Mail Call: Get Ready, Get Set.(International Edition)(Letter to the editor)

Readers worldwide hold high expectations for America's popular president-elect. One acknowledged the challenge of putting "America back on the right track." Another highlighted common global goals in which Barack Obama "has the opportunity and obligation to use his international popularity."

Fixing the World

Fareed Zakaria is right in saying that Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to use American power to reshape the world ("Wanted: A New Grand Strategy," Dec. 8). Obama's challenge will be trying to live up to America's moral promise while fulfilling the practical needs of the world order. Americans have amassed a staggering federal debt coupled with a severe economic situation. Obama's dual responsibility, as the first African-American president, will also be to see that the black community is part of the process of his "change" mantra. Let's not forget that Obama inherits the quagmire into which George W. Bush has dragged the world. He must also repair a ruined image worldwide. What a hard task for a visionary leader like Obama to put America back on the right track. To restore America to greatness is what we yearn for.

Dan Chellumben

Amboise, France

I appreciated Fareed Zakaria's insightful, urgent-but-generous tone. He is right about the need to have an overarching plan for the tumultuous period we are in now and for the foreseeable future. However, I would like to emphasize that the strategy of building working multilateral institutions and consensus on addressing major problems needs to be taken from the viewpoint of solving or mitigating wrenching problems for the benefit of all the world's citizens. The political, economic, religious and power-based conflicts besetting the world already stretch humanity's ability to craft effective mutually beneficial solutions. However, I'm afraid there is worse yet to come. What Zakaria failed to mention is that the world is rapidly moving toward a period of basic resource scarcity--petroleum, water, arable land and food, compounded by climate shifts, that will test the ability of nation-states to maintain peaceful stability. Without common global goals and workable multilateral institutions, desperation will likely lead to levels of conflict that will make the world wars look like regional disputes. President-elect Obama has both the opportunity and the obligation to use his international popularity to help reshape the world into one that replaces national "me first" strategies with one that globalizes well-being and sustainability. If we fail to do this, the suffering will be immense.

Rick Bissell