By Tom Plate

Who will prove the real winners and losers of last week's nationwide U.S. elections?

The immediate winner, to be sure, was President George W. Bush. His strong post-9/11 profile helped make other Republicans look so much better than the bumbling Democrats, who lost control of Congress. But decisive U.S. elections impact places far beyond the pristine Peorias and intellectual Princetons of America.

Consider the obvious: Iraq. It could be argued that, since over the last year, Bush slammed Saddam Hussein more often than he did Democratic House Leader Dick Gephardt, the biggest loser is Saddam. After all, Gephardt resigned his post in the wake of Tuesday's humiliation, and Saddam may well be next. In fact, should he do a Gephardt, Saddam would save the Iraqi people more pain and suffering (just as the classy Missouri congressman is trying to spare his fellow Democrats further "Bushing").

Other leaders around the world, especially in Asia, will feel substantial aftershocks, too. Note that Gephardt's resignation sets off a leadership struggle in the House of Representatives that could have legs long enough to travel to China. That's because right behind him in Democratic Party hierarchy is Nancy Pelosi.

Make no mistake about it, Beijing: She is one tough person. If this committed human-rights activist, who takes an extremely dim view of Beijing's policies on Tibet, Taiwan and dissidents, holds the top House job, China may just wind up in the No. 2 spot behind Baghdad on the losers list.

For, in this prominent leadership role, the plucky Pelosi would be in a strong position to expose those Republican Party business lobbies for Enron-level moral laxity on China (i.e., we take the money, we blink at the ethical issues, we run back to our stockholders looking like champs and the heck with those poor dissidents).

While there's no way she can trump the president of the United States on the China policy issue, the boys in Beijing would be very unwise to underestimate this lady — poised to become a West Coast Catherine the Great.

There are other pluses and minuses for Asia in the election results. Will an emboldened Bush administration throw more sand in North Korea's face? The early signs suggest not: "With North Korea, we are taking a different strategy (than with Iraq)," Bush the victorious said last week. "We are working with other countries in the neighborhood ... to convince North Korea that having nuclear weapons is not in North Korea's interests. ... And we are working with our Japanese friends and with China and with Vladimir Putin ... to remind North Korea" of the folly of nuclearizing its arsenal.

Indeed, Bush pointedly praised Chinese President Jiang Zemin's call during his recent Texas visit for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. Nice job here, Mr. President.

Other questions roil Asian waters. Will the Bush administration, worried about the U.S. economy even as the Federal Reserve dramatically (but perhaps unwisely) lowered interest rates yet again, renew bashing the Japanese for their slow-as-molasses economy and thus undermine our strategic relationship with Tokyo?

Will the Bush administration, having squeezed all it can out of Gen. Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan in the anti-terror campaign, soon turn its back on Islamabad and re-tilt toward India, as many Bush officials openly proposed prior to 9/11?

And, finally, will the Republican-controlled Congress manage to upend the well-intentioned but foolish Leahy Amendment that forbids direct U.S. military aid to Indonesian armed forces, the sole institution capable of keeping that far-flung archipelago intact — and preserve Indonesia's fledgling democracy?

But surely the overarching question in the wake of the Tuesday Bush-whacking of the Democrats transcends issues Asian to embrace the totality of the U.S. outlook toward the rest of the world: It is whether an obnoxious and conceited "my-way-or-the-highway" unilateralism will tighten its grip on the U.S. foreign-policy mentality even more.

Bush, despite this election triumph (or perhaps because of it), could prove to be the long-term winner in history's eyes if he spurns that parochial strategy by taking a view that winning a national election, as difficult as it is, is a lot less difficult than winning the hearts and minds of the world. And it's here where America's true influence and power lie.

Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.