Bliss it is in this dawn to be alive. That will be the reaction of many people around the world to America's election of a thrilling new president-young, black, with political and intellectual gifts well above the ordinary. But the world that will face Barack Obama when he moves into the White House in January is not very heaven. It is, in fact, a mess.rnIn his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope", Mr Obama wrote of America's need to build a new international consensus to confront transnational threats. The world of great-power rivalry, he argued, "no longer exists". But is that true? An argument can be made that old-fashioned competition between the powers has come back with a vengeance since the fleeting post-Soviet interlude of the 1990s, when America bestrode the planet unopposed. As Robert Kagan, one of America's cleverest (and pro-McCain) foreign-policy intellectuals, notes in his book "The Return of History and the End of Dreams", a 19th-century diplomat would instantly recognise this new-old world of clashing interests and alliances between great powers.rnAmerican foreign policy itself has an oddly 19th-century flavour nowadays. Embroiled in foreign wars thousands of miles from home, the Americans, like the British before them, are fighting Muslim zealots from Mesopotamia to Afghanistan and Pakistan's Hindu Kush.
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