WASHINGTON — In an awkward political ritual, President Barack Obama urged the nation Wednesday to join him in rooting for President-elect Donald Trump’s success, even as he and his shell-shocked aides prepared to watch a successor undo much of their work.

Conceding Hillary Clinton’s staggering loss, Obama vowed to do all he could to facilitate a smooth transition and to ensure Trump would be well-positioned to run the country when he takes office Jan. 20. In a brief conversation, he’d congratulated Trump by phone and invited him to sit down together Thursday at the White House.

“We all want what’s best for this country,” Obama said.

Obama delivered his sunny call for unity while standing in the Rose Garden, much as his predecessor President George W. Bush did after Obama’s victory in 2008. It was a symbolic moment meant to signal the calm transfer of power from one president to the next.

But it was also a bit of counseling for devastated Democrats. Obama spoke to more than a hundred of his White House staffers, who stood silently, dazed, some crying, before breaking out into a prolonged round of applause that continued long after Obama returned to the Oval Office.

Obama made no direct reference to Trump’s vows to erase much of what Obama has accomplished. He downplayed the notion that Trump’s presidency would mean an about-face for the nation. He said the U.S. has a tendency to “zig and zag” rather than move in a straight line, and he added, “That’s OK.”

Obama remarks were striking after a campaign in which the Democrats declared Trump was unfit to serve and Obama told voters that “the fate of the republic” rested on defeating Trump.

The brief call between Obama and Trump in the wee hours of Wednesday, after Trump claimed victory, was a “warm conversation” and a “gracious exchange,” Trump’s campaign manager said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans would first target the heart of Obama’s legacy, the health care law they have tried and failed to repeal since it was passed in 2010. With control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, they’ll soon be in position to virtually gut it.

It’s not clear exactly how Trump and GOP allies would go about it. But Republicans last year passed legislation that eliminated Obama’s Medicaid expansion, government subsidies for insurance bought on marketplaces and some new taxes used to cover costs. The replacement would have increased the number of uninsured by about 22 million, according to nonpartisan analysts. Obama vetoed it.

White House officials said they could continue to make the case against repeal as they walked out the door. But they were largely left hoping that Republicans wouldn’t follow through on their repeal pledge, once put in the uncomfortable position of taking away people’s health insurance.

Other parts of Obama’s legacy even more vulnerable, largely because he’s relied on executive actions. A hefty list of Obama’s initiatives rest on regulation, executive orders or unenforceable international agreements the next president is under little obligation to follow.

Trump has supported reinstating waterboarding and other extreme forms of torture that Obama banned. He’s also vowed to tear up Obama’s immigration actions and discard the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal Obama painstakingly negotiated.

The Republican has pledged to “cancel” U.S. participation in the international Paris climate change deal. Withdrawing would take four years under the terms of the agreement, but Trump could also decide to simply ignore its U.S. commitments to reduce carbon emission.

Trump has also criticized Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. But he’s suggested he wants to renegotiate it, rather than scrap it. It’s unclear, though, how he might persuade Iran to accept less favorable terms.

But White House spokesman Josh Earnest tried to be optimistic, arguing it wasn’t a given that Trump would follow through on vows to roll back Obama’s key accomplishments.

“I think it is too early to tell what decisions Trump will make and what impact they will have in the priorities that President Obama has so proudly achieved,” Earnest said.

Story: Josh Lederman, Kathleen Hennessey

MOSCOW — The world will face a starkly different America when President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office in January.

While the billionaire businessman’s triumph was welcomed in some countries, others saw it as a big shock, as governments will now have to deal with a man who has cozied up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, told NATO allies they would have to pay for their own protection and vowed to make the Mexican government pay for a multibillion-dollar border wall.

Leaders weren’t sure what to expect after a U.S. campaign in which Trump upended foreign policy orthodoxy on numerous fronts, including the international movement to contain the spread of nuclear weapons.

Putin sent Trump a congratulatory telegram Wednesday morning and made a televised statement expressing the hope that frayed U.S.-Russian relations could be put back on track. He said Moscow is ready to try to restore good relations.

“We aware that it is a difficult path, in view of the unfortunate degradation of relations between the Russian Federation and the United States,” he said, adding that “it is not our fault that Russian-American relations are in such a state.”

Russia was at times a focal point during the U.S. campaign, with government officials and the Hillary Clinton campaign team suggesting the Russian government was involved in hacking her campaign’s emails. Trump expressed admiration for Putin and his tough leadership style, and some Clinton surrogates questioned Trump’s business dealings with Russia.

Dmitri Drobnitski, a columnist at the popular, generally pro-Kremlin website LifeNews, said Trump’s victory will help the entire world.

“I congratulate the American people with their will and with their democracy and with their strength and with their courage,” he told The Associated Press. “So this is not only a victory for the Americans, who defended their democracy against the liberal, global elite— no, this is a victory that the American people brought to the whole world.”

Trump’s win caused trepidation in Mexico, where his remarks calling Mexican immigrants criminals and “rapists” were a deep insult to national pride. Trump has suggested slapping a 35 percent tax on automobiles and auto parts made by U.S. companies in Mexico. Financial analysts have predicted a Trump win would threaten billions of dollars in cross-border trade, and government officials say they have drawn up a contingency plan.

“It’s DEFCON 2,” Mexican analyst Alejandro Hope said. “Probably something as close to a national emergency as Mexico has faced in many decades.”

Trump’s electoral triumph is also being felt strongly in the volatile Middle East, where multiple crises are unfolding.

In Iran, leaders emphasized the need to keep the historic nuclear deal between Iran and world powers on track despite Trump’s harsh criticism of it during the campaign.

Iran’s president said Wednesday the deal “cannot be overturned by a single government.”

Trump has suggested he would try to renegotiate the agreement under which Iran curbs its nuclear program in exchange for a gradual lifting of international sanctions.

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Trump as a “true friend of the State of Israel.”

Netanyahu said that he believes the two leaders “will continue to strengthen the unique alliance between our two countries and bring it to ever greater heights.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that he hopes “peace will be achieved” during Trump’s term.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi congratulated Trump. In a statement on his website, al-Abadi said he hopes the “world and the United States will continue to support Iraq in fighting terrorism.”

The Taliban called for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Afghanistan once Trump takes office.

In a statement sent to The Associated Press, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said a Trump administration “should allow Afghans to become a free nation and have relationships with other countries based on non-interference in each other’s affairs.”

In Europe, NATO allies will wait to see if Trump follows through on suggestions that the U.S. will look at whether they have paid their proper share in considering whether to come to their defense.

Trump’s rhetoric has challenged the strategic underpinning of the NATO alliance, rattling its leaders at a time when Russia has been increasingly aggressive.

“As a candidate, Trump called into question NATO and trade agreements, and reached out to Moscow,” said Daniela Schwarzer, an expert on trans-Atlantic relations at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

“His campaign of discrimination, lies and aggression harmed the principles of liberal democracy. Even if President Trump doesn’t implement everything, Germany and Europe can’t rely on the trans-Atlantic partnership as usual and have to stand up for Western values themselves.”

Trump’s victory pleased leaders of the nationalist Alternative for Germany party, which has campaigned strongly against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of letting hundreds of thousands of migrants into the country.

“It was high time that people disenfranchised by the political establishment get their voices back in the United States of America too,” party co-leader Frauke Petry said.

The French populist, anti-immigrant politician Marine Le Pen congratulated Trump even before the final results were known, tweeting her support to the “American people, free!”

Trump’s victory was viewed with shock in Ireland, a country fearful of Trump’s campaign pledge to confront U.S. companies using Ireland as a tax shelter. Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote Wednesday: “The republic of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt is now the United Hates of America.”

In Asia, security issues and trade will top the agenda for the new administration, from North Korea and the South China Sea to the contentious and yet-unratified Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

China is seen as favoring Trump because he appears less willing to confront China’s newly robust foreign policy, particularly in the South China Sea.

Clinton, by contrast, was disliked in Beijing for having steered the U.S. “pivot” to Asia aimed at strengthening U.S. engagement with the region, particularly in the military sphere.

Scholar Mei Xinyu wrote in the Communist Party newspaper Global Times that China would find it easier to cope with a Trump presidency.

“Trump has always insisted on abandoning ideological division and minimizing the risks that unnecessary conflicts with other countries may bring to the U.S.,” Mei wrote.

News of Trump’s victory hit hard in Cuba, which has spent the last two years negotiating normalization with the United States after more than 50 years of Cold War hostility. Trump has promised to roll back Obama’s opening with Cuba unless President Raul Castro agrees to more political freedoms.

“If he reverses it, it hurts us,” taxi driver Oriel Iglesias Garcia said. “You know tourism will go down.”

Some said Trump’s win might alter their life plans.

Muki Bosco, a hotel worker in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, said it discouraged him from pursuing his dream of going to the United States.

“What Trump said about the immigration policy, saying that he would deport (immigrants). He was saying those things during the campaign … I don’t think I’ll go to America.”

Story: Jim Heintz, Gregory Katz

NEW YORK —€” Gone was the ballroom with a soaring glass ceiling, the confetti and the celebrity guest stars. Instead, Hillary Clinton looked out to a group of grief-stricken aides and tearful supporters, as she acknowledged her stunning loss of the presidency to Donald Trump.

“This is painful,” Clinton said, her voice crackling with emotion, “and it will be for a long time.” But she told her faithful to accept Trump and the election results, urging them to give him “an open mind and a chance to lead.”

Before Clinton took the stage at a New York City hotel, top aides filed in, eyes red and shoulders slumped, as they tried to process the celebrity businessman’s shocking win after a campaign that appeared poised until Election Day to make Clinton the first woman elected U.S. president.

Clinton, who twice sought the presidency, told women: “I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling. But someday, someone will and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.” Her remarks brought to mind her 2008 concession speech after the Democratic primaries in which she spoke of putting “18 million cracks” in the glass ceiling.

“To all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams,” she said as her husband, former President Bill Clinton, stood wistfully by her side.

In perhaps a subtle nod to bridging the red state and blue state divide, Clinton wore a purple blouse and a dark blazer with a purple lapel while her husband wore a purple tie.

It may have been the final public act for the enduring political partnership of the Clintons, who appeared on the verge of returning to power after 16 years. If Clinton had won, it would have marked the first time a former first lady was elected U.S. president.

Clinton’s campaign was trying to make sense of a dramatic election night in which Trump captured battleground states like Florida, North Carolina and Ohio and demolished a longstanding “blue wall” of states in the Upper Midwest that had backed every Democratic presidential candidate since her husband won the presidency in 1992.

As Democrats were left wondering how they had misread their country, mournful Clinton backers gathered outside the hotel Wednesday.

“I was devastated. Shocked. Still am,” said Shirley Ritenour, 64, a musician from Brooklyn, New York. “When I came in on the subway this morning there were a lot of people crying.”

Flanked by her husband, daughter Chelsea Clinton and running mate Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, Clinton said she had offered to work with Trump on behalf of a country that she acknowledged was “more deeply divided than we thought.”

The results were startling to Clinton and her aides, who had ended their campaign with a whirlwind tour of battleground states and had projected optimism that she would maintain the diverse coalition assembled by President Barack Obama in the past two elections.

On the final day of the campaign, Clinton literally followed Obama to stand behind a podium with a presidential seal at a massive rally outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. As she walked up to the lectern, the president bent down to pull out a small stool for Clinton. Before leaving the stage, Obama leaned over to whisper in Clinton’s ear, “We’ll have to make this permanent.”

The devastating loss for the party, which will no longer hold the White House and will continue to be in the minority of both chambers of Congress, was certain to open painful soul-searching among Democrats, who had endured a lengthy primary between Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. The so-called democratic socialist drew strong support among liberals amid an electorate calling for change but then backed Clinton’s general election bid.

Yet her team spent the bulk of their time focused on attacking Trump, while failing to adequately address Clinton’s deep liabilities –€” or the wave of frustration roiling the nation.

Every time the race focused on Clinton, her numbers dropped, eventually making her one of the least-liked presidential nominees in history. And she offered an anxious electorate a message of breaking barriers and the strength of diversity – hardly a rallying cry – leaving her advisers debating the central point of her candidacy late into the primary race.

Story: Lisa Lerer, Ken Thomas