Congratulations President-elect Obama. Welcome to a world that will greet you with open arms — and expectations that will be impossible to meet.

Late last month pollsters judged opinions of the two presidential candidates among people in 22 nations. More than 22,000 people on four continents participated in the survey, and by a margin of four to one, these people preferred Obama over John McCain.

That shouldn't be much of a surprise. President Bush is so despised in much of the world that the Democrats could have nominated a horned toad, and in this poll it would probably have come out ahead.

What is more, many of these countries are home to darker-skinned people who certainly find it reassuring to see a black man win the most important job in the world. Even in India, where Bush is widely admired for his plan to sell the state civilian nuclear technology, those polled preferred Obama over McCain by a 9 percent margin.

In Egypt, where virulent anti-Americanism hangs in the air like humidity, in a poll last week among 500 business leaders, 85 percent preferred Obama over McCain. In fact, billions of people around the world — regardless of skin color, gender, ethnicity, nationality or political viewpoint — are certainly smiling with admiration for America right now as we transcend two centuries of bigotry, injustice and subjugation.

In Washington, new presidents can expect a honeymoon that lasts about 100 days, at most. In much of the world, that honeymoon is likely to end much sooner. Many people in the Arab world, for example, expect Obama to end the Iraq war and resolve the Israel-Palestine dispute almost overnight.

"People have high hopes," Khalen Dakhil, a political sociologist in Saudi Arabia, told Cox newspapers last week. "They expect Obama to withdraw American forces from Iraq" and "to have a more even-handed policy in the Arab-Israeli dispute." More than likely, Obama will begin withdrawing troops from Iraq soon after taking office. But the Arab-Israeli dispute is another matter. This is the Arab world's perennial grievance with America — though the U.S. provides far more aid to the Palestinians than most any of the Arab states.

For a new American president, the odds of settling this decades-long dispute are small, and no effort to solve it will succeed unless Washington is willing to pressure the Israelis, not just the Palestinians, to do things they don't want to do. The common political wisdom is that playing tough with Israel will cost a president his re-election — given the large number of Jews and fundamentalist Christians in key states who support Israel. So on that issue, President Obama will likely disappoint the Arab world.

Several of the other problems are no more easily solved. In Afghanistan, for instance, Obama and McCain both promised to dispatch more troops. But that is unlikely to solve anything.

As long as the Taliban and al-Qaeda maintain safe havens in Pakistan from which they can dispatch endless numbers of fighters, Afghanistan will remain an open wound. And as long as Afghan government officials continue enriching themselves from opium-fed corruption (Afghanistan is now classified as the world's fifth most corrupt nation) the crop will flourish unchallenged. The Taliban, then, will continue exacting their own tax on the opium farmers to pay for their insurgency. All of that makes the solution much more complex than Obama has let on.

North Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia — all of these are complex dilemmas defying easy solutions. But Obama could strengthen his hand immeasurably by taking a few steps that are less complicated.

Without consulting any other nation, for example, he could close the prison at Guantanamo.

He could take a clear and unequivocal stand on torture, unlike his predecessor who liked to declare that the United States does not condone torture — even as his people committed torture.

He could step up to the climate-change challenge rather than avoiding and evading the problem. By taking the lead, the United States could create new and profitable green businesses and market their products worldwide — just as Denmark has captured a large part of the world market for wind-powered energy, while Bush pretended that the climate problem did not exist.

Most of all, I have no doubt that President Obama will treat other leaders in a manner that shows he respects their views — even when he does not agree with them. This, as much as anything, will allow him to hold onto the admiration, even affection, the world is offering him now.

Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. Readers may send him e-mail at: brinkley@foreign-matters.com.