When a new US president arrives in the White House on January 20, 2009, the entire world hopes to turn a new page. The Bush era – which has been deeply marked by the events of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (as chapters in the “global war on terror”) – has had a profoundly unsettling effect on international relations. It has generated serious divisions within the Atlantic alliance, massively increased the volatility of the greater Middle East, spawned new and dangerous fissures in Central and South Asia, fostered a mood of uncertainty and growing unease in North Asia, offered a global rallying cry for Islamic jihadists, undermined the legitimacy and the efficacy of the United Nations, and fueled an unprecedented level of anti-Americanism across the globe. Never in the history of the United States has an incoming president been faced with so many urgent and immensely difficult strategic challenges deriving in large part from policy errors committed by the outgoing administration. Whoever sits in the Oval Office on January 21, 2009, will immediately have to set priorities, both temporal and spatial, among the many severe challenges awaiting him: Iraq, Iran, Israel/Palestine/Lebanon, Afghanistan/Pakistan, North Korea, China, Russia, Georgia, energy, climate, trade, immigration, to name only the most obvious.

Regardless of who takes office in 2009, the entire world will be hoping for a new US approach. The United States remains the only global superpower with vast resources in every area: military, economic, commercial, scientific, technological, educational, and cultural. And it remains the world’s main provider of public goods. That situation is likely to last into the middle of the century, but the story will nevertheless be one of gradual, relative decline. [1] Although the US armed forces were able rapidly and easily to defeat both the military resistance of the Taliban and the shell-shocked ranks of Saddam Hussein’s army, the clearest lesson of these two wars is that military power alone has severe limitations (especially if it has to be used) and that the tasks of regime change, post-conflict reconstruction, and nation-building require a far greater – and more sophisticated – range of instruments and skills than was previously imagined. The US national debt, which will rise to $10 trillion by 2009, [2] has continued to increase by an average of $1.80 billion per day since September 2007. The vulnerability of the US economy to external holders of dollar reserves, or to capital wealth funds, the volatility of the credit sector (as illustrated by the sub-prime crisis), and the steep decline of the US dollar against most major currencies, all underline one basic lesson of economics: things that cannot go on forever . . . will not. The comparative decline of the US manufacturing industry, symbolized by the near bankruptcy of General Motors and the continuing crises at Ford and Chrysler, now overtaken in the US domestic automobile market by Toyota and Honda, suggests a structural vulnerability in the labor market that the fierce debates over NAFTA during the 2008 primary campaign served only to accentuate. At the same time, the steady “rise of the rest” (Zakaria, 2008) – China, India, Brazil, Indonesia – as well as the resurgence of Russia under Vladimir Putin and the increasing presence of the European Union (issues of institutional reform notwithstanding), suggest that the “uni-polar moment” will prove to be momentary and that the world will increasingly be structured by an ever smaller number of ever larger units. The US will have to learn to deal with these competitive poles in new and imaginative ways.

That said, the expectations of different actors around the world vary enormously. Asian nations in general, while remaining nervous about each other, are already moving towards greater autonomy in their strategic relations with the United States. China, beyond aspiring to continue to increase its trade with the entire world, expects the US to respect its inexorable rise as a commercial power and to avoid a naval arms race in the Pacific. Since 95% of Chinese trade is conducted by maritime transport, the domination of the Pacific by the US Navy is seen in Beijing as a strategic problem. The US is unlikely to withdraw or reduce the size of its Third and Seventh (Pacific) Fleets, for fear of stimulating naval expansion by Japan and/or India. But China is currently concentrating the bulk of its defense spending on naval assets – largely destroyers and submarines – which will inevitably be perceived in Washington as a challenge to US dominance in the Pacific (You, 2006). If Washington’s strategic objective is to persuade China to embrace the international system as a stakeholder – rather than to seek, as has been the traditional course of rising powers, to overthrow the existing system (Ikenberry, 2008) – then China will clearly expect some trade-off in terms of the naval balance in the Pacific.

It is in Europe above all that enormous expectations are likely to be vested in the new administration. The crises surrounding the invasion of Iraq, the blatant attempts on the part of the Bush administration to divide Europeans against one another (“old” and “new”), the reservations expressed repeatedly – at least until comparatively recently – about the strengthening (or even the existence) of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), the constant dashing of European hopes for a new initiative in the Middle East, quarrels over NATO’s strategic objectives and the implementation of Alliance policy in Afghanistan, misunderstandings about the nature and sources of contemporary terrorism, and many more issues have brought transatlantic relations to their lowest ebb since the Second World War (Anderson et al., 2008). Indeed, European expectations are so high in some quarters that one major analyst has warned of a coming crisis of high expectations. “Europeans,” writes Kori Schake (2007: 1), “will expect a more pliable, chastened and multilateral United States. They will want it to start solving problems on terms comfortable to Europeans. The US will expect a more helpful Europe that will take more responsibility and run risks to solve common problems. Neither aspiration will be met.”

The immediate and most urgent focus will be on the broader Middle East from the Levant to Afghanistan. Both the US and the EU have high expectations of positive partnership in these areas. But the precise priorities are different. On the US side, Iraq and Afghanistan will top the agenda. On the EU side, the priorities will be Israel/Palestine and Iran. Whether it be President Obama or President McCain, there will be an American expectation that the Europeans – who are, after all, much more directly concerned than the US by the outcome of the Iraq crisis – will finally agree to help out in some form, even if only through the deployment of additional assets for the training of Iraqi policemen and rule-of-law officials. Either president would expect considerably more European assistance in Afghanistan, in terms of both military and civilian assets. The EU, for its part, will expect new political will to be injected into the Israel/Palestine stand-off, notably by the adoption in Washington of far more conditionality in US support for Israel and by a new, more even-handed approach to the plight of the Palestinians. Europeans generally will also be expecting the new US president to abandon almost 30 years of refusal to speak to Iran and to adopt a more comprehensive attitude towards the current bargaining round. None of these expectations is likely to meet with an unequivocally positive response from the other side.

The EU has long considered the Israel-Palestine stand-off to be the most urgent global security challenge and has deplored the Bush administration’s failure (until Annapolis – too little, too late) to commit political will towards a resolution. This will probably be the policy area in which the highest expectations will be forthcoming from Brussels and the major European capitals, particularly after the relative breakthroughs of summer 2008 in the context of the Union for the Mediterranean. However, given the pile of urgent priorities on the new president’s desk, the EU will have to be very persuasive in urging him to make Israel/Palestine a top priority. The political costs, domestically, for any US president who wishes to strong-arm Israel into a more pliant negotiating position are very high. Most newly elected presidents, facing a multitude of urgent strategic challenges, will instinctively attempt to steer clear of the Eastern Mediterranean. If the Europeans seriously expect the president to place Israel/Palestine higher up the policy agenda, they will have to be prepared to make contributions in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

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The EU needs to be ready by January 2009 with a strategic trade-off with which to engage the US. Greater EU inputs might be considered for both Iraq and Pakistan on the condition that Washington undertake a new political effort on Israel/Palestine and a new, more constructive approach to the bargaining over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But the framework for such a grand bargain would have to be a new, bilateral EU-US forum. NATO is neither the appropriate nor the possible framework for such a comprehensive strategic discussion. Expectations in both Europe and the US are high. The Europeans must stop worrying about the Lisbon Treaty and develop a strategic approach to their relations with the US. The United States must be prepared to listen and to negotiate. If there is no transatlantic meeting of minds between the two sides after January 2009, many might conclude that we would indeed be witnessing “the end of the West.”