AS BARACK OBAMA travels abroad this week, he is finding a world that still wants America to be engaged, but no longer necessarily waits for America to take the lead. The challenge for the next president is to understand how much has changed and how America can best pursue its national interests in such a different international environment.
It isn't just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have changed the world, nor other aspects of the Bush legacy that have weakened America's power and position. The world itself has changed. Ours is the era of global interconnectedness. The fate of the average American is increasingly connected to the fate of people around the world

A key component is likely to be more troops, but the strategy must go beyond that, experts say.
By Gordon Lubold | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
al troops to turn things around there.

He hit the right notes during his swing through Iraq, but his plans for that other war could mean trouble.
By Juan Cole
but wants to withdraw all American soldiers and Marines from Iraq on a short timetable. In contrast to the kid gloves with which he treated the Iraqi government, Obama repeated his threat to hit at al-Qaida in neighboring Pakistan unilaterally, drawing howls of outrage from Islamabad.

MARK COLVIN: Precarious and urgent; those were the words the US Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama chose to describe Afghanistan on his visit to Kabul yesterday.
Mr Obama wants American troops redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan to deal with the worsening situation there.
nstance? That they're only prepared to contribute reconstruction forces that work way behind the lines.

Watching Sen. Barack Obama glide through his foreign trip so far, nervous Republicans and other patriots have to hope that American voters will not view him through the eyes of a Hollywood casting director. Because one could not cast a man, who can better visually portray a worldly statesman?
We all must envy his ability to effortlessly drape his tall, imperially slender form in gilded Louis XV chairs in foreign palaces. Mixing just the right combination of worldly bonhomie and serious mien, his presentation (conveniently presented to the world with video, but no audio) make, by comparison, Henry Kissinger, FDR and Winston Churchill all look like clumsy provincial oafs.
But we've not seen a presidential candidate do this, in my recollection, ever before."