It is rightly said that coming events cast their shadows before. Mr. Joe Biden, in his inaugural speech, has set the tone of his priorities as 46th US President. He has committed to be the source of unity not division, of hope not despair and that of light not darkness. But now time has already come to move swiftly beyond the realm of words, stand tall and deliver. Therefore, it is immenselyimportant that the Biden administration takes on the big issues including a highly polarized society and divided nation, extreme disparities in wealth and income; access to quality public education, and affordability of higher education, quality housing and healthcare; and climate change. What is even more important is that special attention be paid to their racial and ethnic dimensions. President Biden has given strong indications through his cabinet appointments and their expertise that he intends to do so, which is certainly encouraging. However, the intention will be unable to significantly confront either the enormity or depth of the issues. Let’s take the racial income gap, for example. As has been well documented, nearly 40 years of wage stagnation has constrained accumulation and stifled upward mobility for millions of working-class and middle-class Americans. But for black Americans, this period of wage stagnation mostly compounds historical disadvantage, born of decades of discrimination in employment and education. Although we cannot alter our past, we can surely build a better future, with that history in view, let us be positive that this recognition will guide Biden policymaking across a range of domains. President Biden’s team must also focus specifically on criminal justice reform and voting rights. Of all of the major issues of the Civil Rights movement (i.e., disenfranchisement, educational and residential segregation, and employment discrimination) abridgement of rights and abuses by law enforcement received relatively short shrift. The Black Lives Matter Movement has changed that, thankfully. Combating black voter suppression continues to be a serious problem. President Biden should immediately and persistently work for the passage of two crucially important bills currently wallowing in the Senate. The first is the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020. This bill has several important provisions, including revising federal law on criminal police misconduct and qualified immunity reform; establishing a national registry of misconduct by law enforcement officers; requiring states to report the use of force to the Justice department; and granting subpoena power to the Department of Justice’s civil rights division to implement “pattern and practice” investigations of police department misconduct. The second is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019, which seeks to restore voter protections in states with storied histories of barriers to black voters. The Biden administration will face a range of serious domestic political, economic, and geopolitical constraints that will likely limit its freedom of action Despite the appeal of President Biden’s exhortation that “America is back,” the implication that things can be as they were is unpersuasive. The Biden administration will face a range of serious domestic political, economic, and geopolitical constraints that will likely limit its freedom of action. To address these constraints, the administration should adopt a grand strategy of “restraint,” which focuses on only the most serious threats to US security, and only the most cost effective remedies for those threats. In particular, the administration must not return to policies of armed nation building pursued by both Democratic and Republican administrations since the end of the Cold War. It should end existing efforts of this kind, particularly the effort in Afghanistan. The administration also should work energetically to increase the contributions to their own security of the US’s wealthy allies in Europe and Asia. In particular, the transatlantic relationship must be thoroughly overhauled to place the bulk of responsibility for European military defense on the shoulders of Europeans who are well able to bear it. Finally, the US should beware of treating the China challenge as a new Cold War, in which all aspects of the relationship are drawn into a comprehensive model of conflict. Rather, the US should carefully pick and choose those issues upon which it must stand firm, those issues where it can compromise, and those issues where it must compromise. While dealing with China, Biden team must determine the hierarchy of US national interests. The legacy of the Trump administration’s approach to China was a broadly confrontational approach in which confrontation had become an end in itself and not a means to end. Thus, the Biden administration should identify a clear hierarchy of US national interests, distinguishing those that are vital to the security and prosperity of the United States from those that are important to varying degrees. This will enable policymakers to determine where to cooperate, where to compete, and where to confront China, if necessary. On top of that, Mr. Biden also will be taking office on the steps of a Capitol still bearing the scars left by a mob of Trump supporters set on stopping him from taking office. Pile on top of that a Congress that is more evenly divided between the two parties than at any point in 20 years, the largest federal debt as a share of the economy since World War II and a rising global competitor in China, and the tasks are genuinely daunting.Mr. Biden has talked consistently—throughout the primary and general-election campaigns, and since his election victory—about unifying the country, working with Republicans and moving beyond the deep political divisions of recent years.It won’t be easy. Before the election, the Pew Research Center found that almost 90% of Trump voters said a Biden victory would bring lasting harm to the country (and that a nearly identical share of Biden voters said the same about a Trump victory). And that was before the effort this month by Mr. Trump and his supporters to overturn Mr. Biden’s election because of unsubstantiated charges of election fraud and irregularities.More than 100 Republicans in Congress voted to pause certification of the Biden victory to investigate those charges. The postelection anger now has spilled out into a second impeachment of President Trump, as well as an unprecedented burst of political activism from the business world, where some corporations and business groups have frozen contributions to Republicans who challenged the presidential election results. The wounds will linger on for longer time than we think. On the other hand, the shock also could compel people on both sides to tone down rhetoric and be more open to compromise. Similarly, Mr. Biden will have to deal with the health and economic threats posed by the global pandemic still raging, and destined to pose a cloud over at least his first year in power. “There’s nothing that can be done anywhere in the government-policy area that comes close to the impact on the economy and the country of getting the pandemic under control,” says Josh Bolten, president of the Business Roundtable. Mr. Biden and the new Congress, under narrow Democratic control, figure to agree early in the year on a plan for additional economic stimulus, and the Biden White House is likely to carve out a more aggressive federal role in overseeing the distribution and delivery of millions of coronavirus vaccine doses. The Trump administration’s policy of leaving logistics mostly to the states seems certain to fade. Yet the complex task of rolling out vaccines already is behind the schedule the nation’s health-policy leaders expected, and it inevitably will hit more bumps in the road. In addition to the bigger federal role, also look for more money going to states and localities as they oversee the effort at the grass-roots. It is pertinent to remember that the politics surrounding climate change has shifted dramatically in the past few years, and there is more bipartisan agreement than ever before on the desire for a coherent national action plan. The problem is finding agreement on what that might be. Mr. Biden supports action but not the Green New Deal. He and those in the center in Congress face the task of turning a general desire for action into an actual action plan.Another daunting challenge confronting Biden is the rising debt. Twenty years ago, the accumulated federal-government debt amounted to just over 30% of the nation’s annual gross domestic product. In fiscal 2020, the debt matched the entire annual output. Under current trends, debt will amount to almost double the nation’s annual GDP by 2050. Mr. Biden will have to grow larger than life to overcome these nerve wrecking challenges staring him in the eyes, under these testing times ahead. History will judge him by his performance not by promises. The writer is a civil servant by profession, a writer by choice and a motivational speaker by passion!