Let's not pass over our pleasure in silence; good news is rather unusual at this time. We, that is to say, almost the entirety of the rest of the world that feared American electors would not follow our passion for Barack Obama at the hour of choice.

    For once, then, Americans are in sync with the rest of the world. Or vice versa rather, since, after all, they are the ones who voted ...

    Barack Obama has charmed by his youth, his charisma, his personal journey and his mixed origins. He has known how to inspire and give hope at a time of crisis and rupture. He has embodied the future, while his 70-some-year-old opponent has a slightly rancid flavor of the 20th century. He has made obsolete battalions of politicians who ring false. He has taken on the question of getting beyond the racial issue in the United States - and elsewhere, moreover - in a positive way.

    The Democratic candidate will have succeeded in the tour de force of reuniting a majority of Americans around his personality, but also, incontestably, an even greater majority of citizens of the rest of the world, who "voted" for him psychologically.

    It's an understatement to say the new president-elect has aroused enormous expectations. For Americans, the priority is the state of the economy, which was the number one subject in the electoral campaign. But in the rest of the world, he is also long awaited for the promised rupture with the Bush era, undoubtedly one of the most disastrous in American history.

    Unless we want to be disappointed, we should not expect sudden changes, no immediate retreat from Iraq, still less Afghanistan, the two fronts in which the American Army is enduringly bogged down.

    But a president of the United States who would put an end to the messianic unilateralism of the Bush clan, to the Manichaeism and the arrogance, to the lies and the paranoia, who would take the world as it is to rebuild governance in crisis, would be good news. For the whole world.

    Such a minimalist program would make Barack Obama the midwife of a - to use analyst Fareed Zakaria's expression - "post-American" world. On election night, one may still hope and dream.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.