Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy reminds us that the next president of the United States will be, as much as everything, president of the world.

Consider this:

The separation of powers set out in the US constitution was created explicitly because human beings could not be trusted to act in "good faith." It generated a high legal culture and civic sense of the public interest. But at the same time its low expectations built in permission for Hobbesian "hard-ball" politics and the pursuit of self-interest which are coded into American political expectations. No one can successfully pursue the first who is not also a master of the second's darker arts. Obama seems to have a natural command of the double-game. He pitches himself as above partisan party politics, but in a consummately political fashion. He once said, "I've become a receptacle for a lot of other people's issues that they need to work out. . . . I've been living with this stuff my whole life." But he also attracts this identification with himself deliberately so that he embodies the national unity many Americans long for."