What traits are emblematic of the United States? For the answer, writers often turn reflexively to a Frenchman (Alexis de Tocqueville). I will cite a German and a Swede.

Paul Tillich, the eminent Protestant theologian, was among the many German intellectuals who emigrated to America after Hitler seized power. At the midpoint of the last century, he wrote appreciatively of his new home:

A second assessment, also midcentury, is that of a journalist, Victor Vinde, who traveled extensively in the United States:

America at its best is mirrored in these testimonies: optimism, resilience, faith in freedom, and, one might add, confidence that our national experiment matters to all the world. And yet who today describes Americans in such flattering terms?

Powerful myths emerge from revolution and resistance; present-day America is identified with privilege and the status quo. Tillich credited Americans with courage, but it is hard to appear brave when we are so advantaged; we consume a quarter of the world’s resources with 4 percent of the population and can afford to spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Though we are still admired for our scientific and material accomplishments, even friends have become reluctant to follow our lead. In the language of the playground, many feel that we have become too big for our britches; they want us brought down a peg.

Strong leaders often generate resentment, but stirring resentment is no proof of strong leadership. Success is sustained through respect, trust, and a measure of affection. Those assets are invaluable now, when major problems can be solved only through the work of many hands. The renewal of American leadership will depend on whether you deploy the tools of the presidency in ways that inspire cooperation. So from the first day, stress your desire to listen to others, knowing that you will invite more complaints than solutions. Listening is essential, nonetheless, for though few countries expect America to do what they tell us, all want us to care what they say.

One precedent to consider is that of John Kennedy, who, four months into his presidency, delivered to a joint session of Congress a special message on “Urgent National Needs.” Kennedy used the occasion to unveil forward-looking initiatives on diplomacy, development, military reorganization, and arms control. He also announced, with fanfare, a commitment by decade’s end to land a man on the moon.

You must be conscious, as you prepare to introduce your own strategy, of the need to do more than describe; you must persuade. On paper, you will have a list of ideas and priorities. On the podium, you will require a story. The particular problems we face are well enough known. These are issues, in the case of nuclear weapons, that have preoccupied the world for decades and—with respect to the dilemma in the Middle East—for centuries. To be heard, you must speak of old problems in new and surprising ways.

As you do, be aware that you are not the only storyteller on the street. Hundreds of millions of people have been conditioned to believe that the American president is a hypocrite and liar. Words, if they are in fact to persuade, must be linked to action; yet words matter if they speak to universal aspirations, reassure the wary, and cause the hostile to think twice. In the film Cabaret, a young Nazi, blue-eyed and blond, rises from his seat to sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” America, with its hair and skin of many colors, must stand up for a different principle—that tomorrow belongs not to any one nation or faction, but to us all.

The president of the United States is, ex officio, a symbol of globalization. We have more influence in the international financial institutions than any other country. An American has always held the top position at the World Bank. Ever since the Great Depression, our leaders have preached the merits of free trade. Our wealth and power mean that we are held responsible for the world as it is—and to people who have nothing or very little, this does us no credit.

With communism essentially dead and the victory of capitalism presumed, we might think that Marxism could safely be forgotten. Yet Marx predicted that capitalism would fail precisely because it concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. Increasingly, this is happening both within and among nations. Globalization, though celebrated for increasing productivity, has been accompanied by growing inequality. Critics allege that this split is caused by corporate interests who have used their power to impose unfair rules governing trade and tax policies. Because the rules are unfair, the Western prescription for economic health, embodied in the so-called Washington consensus (disciplined budgets, privatization, liberal rules for investment and commerce) can seem the wrong medicine. Governments are forced to curtail social spending and give higher priority to pleasing foreign investors, so it is said, than to meeting the needs of their citizens. When this happens, policies intended to aid development are perceived as marginalizing the poor.

This might not occur so often if governments were run by enlightened technocrats who could institute needed economic reforms over a long period without fear of being turned out of office. The leaders of fragile democracies, however, cannot afford such patience. If an economic program doesn’t yield dividends right away, it’s likely to be supplanted by another that promises more, even if—as is often the case—the new policy ends up delivering even less.

Bill Clinton responded to these issues by embracing what he called “globalization with a human face.” He favored a bargain through which relatively honest and democratic governments would benefit most from debt relief, trade concessions, and aid. Similarly, George W. Bush sent more aid to fewer countries, rewarding those that met a list of benchmarks for good governance. After some foot-dragging, he endorsed the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, which call for a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty by 2015 along with parallel gains in such areas as maternal health, child survival, and universal access to primary education.

Reducing poverty should be a central theme of your administration. This is smart politically, right morally, and makes sense economically. With this goal in mind, you should reevaluate our policies on trade, aid, farm subsidies, the environment, and women’s rights. To dramatize your commitment, you might visit some of the poorest countries early in your term and, while there, draw attention to the linkages that exist among disease, hunger, corruption, and conflict. Visit Mali to shine the spotlight on a place with few natural assets but blessed by an honest and democratic government dedicated to helping farmers become self-supporting. Take advantage of the global antipoverty movement, which includes rock stars, billionaires, evangelists, students, and the producers of American Idol; don’t underestimate the power of their enthusiasm—some jobs can best be done only by people too inexperienced to know exactly how hard the jobs are.

You might also consider the insights of a friend and colleague of mine, a man who can only be described as a walking, talking oxymoron: a charismatic economist. Twenty years ago, Hernando de Soto developed an economic strategy for Peru based on the extension of legal rights to participants in his country’s informal economy—that is, farmers without deeds, businesspeople without certificates of incorporation, and families without title to the houses in which they lived. Backed by the government, de Soto’s program gave new legal standing to people in areas preyed upon by a violent guerrilla group, Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path. De Soto’s approach, dubbed El Otro Sendero, the Other Path, proved so threatening to the guerrillas that they bombed his offices and tried to assassinate him. Today, Sendero Luminoso has few followers, and de Soto has taken on a new enemy: poverty across the globe. He and I serve as co-chairs of an international panel of experts that is considering how best to apply more broadly the principles of legal empowerment for the poor.

As de Soto’s research reflects, families living in poverty already have assets many times greater than amounts received through foreign aid. They possess trillions of dollars in wealth in the form of livestock, houses, small businesses, and the products of their own labor. The catch is that many of these assets exist outside the formal legal economy, and thus cannot be leveraged into capital, investments, or loans. More than one-third of the developing world’s GDP is generated in the underground economy. Disturbingly, this proportion has risen steadily over the last decade, with the largest increases in the poorest nations.

The key to capitalism is capital; the key to obtaining and using capital is the law. Yet the law, even in countries where free enterprise is supposedly practiced, can be the enemy of capitalism. Mr. de Soto’s team found that months, even years, can be required in some countries to establish legal title to a house or to register a new business. This leaves millions of small entrepreneurs—such as cabdrivers, jitney runners, street-side vendors, laundresses, small farmers—without enforceable rights at home or on the job. Many don’t even have a birth certificate or proof of identity. Lacking power, they are vulnerable to those with power, including criminals, predatory government officials, and single-minded developers, who may, for one reason or another, want to move poor people out of the way. In Africa recently, I saw an entire neighborhood where each house was marked with an X, indicating that it was to be destroyed. The local families had built those houses with their own hands yet had no papers to demonstrate ownership and no legal means to seek compensation or redress.

Not long after that trip to Africa, I had cause to look at the deed to my own farm—a retreat a couple of hours outside Washington that my family has long used to relax and commune with cows. Instead of the legalese I expected, the language setting out the farm’s boundaries read as it might have hundreds of years earlier: “Beginning at a pile of stones…proceeding over the mountain in a northwesterly direction to another pile of stones…continuing beyond the hanging rocks to a birch tree by an old stump; south past a Black Oak Chestnut to an iron pin set in the easterly edge of a private road.” The lesson in this is that the law need not be complex; at its most basic, it simply reflects what our senses tell us.

Most past efforts to extend legal protections to the disadvantaged have nevertheless failed because they have required unrealistic levels of documentation. De Soto tells of walking through a rice field in Bali. There were no official papers or physical markers to tell which portion of the vast field was cultivated by which family, but he noticed that as he moved from one area to the next, a different dog began to bark. The dogs knew what the law did not. The goal (and it would be a good one for you to espouse) is to find ways to give the poor the same rights as the rich and then see what happens. It may be that free enterprise has not delivered because inequity at the starting line has made fair competition the exception, not the rule.

The spread of new information technologies may improve efficiency, but that is an economic virtue not a political one. I fear that Thomas Friedman, best-selling author of The World Is Flat, is wrong when he predicts that “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other…. Because people embedded in major global supply chains don’t want to fight old time wars anymore. They want to make just-in-time deliveries of goods and services—and enjoy the rising standards of living that come with that.”

Such thinking places the logic of material self-interest on too high a pedestal. Governments do not make decisions solely on the basis of what is best for standards of living. According to one study, “Contrary to popular belief, the most impressive episode of international economic integration which the world has seen to date was not the second half of the twentieth century, but the years between 1870 and the Great War.” In that era, political stability and technological change caused trade to expand and capital markets to become integrated to an unprecedented degree. This was particularly the case in Western Europe, where Great Britain and Germany were major trading partners and Lloyd’s of London insured the German merchant marine. These cozy arrangements nevertheless failed to check nationalist passions, leading to a level of destruction that was also without precedent. World War I was a disaster for business interests in all of Europe—except for the manufacturers of armaments and tombstones.

Globalization is supposed to make us more alike, but it can also cause people to cling ever more tightly to the identities and beliefs that separate “us” from “them.” Uplifting ideas may now be transmitted instantaneously from one mind to millions of others, but so can lies, boasts, stereotypes, and threats. Perhaps Friedman and other global enthusiasts are right, but I suspect each modern generation has believed something similar—that, on their watch, the world had become more advanced and more tightly linked than ever before. We may all hope that humanity has advanced to the point that nothing is beyond our reach, but consider this prediction: “It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought among all the nations of the Earth.” Tragically, international conflict did not cease on that day, in 1858, when the first transatlantic cable was connected.

Time does bring change, astonishing things do happen, technology steadily pushes back the boundaries of what can be imagined—and yet unimaginable tragedies still occur: the Somme and Belleau Wood; the Ottomans and the Armenians; Guernica, Nanking, and Pearl Harbor; Auschwitz and Buchenwald; the North Korean invasion and No Gun Ri; Tet, My Lai, Srebrenica, Idi Amin, Rwanda, 9/11, Darfur. Everything has changed but has anything changed? The world may be flat or it may be round, but it sometimes seems as if we haven’t learned a thing.

These fearful explosions were preceded by prayers and motivated by anger and the urgent desire to end a war. During the past sixty years, a big part of the job of the American president has been to see that it does not happen again.

Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1953 “Atoms for Peace” address to the UN, pledged America’s “determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma—to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.” In the same spirit, John Kennedy proposed to prohibit atmospheric nuclear tests; Richard Nixon authored a ban on antiballistic missile defense; and Ronald Reagan stunned advisors by telling Mikhail Gorbachev that his suggestion to eliminate nuclear weapons “suits me fine...