Yesterday's emphatic win by Barack Obama of the United States presidency is nearly as much a victory for the world as for the man himself and the people of the US.

It is not that Mr Obama will, or can, be anything but the president of the United States. His duty is to the interest of the people of the US and the American Constitution demands nothing else.

But, beyond the immediate domestic matter of the crisis in the US economy, that defined the last stretch of the campaign between Mr Obama and his Republican rival John McCain, two other big issues were, and remain, central to this election and its outcome. Both are of relevance to the world impacting on America's moral standing abroad.

Race relations

The one has to do with race relations in America. The other is the conduct of foreign policy.

The US was built on a great idea and a grand ideal: that democracy is supreme, that the concept is universal and, that within the framework of freedom, achievement by the individual was assured. Yet, America's founding fathers limited those notions of rights and freedoms, ending their boundaries at white America, allowing the embrace of slavery until the country was split apart in a bloody, fratricidal civil war.

Much has changed for the better in the 140-odd years since the end of slavery and of that civil war. But it can hardly be claimed that America has found harmony on the issue of race and ethnicity or that black people, the former slaves, have found an equal place in the society.

Indeed, it is less than half a century since the civil-rights movement, the Selma demonstration and the march on Washington. Undeclared apartheid was in Mr Obama's lifetime. In that context, his election to the presidency is a significant and profound part of the narrative in the emerging American story.

America is much closer to resolving its internal contradictions and making whole the ideals of the founding fathers.

Moral compass

But as imperfect and exasperating that we, too, often found America and Americans of the gum-chewing, loud-talking, arrogant variety, there was still something decent and noble we thought about the US. The country might be drunken on its success, but there was a clear moral compass in America that forced us, against the grain it seemed sometimes, to express admiration.

Then came the lot who have run things these last eight years, unilateral marchers in hobnailed assertion of sole superpower status, articulating doctrines of preventive strike and regime change.

The world was designated as old and new - the supposed old order being of those who believe talking is the first order towards resolving conflicts - and that not only the powerful ought to have a place at the table and that morality can be as potent a force as mighty armies and superior technology.

It is the hope that Mr Obama will rebalance these ideas - not that he will be weak and effete - that make the world excited about his presidency.

America should remain muscular and strong, but the hope is that a moral core will return to Washington and the rest of us not viewed as mere pawns.

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