The election battle is over. Now it is time to return to the wars outside our borders.

Difficult choices have been put off for months in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. These decisions will tell us a lot about where Bush is headed in his second term.

The nuclear negotiations with Iran have reached a tense moment, likely to culminate at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency later this month. Talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, halted by Pyongyang because of the U.S. elections, will most likely resume in the next couple of months.

It has not been clear whether the Bush administration really wants to negotiate with those regimes or simply remove them from power. Both views have strong voices in this administration. Will one prevail in the second term? No doubt both the Tehran and Pyongyang regimes are looking for hints.

Before then, however, the administration must grapple with the chaos surrounding its most recent experiment in regime change in Iraq. The fate of that experiment will probably be decided between now and a scheduled parliamentary election in January.

The Bush administration is determined to orchestrate events to consolidate power for its chosen strongman, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. It apparently believes this could set the stage for a stable, long-term American presence in Iraq, a new bastion to replace Saudi Arabia.

But Allawi’s support has dropped dramatically since he was installed last June, according to polling done recently by the International Republican Institute. Popular backing in Iraq now rests almost entirely with Islamic religious leaders and institutions. This is true among the majority Shiite community and among the Sunnis, where clerics now have far more sway than the deposed Baath party.

American officials are apparently convinced, however, that a show of military force against the Sunni insurgency would reinvigorate Allawi’s authority. American Marines are now massed to carry out a door-to-door cleansing of the insurgent stronghold in al-Fallujah. The attack supposedly would allow the regime to hold voting in Sunni regions now controlled by insurgents.

Behind the scenes, American officials are pressing more established Iraqi parties who were part of the previous governing council to join Allawi in an electoral bloc. The idea is to get the backing of the two Kurdish parties and the two main Shiite parties.

But this plan could easily fall apart. Iraq’s interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, a Sunni tribal leader, issued a blunt warning this week that a military move into the Sunni regions will only inflame the insurgency. It would be “as if someone shot his horse in the head to kill a fly that landed on it,” he said.

There is growing concern that an attack will only deepen support for those Sunni clergy who threaten to call for a boycott of the elections, depriving them of any legitimacy among Iraq’s Sunni minority.

The American gambit faces an even more serious challenge from the Shiite clergy. Led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the clerical leadership sees elections only as a means to an end – to regain an authority lost centuries ago and denied to them in recent decades by the powerful Sunni minority.

At this moment, the Shiite clergy is busily trying to negotiate an agreement among all the Shiite parties and groups – minus perhaps the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr – to form a unified electoral slate. Though they may try to include some secular elements, there is little question that this is a move to gain Shiite control of Iraq’s government.

The Shiites’ patience with the American presence depends almost entirely on whether the U.S. tries to cheat them out of their long sought prize of power. And they can always call on potential allies in the Shiite clerical regime in Iran.

The underlying feeling is that “the Iraqi people are just exhausted with the Americans and with having foreign troops in the country in general,” says the Hoover Institution’s Larry Diamond, a former political adviser to the American occupation authority.

Rather than building bases in Iraq’s deserts, the United States may be ushered out of Iraq by the end of next year, a longtime former CIA analyst of this region predicted to me.

All of this is to remind us that while President Bush has won a fresh mandate at home, the election has not changed uncomfortable realities abroad.

Daniel Sneider is foreign affairs columnist for the San Jose Mercury News.

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