Eight years of Bush administration leadership has severely damaged the reputation of the United States abroad. The incoming president will inherit this deficit as well as a host of other foreign policy crises. To gain back trust, he will have to address nonproliferation and climate change.

Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima: "It didn't take the actual experience of Armageddon to spur the international regulation of national arsenals."

The president of the United States inaugurated on January 20, 2009 will inherit the most complex, difficult and dangerous array of foreign policy challenges ever facing a newcomer to the Oval Office: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rising Iran, a Pakistan that has lost control of its own borders, a languishing Arab-Israel peace process, a Syria covertly cooperating with North Korea on a nuclear weapons program -- and that is just in one region of the world. In dealing with those and other problems, the United States, under its next president, will need all the help in can get from other nations. Therefore the incoming chief executive will have to move quickly to improve -- and indeed repair -- America's image in the world.

Polls taken in recent years show a precipitous decline in respect for and trust in the United States. Those two essential ingredients for leadership of the international community have been severely damaged during the administration of George W. Bush. During his first term, President Bush withdrew from, nullified, "unsigned" or backed away from a range of agreements, including the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was originally signed by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev and was observed by the five presidents who followed Nixon.