On 20 January 2009, the Democrat Barack Obama became the first African-American president of the United States. The hopes of 300 million US citizens, and most of the rest of the world's population, are focused on this president who could lead his country in a new direction and mark the course toward a new era in the globalised society of the 21st century. However, Obama has inherited a country that is economically wounded and socially weakened, a country involved in two entrenched wars and whose image overseas has deteriorated, problems that the incoming president aims to tackle through work, trust and the recovery of an intelligent power. Nevertheless, while part of the responsibility lies on the shoulders of an American population that has lost the the basic values on which the country was founded and has grown, these values must be recovered in order for society to be reborn. It is a matter of recovering old values in order to overcome new challenges. In order to understand the real dimension of the new history that is commencing in the United States, one needs to take a retrospective view right back to its origins, and to carry out an analysis of the present moment. This is the approach that we are taking toward Obama's electoral victory, in addition to examining the philosophical keys to the creation of a nation and its subsequent development, without forgetting the external dimensions marked by the balance between hard power and soft power, and between multilateral leadership and unilateralism. Nor should we forget the aspects of the present economic crisis and past crises, or the struggles to achieve energy security.

ISSN: 1132-6107

60 pp.

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