The United States likes to think of itself as a benign superpower, one that is committed to doing good by supporting and spreading democracy and prosperity, while protecting American interests in the process. Everything that President-elect Barack Obama has said on the campaign trail demonstrates that this is his basic view of the world.

The extraordinary team of 300 foreign policy advisers that have been supporting and counseling the Obama campaign also have this world view in common, even while they argue passionately about what it might mean in reality, in dealing with a particular country or problem. And people with a particular interest in the Middle East will recall that the George W. Bush administration faced a similar dilemma when they tried to apply their hopes of spreading democracy in the region to the realities of alliance politics with less than democratic regimes like those in Egypt or the Gulf.

This dilemma will be specially acute for the Obama administration because the hopes and expectations of this new president are so high, and because so many of his foreign policy team can be defined as members of the Global Justice wing of foreign policy rather than the Realist wing.

His first and still most senior adviser, Tony Lake, who was a less-than-impressive national security adviser to U.S. President Bill Clinton in the first term, is a Global Justice man. The most prominent and noisy and assertive of Obama's advisers, former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, is a dyed-in-the-wool realist. The former feels the pain of Darfur and the Congo, of Palestinian refugees and Indian contract workers in wretched hostels in the Gulf states; the latter is aware of their pain, but thinks American alliances and interests are more important.

The Global Justice advisers want to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq as soon as possible, and complain that any deal with the moderate Taliban in Afghanistan would plunge the women of that unhappy country back into the medieval subjection from which they have spasmodically been emerging in the last six years.

The Realists look at matters differently. They seek, coldly and intelligently, to define America's interests in a post-occupation Iraq or in a fundamentalist Afghanistan that seems likely to become a narco-state as well as a refuge for al-Qaida if and when the NATO forces depart.

These tensions between Realists and the Global Justice crowd are particularly acute in the Middle East, because all of the policy debates involve oil supplies and they usually involve Israel, and the more politically-minded among them know that 78 percent of American Jews voted for Obama.

As the three most predictable Mideast crises loom - over the Iraq withdrawal, over Iran's nuclear ambitions and over the Mubarak succession in a highly unstable Egypt - this tension will offer real challenges for Obama's White House.