Your home is indeed your castle, and you are free to do in it what you please, but if you're having a loud confrontation with your wife there that is preventing your neighbors from getting a good night's sleep, then your problem, willy-nilly, becomes theirs as well. Flippant though this analogy may be, that is precisely the way the rest of the world has looked at the federal government shutdown in the US, which rattled world markets and affected every facet of American foreign policy.

Consider this: US sanctions against Iran and Syria, for example, had already suffered on account of the shutdown because the Office of Foreign Assets Control, an agency of the Treasury Department that administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions against targeted states, was unable to sustain its core functions with most of its staff furloughed. And President Obama canceled his trip to Bali, where he was expected to address the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, in order to attend to the potentially disastrous issue of what to do about a US government on the brink of default. As of last Wednesday, a short-term deal was reached on Capitol Hill to work toward a long-term budget agreement, but all that will not mask the hurdles ahead.

People around the world may not care that 800,000 wretched federal employees had been indefinitely furloughed without pay — with 1.3 million others required to work without immediate pay — and that, say, the National Park Service closed its parks to would-be campers, but when the shutdown, in a trickle-down effect, impacts on these people's economic well-being and foreign reserves, well, the shutdown becomes their business as well. Imagine, as a case in point, the wringing of hands going on today in a country like China, which is the largest investor in American public debt, with $1.3 trillion in holdings. (Beijing, is helpless, as it were, since it cannot start dumping its Treasury bonds without driving down their value.)

And imagine how the news that a major credit agency, Fitch, which last Tuesday put the United States on a "negative ratings watch," must alarm countries like Saudi Arabia whose oil revenue is computed in dollars.

With the Treasury Department declaring that, as of early this week, it had only $35 billion in cash (chump change for a nation that dominates the global economy) and that it expects to run out of "measures" to keep paying all the government bills, the United Sates of America, a big power entering its putative second American Century, neared default. Meanwhile those reckless Republicans on the Hill continued playing games.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the late 19th century American essayist and poet, put the issue of response and responsibility, in the political workings of a country like the US, quite succinctly. "Before we acquire great power," he wrote, "we must acquire the wisdom to use it well."

People in countries all the way from Greece to Argentina, and from Egypt to Mexico, that have had their share of financial crisis in the past (in 2001, Argentina, for example, defaulted on $100 billion in debt) remember American finger-wagging and lecturing — at times dictating — about how they should go about putting their house in order. Today, these folks' reaction to the standoff in Washington surely can be described as caustic. Some even go further, and see it as a sign leading to America's inevitable decline as a big power. And quotes from around the world attesting to this, that no doubt also reflect a certain element of schadenfreude at US misery, abound.

Here are two, both from the New York Times last Wednesday. Irina Popov, a housewife living in Russia, a country that suffered a financial collapse and default in 1998, said: "It's strange that such a thing has happened there. I always dreamed of going to America. It can happen to any country. It was us before. Now it's them."

And Theodore Couloubis, emeritus professor of international relations at the University of Athens, was quoted as saying: "I never thought a global superpower like the US could ever be in a comparable position to Greece. Both countries are paying dearly for rising political tensions. But in America's case, there is the potential for serious global repercussions." Very serious indeed.