Newsweek International

To the myriad foreign challenges Barack Obama will have to confront upon taking office we may have to add a complex conundrum next door in Latin America. On three fronts that have posed serious problems for the United States before, there is a growing and worrisome democratic challenge in the hemisphere--and no one knows quite how to handle it.

Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president and strongman, met his nemesis, the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, in Abu Dhabi on July 27. Only extraordinary political circumstances could have thrown these two together. Musharraf sees Bhutto -- a former prime minister who’s lived in exile since the general brought corruption charges against her -- as emblematic of all that’s wrong with Pakistan’s inept and graft-ridden political parties.

He wears a long, flowing thobe and a white headscarf and smells faintly of oud, an ancient Arabian perfume. With his trim beard and loose sandals, he looks much as his ancestors might have nearly two centuries ago when they took over this tiny fishing village on the shores of the Persian Gulf. But Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktum, the ruler of Dubai and the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, is a thoroughly modern prince.

We all know the headlines by now: the Middle East is burning, right? So it seems, as Palestinians and Iraqis wage civil war, Lebanon seethes, Syria and Israel trade barbs and Iran spits defiance. Yet beyond the smoke a very different story is emerging nearby. In the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, times have never been better. Business is booming. And political conflict has become a foreign phenomenon, watched on flat-screen TVs in the air-conditioned living rooms of Doha, Dubai, Kuwait City, Muscat and Riyadh.

Iraq’s Kurdish north has offered a heartening contrast to an otherwise blood-soaked country. Its polity works; its economy thrives. But the reports last week of a Turkish military incursion, in pursuit of Kurdish rebels, is an eruption of only one of three steadily deepening problems that could combine to worsen the Bush administration’s predicament in Iraq.

Bad relations between Washington and Moscow are nothing new. But this time America may be lurching toward something it carefully avoided throughout the cold war: an armed confrontation between a U.S. client state and Moscow on Russia’s own border.

News stories about Russia these days follow a predictable theme. The country is resurgent and strong, and the West must adjust to this new reality. But that story line is wrong. Russia is weak and getting weaker.

On his recent trip to Kabul, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pledged that America was not disengaging from Afghanistan, where the Taliban have staged a bloody resurgence in several southern provinces. But the more telling comment may have come from the man standing beside him at the time, Afghan President Hamid Karzai. When asked whether he would request more U.S. troops to quell the insurgency, he replied, "Yes, much more, and we’ll keep asking for more, and we will never stop asking."

Sorry, city sophisticates, but the metropolis of the future may prove far less intensely urban than you hope. For all the focus on trendy downtowns and skyscrapers, the real growth in jobs and population is likely to take place on the periphery. The new urbanism, built around downtown revival and beloved by the celebrated starchitects, will cede pride of place to the "new suburbanism." And not only in the land of free-ranging suburbs, America.

What's the main problem in Russia today? Most people have a ready answer: President Vladimir Putin's strangulation of democracy. Yes, but there's a bigger one. That's whether Russia is stable enough to hold together.