President-elect Barack Obama now has to prepare to live up to the expectations of those who rapturously welcomed his victory.
Righting the economy dominates his agenda, in both its global and United States contexts.
He really needs to start afresh. So it was not surprising that he kept away from the G20 summit and George W Bush and his extraordinary opening comment that the free market should not be blamed because it is working well. Really!
Most other leaders must have cringed when they heard what could be interpreted as a recipe for inaction.
Let us hope for new directions when Senator Obama formally takes over on January 20.
The new president will face a host of other problems.
These include how to end the Iraq intervention promptly and how to make real progress in Afghanistan - or get out.
However, I want to touch on one other important issue; Washington's deteriorating relations with Moscow.
It really needs to be put right, because it involves relations between by far the world's largest nuclear powers, where miscalculation could have calamitous consequences.
Russia has more than 10,000 nuclear devices, compared with about the same number for the US and 600 for China.
In 1968, I was charge d'affaires of our mission in Moscow when the Kremlin moved against the Czechoslovak Dubcek regime, which had announced its intention to shift to communism with a human face.
The declaration shattered the Cold War calm. To Soviet leaders, it was nothing short of heresy.
Forcing other East European communist states to join them, they moved to extinguish this ray of enlightenment with a Warsaw Pact invasion.
The seriousness of the situation for the superpower confrontation was brought home to me in Moscow on the day of the invasion.
Late than night I was returning to my apartment on Moscow's ring road when a huge dark shape loomed ahead.
It was an intercontinental ballistic missile being moved into position, a weapon with 50 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb.
The implications of the scene were frightening at the time, but thank goodness the crisis passed.
Russia is a quite different power these days.
Communism has gone, although replaced by a system more akin to Tsarist autocracy than to a functioning democracy.
The Putin-Medvedev regime has disappointed many in the West.
It continues to have an uneasy relationship with breakaway republics like Ukraine and Georgia.
Many in the latter want the protection of the NATO umbrella, arousing mixed responses from Western Europe.
In fact, such a move is only likely to make things worse, creating a dangerous isolationist mood in Moscow and greater reliance on its nuclear power status.
The West needs to appreciate how Russians still smart over the collapse of their once-great Soviet empire, especially as they face the impact of the global economic crisis.
In the circumstances, confrontation should be avoided.
James Dunn is an author with four decades of experience as a foreign affairs official and with UN agencies.
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