinking people are very much aware that we are stuck with the fact that we have absolutely no say in who gets to be president of the US and yet we, and the rest of the world, are stuck with the consequences of the outcome of the US presidential elections. When that outcome is a Republican president, the rest of us have more to fear than when he's a Democrat, since Democrats typically restrain themselves from foreign adventurism.
If America didn't project its power - both political and military - as if it were the only country in the world, our concern about US presidential elections and about those for the House and the Senate, too, would only be theoretical. Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works.
