The World Obama Faces: Luck and Pluck

The world is in the midst of a financial crisis routinely described as the worst since the one that precipitated the Great Depression; most observers recognize that the United States and its NATO allies are losing the war in Afghanistan; Afghanistan's nuclear-armed neighbor, Pakistan, faces a deteriorating political, economic, and military situation; Iran, strengthened by regime change in Iraq and the successes of Hezbollah in Lebanon, continues to rebuff international pressure to come clean on its nuclear program; and NATO remains divided over what to do about an increasingly cantankerous Russia, whose most recent military adventure involved crushing Georgia, a US client state.

The Israeli-Palestine conflict might generously have been described as "intractable" even before Hamas seized control over Gaza. A regime transition appears likely in North Korea. The US is severely degraded after years of fighting counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. China grows richer and more powerful by the month, while the US national debt — of which the Chinese government owns a significant share — is approaching $11 trillion. Meanwhile, a neo-socialist Latin American bloc now consisting of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia continues to needle the United States. And let's not forget about the looming ecological disaster represented by global climate change.

Yet the legacy left to Obama by the Bush Administration isn't all bad. The outgoing foreign-policy team has had significant successes in North Korea. The revamped counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq — often misleadingly conflated with "the surge" in troop strength — will help Obama make good on some sort of modified plan to withdraw American forces from Iraq. The transatlantic faults created by Bush's early, and far too gleeful, unilateralism (and widened to a chasm by the Iraq War) have shrunk, due both to effective diplomacy on the part of Washington and the election of more pro-American leaders in many of the nations of "Old Europe."

But these positive developments cannot obscure the international mess the Obama Administration is now tasked with cleaning up, nor the significant constraints placed upon its ability to do so.

The current economic downturn, combined with the enormous federal budget deficit, means that Obama will simply have less money available with which to pursue major foreign-policy initiatives. The overextended US armed forces need time to regroup and revive, even as military needs in Afghanistan will place additional burdens upon them. A sound approach to the federal budget — particularly after the next round of government stimulus drives the US deeper into the hole — would help matters. The US military remains the most advanced in the world, with an unmatched ability to project "firepower" across the globe. Here too, effective planning and prudent policies can put things back on track.

Developments in the global balance of economic power will prove a more intractable, if less immediate, source of constraints upon Obama's ability to convert his policy objectives into international outcomes. The world is in the early stages of what international-relations scholars call a "power transition:" a major change in the distribution of international power.