The problems that will confront Barack Obama beyond the United States make a nonsense of the metaphor of an in-tray. That suggests bureaucratic neatness, a stack of problems waiting for attention that can be dispatched one after the other.

Instead, he will inherit a worldwide map of problems that demand more time, military commitment and money than America can possibly deploy. It is wrong to lay all of those problems at the door of George W. Bush. Many were there before his presidency – Iran, North Korea, the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock, to name just three.

But it is still true that President-elect Obama will take on a challenge different in nature from recent predecessors. The US is engaged in two live wars and Afghanistan is getting worse just as Iraq gets better. More than that, he takes over at a point when US leadership is questioned. In the US’s foreign policy, it has suffered the greatest blow since Vietnam to its reputation for military success and its claim to legitimacy. In economic policy, its recent decisions and even its principles of economic organisation have been challenged.

Around the world, people expect him to change this. The expectations are impossibly high, as the President-elect has already acknowledged. In Europe, many of those who have cheered him seem to expect a US president who will use all of the US’s power and financial weight to solve the world’s problems, regardless of its own interest.

They will be disappointed.

Iran

Iran has been strengthened as a regional force by US struggles in Iraq. It has not walked out of the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty, but nor has it given an inch to pressure from the European Union and the United Nations Security Council in its determination to enrich uranium. It says this is for nuclear fuel but the US and EU argue that it conceals military aims.

The notion of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, either by the US or Israel, looks as dangerous as ever. It would be unlikely to do permanent damage and would provoke retaliation on Israel and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr Obama could decide to negotiate with Iran – a route President Bush ruled out on principle. There is common interest in stability in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, it might take a change of Iranian president to make progress. The fall in the oil price helps to weaken Iran’s hand.

Middle East

Israel is heading for an election, and Palestinian leadership is split between Hamas and Fatah, so conditions for progress are not ideal. The old basis for hope is still valid: that most Palestinians and Israelis would settle for a two-state solution. There is new urgency: the spread of Israeli West Bank settlements and of Palestinian extremism will be increasingly hard to reverse. The Gulf’s wealth may play a greater role in US corporate finance, and politics, than in the past.

Iraq and Afghanistan

The fall in violence in Iraq has given the US a glimpse of the exit. So has the desire of Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, to set a date for US troops to go home. But the conflict in Afghanistan is worsening and the next president must decide whether a troop “surge” would help as it did in Iraq.

Before a Nato summit in April, Mr Obama will ask allies for more troops for Afghanistan: it will be hard to deny him completely.

North Korea

North Korea’s on-off agreement to freeze its nuclear weapons work cannot be neglected, though it is more China’s problem to solve than that of the US. The issue is a crisis just as some other fire blazes.

China

The country that has most wrongfooted the US since the fall of the Soviet Union is China. Identical interests in securing energy supplies have led many to predict a clash, but China’s decisions to sign up to international rules and trade talks show that it will work with others. The US faces the same choice. The last two years of President Bush showed a change of tone: more conciliatory, keener on the UN, free of the insults the early Bush team showered on old allies. Mr Obama won’t meet all the world's hopes, but a change of tone would go a long way.

Russia

The first decision is over tone, not actions, but is hard to get right. Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, who is gauging the extent of Central and Eastern Europe’s commitment to the US may try to test Mr Obama’s clarity.

Pakistan

After Afghanistan, Pakistan should come next. But it may not. One of the weaknesses of US foreign policy has been the neglect of Pakistan, a country that slips off the agenda and out of news reports. Facing a deepening mood of anti-Americanism, which blends easily into militancy, Pakistan’s leaders need help in demonstrating the value of US support. That means money, spent visibly. The US will need to be more sophisticated than during President Musharraf’s military rule in backing leaders who are good for Pakistan’s democracy, not just those who support US aims.

Africa

Mr Bush won little credit for the money and time he poured into Africa, because of his damaging objection to some contraceptive programmes and nonsensical promotion of abstinence. But the need for a US role is clear, in aid and perhaps in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s new turmoil.

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