It will not be surprising if the new president of the United States is seen by Americans as facing an immediate task that is overwhelmingly economic and financial. Showing how the world’s largest economy can recover its growth and momentum will indeed be a vital part of his work.

Yet no less important a task for the new president lies in giving urgent attention to a widening range of foreign policy crises on the outcome of which the peace and stability of the world in the next decade may depend.

Many international issues now await the authority that can come only from being newly elected to lead what remains the world’s only superpower, even in straightened financial circumstances.

They are problems that need the power of a president with four or eight years ahead of him in office, to which no US administration in its final months can bring the necessary combination of fresh analysis and staying power.

The most obvious example is the Middle East Peace Process. The world will look to the new President of the United States to apply his efforts to forcing compromises with vigour and determination from the very outset.

And that should include encouraging a peace treaty between Israel and Syria, an immensely difficult objective but one that, if achieved, would help to break innumerable deadlocks elsewhere.

Next is the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The achievements of many NATO troops in Afghanistan, including, of course, our own substantial force in Helmand, are extraordinary given the size of the country and the difficulty of the terrain; often their conduct is simply heroic.

Yet one tactical success after another is not bringing strategic victory. The election of a new president and the simultaneous arrival of General David Petraeus at US Central Command provide the opportunity for the Americans to lead the way to a more coherent strategic approach.

That must include a huge effort in Kabul to provide better functioning and less easily corrupted national leadership, the more effective co-ordination of international aid and reconstruction, a more clearly unified military command of all NATO forces, an increase in US forces and a continued, sustained improvement in Pakistan’s combating of insurgents inside its own frontiers.

The United States is the only country in the world that can, with our support, force the pace on all these issues. The time is now arriving when it must do so.

Next in the president’s in-tray should be Iran. Its nuclear programme continues: the "deadlines" of the UN Security Council for full co-operation with international inspectors have been ignored.

With America distracted and Russia truculent, the world has done little in recent months while Iran gets nearer to nuclear capability, increasing the risk of either conflict with Israel or the ruin of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, or quite possibly both.

In the Conservative Party we have long argued that stopping Iran’s nuclear plans will require more carrot from America at the appropriate time and already requires more stick from the nations of Europe.

Wide-ranging financial sanctions by the EU and bans on European investment in Iranian oil and gas fields have been proposed by Britain but not agreed in other capitals. The approach to Iran on both sides of the Atlantic needs an urgent injection of strength.

Sad though it is to say it, the two most pressing remaining areas in which a strong lead is needed from the Oval office are within or on the frontiers of Europe itself: Georgia and Bosnia. In both cases, European leaders have been keen to take ownership of the problems.

Often, such as in the case of President Sarkozy’s energetic diplomacy on Russia and Georgia, they have certainly applied themselves to the task.

Yet it is becoming a feature of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy that an eagerness to demonstrate that Europe can manage a crisis is not accompanied by the strength of will and the strategic patience necessary to do so.

In both Georgia and Bosnia there is a current temptation to try to tick the box of a supposedly completed EU operation rather than to persist with a clear sense of purpose to show that a slide back towards increased tension or renewed conflict is not on.

EU foreign ministers will decide soon whether to resume the talks between the European Union and Russia on a new partnership agreement.

It is clear from visiting Georgia, as I did a week ago, that the terms of the August ceasefire have not yet been fully implemented: the movement of Russian forces into parts of South Ossetia in which they were not present before the August invasion make that clear enough.

Yet many EU leaders are already itching to get back to "business as usual". To do so with such speed, at a time when an EU-sponsored ceasefire has not been fully respected and the possibility of renewed conflict remains, would send a signal of collective European weakness where there should be united strength.

Washington should be clear that successful future co-operation and dialogue with Moscow is more likely to come from clear resolve in the West than succumbing easily to tactics of divide and rule.

In Bosnia too, many European governments are keen to disengage and declare the problem solved even while the position on the ground is deteriorating. The remaining international troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina number only 1800, and although the largest contingent is drawn from Turkey they operate under an EU command.

Many EU defence ministers want to withdraw even this small force. This would be a mistake: Bosnia’s ethnic groups have ceased progressing towards a common constitutional future; an intensified political impasse is likely and even a renewed outbreak of conflict is not out of the question.

The international community needs to deliver a clear message that all ethnic groups in Bosnia must achieve the goal of living peacefully alongside each other: if Europe’s leaders cannot summon up the will to exert the necessary pressure then it will fall to the next President of the United States to do so.

These major foreign policy issues are by no means an exhaustive list of what now demands our, and America’s attention - this week’s chaotic scenes in the heart of Africa are proof of that - but they illustrate that the challenges abroad for the new president are greater than any since the Cold War.

In all of them, America and her allies must steal themselves to tackle issues which cannot, even for a week or a month, be ignored.

Mali3=If Barack Obama wins the election, he cannot, even for a week or a month, ignore the international situation challenging that the West