Having welcomed the historic victory of Barack Obama in the US presidential election, let us begin by shedding too much expectations of him. They are likely to be dashed – generating a great deal of pain and resentment into the bargain.

There are some quite extraordinary notions circulating about what sort of president he will be, particularly in this part of the world – for example, that he is going to turn years of American Middle East policy on its head. This is a willful, and ultimately destructive, fantasy.

Despite attempts by his more extreme opponents during the campaign to paint him as un-American, President Obama is not going to run the White House in the interests of anyone other than the American people. Nor should his victory be seen as a defeat or comeuppance for the US, although that is how it is being presented in some corners of the world. That is to ignore that a majority of Americans, fed up with the past and seeing him as the personification of the American dream, voted enthusiastically for him. He is, by virtue of his election, everything that America stands for. He is Uncle Sam, the all-American kid, The Chief.

As president, Barack Obama is going to defend American interests first, not those of some other nation. There will be attempts at dialogue, even at finding peace in the Middle East, but no one should imagine that they would be radical or pursued with all his energy and determination. Iraq is one thing – and even then there can be no certainty that every last American troop will be pulled out from there in 16 months. But a president whose deputy is Joe Biden, a man who last year said that Israel is “the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East” and who is proud to call himself a Zionist, is not going to turn his back on the Israelis. His appointment of Rahm Emanual as his chief of staff makes that doubly certain. Emanual is an even more convinced Zionist (his father was a member of the Zionist terror organization Irgun), not to mention a prominent figure in the US Jewish lobby. Far from challenging Israel, the new team may turn out to be as pro-Israeli as the one it is replacing.

In fact, President Obama is going to have to concentrate on domestic issues. He has to deal with recession, poverty, unemployment, healthcare, the environment and two wars – hardly the most auspicious beginning for a new president. His room for maneuver is limited. The monumental tasks of putting the country back on its feet again are testimony to mismanagement of unprecedented magnitude during the Bush era. Never before has the US been at war and in recession at the same time. Obama and his team may well reflect that winning the election was the easy bit. His clarion calls for change has convinced an eager world that he will change the US and change its foreign policies. That remains to be seen. If only because he is the first African-American president, he will want to carry as wide a section of American public opinion with him as possible in his decisions. If he wants a second term, he is going to be very cautious at best. More likely, he will champion America’s interests with iron-fisted determination. Whichever, the wild expectations have to go. In any event, one man cannot solve all the world’s problems, however well intentioned he may be.