The transition to Barack Obama’s presidency looks oddly like nation-building: an enormous bustle in constructing a country’s government, from what feels like scratch, with little sense of where the machine will head once assembled.

The President-elect has embarked on filling the hundreds of top jobs in his administration, an exercise surrounded by faux secrecy and rumour that has taken professional Democrats in Washington from euphoria to anxiety in a week.

One adviser to a would-be adviser, fretfully stabbing calamari into tartare sauce, said: “I don’t know whether my man, and the Chicago people, can get past John Podesta”, the head of the transition team and Clinton-era chief of staff, thought to lean towards the appointment of his old colleagues on some issues.

The policies of this embryonic team are inevitably opaque, beyond the realisation that the economy now dominates. In foreign policy there will be a radical change in tone from the Bush years, and you might say that this amounts to a different tack.

“We’re going to get a pragmatic president,” said Anthony Cordesman, a security specialist at the CSIS think-tank, calling the detailed speculation about policy “a remarkably pointless exercise”.

There will be some small, clear rejections of Bush decisions, such as shutting Guantanamo Bay (probably), provided that European governments who have so criticised the US take some of the detainees.

On trade, despite the lecture against protectionism that Gordon Brown has just delivered the US, Democrats in Congress look like demanding precisely the measures he rightly gave warning against.

On the three most urgent problems of US foreign policy Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran the nastiness of the reality means there is little room for change.

On Afghanistan (or “Af-Pak”, as diplomatic slang now has it, to drive home that it and Pakistan are a joint problem), strategy will be shaped by the report from Lieutenant-General Douglas Lute around the end of this month (before the more-publicised report from General David Petraeus, the new head of Central Command, on Iraq and Afghanistan, next year). Obama has hinted that he wants to focus again on Osama bin Laden, to remind Americans, whose stamina for war is flagging, why their forces are there. He might, too, in a subtle but important shift, ask the European Union to do more on aid and trade to Pakistan.

The inevitable US request for more Nato help looks like being largely disappointed. No one wants to be the first to say no, but no one wants to say yes. Germany, in an election year, is not about to lift the “caveats” that keep its forces back from fighting (and commanders might not want it to, officials add, given their combat inexperience). Britain, with more than 8,000 troops in Afghanistan, and half as many in Iraq, does not want to make a significant increase. If the US wants more combat troops and advisers, it will probably have to send many itself.

Over that hangs Iraq, easily capable of overturning Obama’s plans. It is costing more than $7 billion (£5 billion) a month, twice as much as Afghanistan, and Obama’s hopes of spending cash on his favourite projects depend on slashing that bill. True, it’s going better; even more valuable for the US, Iraqi leaders want the Americans out. But to take peace for granted as Obama’s plans all but do is asking for trouble.

And Iran? Yesterday’s test of a missile capable of hitting Tel Aviv is a reminder that it has not given an inch in its pursuit of uranium enrichment, something that will put it within reach of a nuclear weapon (although it denies that aim). More sticks (trying to persuade Russia and China to join sanctions), more carrots (dangling the first proper contact with the US for 30 years) Obama has no real options to the Bush policy of the past 18 months.

Many expect Obama to make early contact with the Middle East, but nothing has changed in US politics to make a radical shift likely.

It will be late summer before he has appointed his team and they are on top of these issues, and in a position to make decisions. It would be wrong to expect radically different ones except where the economy has forced a change.

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