Remember the old innocent days when fixing the US (and world) economy was going to be job one for the Obama administration?
It's looking increasingly like the new president will take office wishing that the worst economic crisis in 70 years were his biggest problem. The Middle East is blowing up; Hezbollah's Nasrallah and Iran's Ayatollah Khameini are starting to toss gasoline on the fire. Meanwhile, Pakistani troops continue to be redeployed to the Indian border.
All this presents an awfully difficult set of circumstances for a new administration to take control under. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the rest of the foreign-policy team may find that in both regions, they'll have little choice but to hit the ground running, forced to accelerate whatever timetable they may have in mind for possible progress there. And the more their attention has to be focused on international matters, the more stonewalling and mischief-making Congress might be able to engage in on the domestic front.
Those of us who voted to elect Obama did so in no small part because we had, and have, some degree of faith not only that he can change the US's image in the world, but that he can, with that moral authority, produce better results for the world.
At the same time, he's obviously not going to snap his fingers and make thousands of years of animosities disappear. He'll have four or perhaps eight years to work on these things. But we may get a glimmer far more quickly than we imagined of how successful he can be.
