Exceptional speech by Obama

Barack Obama looks set to offer the United States a much more whole government, and the world a welcome sense of restart and openness.

When he claimed victory in a stirring address to a massive rally of his supporters, he listed the challenges as including "two wars, a planet in peril, and a grave financial crisis". He went on to talk of his future responsibilities to "people dying in Afghanistan, mothers struggling to pay their mortgages, new energies to harvest, and alliances to rebuild".

Obama's own political history is deeply rooted in domestic US politics. His social activism and campaigning started with him as a young man working in the streets and tenements of Chicago. This background is the major reason that he has made such a success of reaching out to the new generation of Americans, who are younger, more ethnically mixed, and more internet aware than the ageing population of traditional American voters.

He talks directly to this new audience and has engaged them in wanting change and success, and making sure that they feel they can be part of the change that he offers. His main priority will be to rebuild and develop a new sense of American belonging.

Environmental issue

His victory speech reached out to Republicans in a very generous manner, and he took time to praise the Republican virtues of self-reliance and national unity, seeking to adopt them into his own programme. With the ongoing crisis in Wall Street, and consumer confidence at an all-time low, Obama will have to focus on the economy and restore Americans' sense of confidence and pride, as well as their economic well being.

That done, Obama is outstanding for his consistent emphasis on the desperate state of the world's environment. Referring to the "planet in peril" as one of his three priorities on election night, puts him way ahead of most other politicians in the world. Nearly everyone else wants someone else to solve the difficult and expensive issues of global warming, emissions, and building a sustainable Earth.

Instead, Obama has made this a significant part of his platform, and speaks of research into new technologies, and building new jobs with these new technologies. The outlook is for an Obama presidency to give the world a significant lead on these matters, which will transform the process (currently contained in the Bali Accord) in which the United States has been the most obvious laggard.

Outside the United States, Obama will have to face a world that will expect far too much of him. Just because he is the first African-American president and still has family in Kenya, he is not automatically everyone's friend. He cannot be a supporter of the many causes that various parts of the world espouse. He has to be an American first, and then the leader of the world's super power, and only after all these priorities are taken care of, can Obama become the world citizen that we all identify with.

More than most presidents, he is walking into a mess created by his predecessor, which will not just go away. His White House will still need to engage in Iraq, and support the American troops in Iraq, while also fast tracking a future withdrawal. Obama has committed to decisive action in Afghanistan, which will include crossing the border into Pakistan in pursuit of Taliban or Al Qaida targets.

Obama has placed Palestine low in his priorities, and he may well lack the will to start any peace process with the Israelis and Palestinians split in their leaderships. There will be no shift in American attitudes to nuclear weapons in Iran, nor to Iran's avoidance of UN resolutions, although there may be a shift with diplomacy replacing militaristic challenging.

Nonetheless, with all these issues in place and not likely to change too radically, Obama has already offered a fundamental change in the way that America deals with the world. Throughout the campaign, and in his victory speech, he has spoken of the alliances that America has to repair. He has been very clear that the unilateral arrogance of the Bush years will end. He has been clear that the United States cannot solve all the problems of the world on its own, and that it has to work with others.

This return to multilateral thinking, coupled with the energy and intellectual vigour of the new Obama presidency, has to lead to some important reforms of the way the world operates and the building of new institutions that can handle the problems that the entire human race needs to deal with together.

The United Nations is in bad need of reform so that it becomes more effective, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have not been successful on heading off the present crash, and the Bali Accord needs to become far more definite in the way it forces action on a reluctant world.

The hope that Obama offers the American people and shares with the rest of the world, needs to be transformed into a new agenda for global action. This will not happen immediately, but the world is waiting to see how it will start.