Few leaders have come into office with such an opportunity to reshape history as Joe Biden, America's 46th President. He, and his administration, have it in their gift to change the lives of almost everybody on earth.
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The decisions they make, and the actions they take, will determine whether or not hundreds of thousands of people live or die, shape relations between great powers, and influence the speed with which the global economy recovers from the devastation of the pandemic.
While President Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris's inaugurations have been greeted with a surge of optimism, it remains to be seen just how well they will cope with the most nearly perfect storm of calamities to afflict humanity in centuries.
Comparisons with some of President Biden's famous predecessors such as Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while interesting, are hardly instructive. Lincoln's great challenge was the preservation of the union with seven slave states having seceded to form the Confederacy between his election and inauguration. When FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, he was confronted with a global depression that had thrown millions of people out of work, plunging them into poverty, homelessness and despair.
President Biden, by contrast, is facing a pandemic that has killed more than 400,000 Americans, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a nation bitterly divided along political, class and racial lines, the existential threat of climate change, and an emerging cold war between the US and its allies and the Chinese hegemony.
His age is an issue, given at 78, with the exception of 96-year-old Jimmy Carter, he is older than any other living president. While the new commander-in-chief appears healthy and vigorous, the possibility he may die in office or be incapacitated cannot be ruled out. It seems unlikely he will be standing for a second term in 2024.
That said, President Biden's age, experience and apparent wisdom will be an advantage when it comes to tackling the challenges of the coming months and years. He is as unlike his troubled and disruptive predecessor as it is possible to be.
So far all the signs are good with many people breathing a deep sigh of relief at Trump's departure and a return to what promises to be a much more stable and considered style of government.
President Biden has, amongst other things, pledged to recommit the US to the World Health Organisation and the Paris climate agreement, to "go big" on economic stimulus and hardship relief, to crack down on big business tax cheats, to more than double America's minimum wage to $US15 an hour, and to address China's "abusive, illegal, and unfair [commercial] practices".
On the coronavirus front the new administration wants to make "Operation Warp Speed" live up to its name with 100 million doses of vaccine to be administered in the next 100 days, to mandate mask wearing on federal property nationwide, and to work with state governors to mandate masks on interstate planes, trains and buses.
This, along with lifting the Trump travel bans on many Muslim-majority countries, stopping work on the Mexico wall, granting an amnesty to the "dreamers", setting up a national police oversight body, ending the ban on transgender people in the military, and reaching out to America's NATO allies are positive signs that after four years of chaos the US is about to re-enter the 21st century.
If President Biden and Vice-President Harris can deliver even half of what they have undertaken to do they may emerge as two of the greatest leaders the US has ever known.
