Challenges of presidency have magnified

WASHINGTON — The world looked very different on the chilly Saturday in February 2007, when Barack Obama stood in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill., and declared himself a candidate for president of the United States.

The buildup in Iraq was in its first weeks, and it seemed hard to imagine that by the time the next president took office, there would be a consensus about the pace of a U.S. withdrawal. The two Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, were talking about a peaceful power-sharing agreement.

The Dow was at 12,580, on the way to 14,000 that summer. General Motors was making money selling cars even while reporting some concerns about "nonprime mortgages" held by its financing division. And the greatest worries about China and India were that their economies were growing so fast they could overheat.

Agenda shifts

The challenges Obama will begin to confront Tuesday afternoon bear only a passing resemblance to those on the table on the day nearly two years ago when he conceded "there is a certain presumptuousness in this — a certain audacity — to this announcement."

The agenda he is setting out to enact is significantly altered from what he had in mind then, partly by choice but mostly by circumstance. In the past two years, and especially in the 2 ½ months since his election, he has spoken less and less about Iraq and more and more about stabilizing the world economy.

Behind the scenes, his national staff has raced to reassess strategies for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza and Iran, even before logging on to their secure computers in the West Wing.

"He's facing the classic problem of having to handle a number of crises before he's really got time to set out a long-term architecture," G. John Ikenberry, a Princeton professor who co-wrote a detailed study of the national-security agenda for whoever became the next president.

Change in focus

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently called Obama's task analogous to "redesigning the airplane while you're flying it."

But the shifting reality has done more than force a change in focus. It also led Obama to re-examine his assumptions about a range of issues, hone his thinking and reach out to new advisers, some of them drawn from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign, some of his aides said.

At home, Obama is confronting an economic and financial crisis that is sure to demand a certain amount of trial and error. With some of the nation's biggest banks under intense strain, he will face tough decisions about redesigning the bailout strategy even as more money is being poured in.

Conflicts to handle

Abroad, Afghanistan, Iran and the Israel-Palestinian conflict are likely to be among the first tests of how Obama handles the changed landscape.

As his inauguration has approached, Obama renewed his pledge to engage directly with the Iranians, something President Bush permitted only at the end of his presidency and only at a low government level. Clinton, who once cast Obama's calls for high-level engagement as an example of his inexperience, will now be in charge of the effort.

But the enterprise is bound to be complicated by the fact that Bush is handing off to his successor an expanded, covert effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program, one of many secret programs Obama has been briefed about in detail.

Obama made clear Saturday, just before boarding a train in Philadelphia that was supposed to evoke Abraham Lincoln's sweep into Washington, D.C., in 1861, that he was ready to make good on his promise to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. "Two wars," he said, "one that needs to be ended responsibly, one that needs to be waged wisely."

His views on Afghanistan are likely to be heavily influenced by Gen. James L. Jones, his national-security adviser, who wrote an influential report a year ago making the case that U.S. and NATO forces were not winning the war and needed a revamped strategy to confront Taliban forces coming over the border from Pakistan.

Jones, in turn, has asked Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the war czar for Iraq and Afghanistan, to stay on.

But it may be the battle in Gaza — the first test of how he will deal with the Israeli government — that will confront Obama on Tuesday afternoon. No one on his team expects Israel's unilateral cease-fire — which started today — to last for long.