Fortunately, democracy has prevailed, or at least the very flawed American Electoral College “democracy” that any serious liberal democrat would scoff at. Although it is certainly tempting to engage in schadenfreude by simply eulogizing the Bush legacy and the irrational and ultimately incompetent policies pursued over its course, I can’t help but feel that it is time to clean up this mess.

Barack Obama’s election is truly a milestone. Not simply by any one fact, whether it is his transcendence of race based politics, his sound foreign policy judgment, his mobilization of new voters or even his basic determination to return the United States to its rightful place: the responsible center of world politics.

America is well-deserved to pat itself on its back, at least this week. By electing a colored minority to the highest office in the land, it has accomplished something that no other democracy in modern history or for that matter in the near future will likely to have achieved. Sadly, race matters more in “progressive” Western countries than it does in “conservative” America; in France, it would be virtually impossible to elect someone of Algerian descent while in Germany it is nearly unthinkable that someone of Turkish lineage might lead the country.

All of this combines to starkly reinforce the sheer magnitude of near insurmountable obstacles that the incoming Obama administration will have to tackle. To understand the immensity of this task here are but some of the coming hurdles: the economy, climate change, national debt, Iraq, Afghanistan, a resurgent Russia, Iran, North Korea, the restoration of checks and balances, the threat of nuclear proliferation, the War on Terror, a rising authoritarian China, social security, and health care.

It is indeed arguable that the sum of these trials in fact dwarf anything that Washington has faced since its very founding. The question then is, how are the United States and the world to go about overcoming these tests together, all the while maintaining global stability? In many respects, the outgoing administration has brought the world to the brink; soon it will be the next government’s responsibility to redress the problems created by their immediate predecessor. Unfortunately, any misstep even by one so well-intentioned as the President-elect might lead us all to greater disaster.

This is Bush’s legacy: the new international minefield.

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