Obama’s tide of hope may be a puddle of wishful thinking

The new US president has a multitude of important global decisions to make.

They looked like those old newsreel pictures from the final hours of World War II, with the Times Square lights spelling out ‘‘Japan surrenders’’ and joyous New Yorkers, in and out of uniform, screaming and gesticulating for the cameras. Last Tuesday night, in some bizarre way, it looked like the population of the US had just been liberated from some ...