President Bush has called the November election an accountability moment on his policy in Iraq.

That policy will face another test of accountability next Sunday when Iraqis are scheduled to go to the polls to elect a government and exercise the type of liberty Bush lauded in his inaugural address on Thursday.

Bush didn't mention Iraq in that address. He didn't have to. As was demonstrated last week at the confirmation hearings for Secretary of State designee Condoleezza Rice, the future of Iraq, for good or ill, will largely define Bush's legacy in foreign policy. In fact, the extent to which the Iraq experiment succeeds will largely determine whether the president preserves the political strength to achieve his goals in both domestic and foreign policy.

Any number of other threats and opportunities are competing to affect his legacy in world affairs, however. For just as Colin Powell's confirmation hearing four years ago gave little hint that terrorism would preoccupy Bush's first-term foreign policy, so, too, it is impossible to predict which simmering problems might leap from relative obscurity during the balance of the Bush administration.

A spin of the globe offers a long list of contenders.

The nuclear ambitions of Iran provide the ingredients for what many analysts consider a far greater threat than was ever posed by neighboring Iraq. The unfathomable government of North Korea, yet another member of the "axis of evil" identified by Bush, poses a separate nuclear threat. Tensions in the states of the former Soviet Union will continue to produce friction between Washington and Moscow, as evidenced by the recent elections in Ukraine.

U.S. relations with China are probably better than anyone would have predicted at the start of the Bush administration, but the issue of Taiwanese independence remains a potential powder keg between the two giant powers. On an economic level, the United States and China are co-enablers in an unprecedented dynamic that reinforces the excesses of both societies: Americans buy cheap Chinese goods in increasingly huge volumes, while China's central bank helps the U.S. finance its budget and trade deficits by buying U.S. debt.

In the Western Hemisphere, narco-terrorism remains a huge threat in Colombia that could spread to its Andean neighbors. And Bush has promised renewed attention to the issue of immigration, with a guest worker proposal that has stirred controversy among Democrats and Republicans.

U.S. relations with Europe remain frayed in the wake of the Iraq war and Bush's resistance to international treaties, although Rice sounded conciliatory during her hearings last week. And seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian relations offer some hope for improvement with the election of relatively moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has begun to deploy his security forces to prevent attacks on Israel.

Nevertheless, the most immediate and portentous challenge for the administration is to help oversee a successful election in Iraq. The best-case scenario would have the election confer internal legitimacy on a new Baghdad government, which would then be strengthened and emboldened to defeat what appears to be an escalating insurgency.

Many analysts, both critics and friends of the administration, have warned against believing the elections will become such a turning point. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the first President Bush, attracted widespread attention earlier this month when he predicted that the election could, in fact, deepen the already bloody conflict.

Larry Diamond, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, sees little reason for optimism.

"The situation there is, frankly, grave," he said. "The insurgency is becoming more ruthless, more extensive every month. We have shown no political imagination or strategic capacity to diminish it."

Diamond, a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion, warned that the elections will exacerbate civil strife. He expects them to be reasonably successful in the Kurdish and majority Shiite sections of the country, but sees a dismal turnout among Sunnis because of intimidation by Sunni insurgents and a voluntary boycott. The result, he predicted, will be enduring Sunni estrangement from the new government.

"Our current track is politics for those who are willing to participate in the political process and war for those who are not. That is a formula for years in which we cannot get out ... we will fail."

Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Johnstown, said the U.S. military has been remarkably effective tactically but is not achieving overall U.S. objectives.

"The troops are doing a magnificent job, but you look at a battle like Fallujah. It's a military victory, but we turned 250,000 people out of their homes. We have made more enemies by winning militarily," Murtha said.

Dr. Marina Ottoway, a fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and an expert on institution-building in war-torn countries, is also pessimistic about the election.

"It's going to leave the U.S. having played its last political card and having no more political cards to play," she said.

Administration officials have rebutted such skepticism and have hailed the example of Afghanistan, where elections have contributed to improved post-war stability in most parts of the country. But Ottoway argues that there are significant differences between the two countries, pointing out that the elections in Afghanistan were the culmination of a political process among various Afghani factions.

"There was a lot of bargaining among the groups. Some of it was dirty politics; [President] Karzai made deals with some of the warlords, but there was a lot of horse trading, normal politics," she said. "In Iraq, by contrast, there has been almost no Iraqi-on-Iraqi negotiations. Almost all of the negotiations have been between the U.S. and the various Iraqi groups."

Bush has argued, however, that it would be a mistake to assess the coming election as a success or failure in isolation. He said in a recent interview with the Washington Post that the balloting was just one step in an extended march toward democracy.

"My only point is, is that I am realistic about how quickly a society that has been dominated by a tyrant can become a democracy," Bush said. "And therefore, I am more patient than some, but also mindful that we've got to get the Iraqis up and running as quickly as possible, so they can defeat these terrorists."

The Bush administration is also increasingly mindful, and increasingly outspoken, about the threat across the Iraqi border, from what it sees as the unacceptable nuclear ambitions of Iran.

In an interview Thursday with radio host Don Imus, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "You look around the world at potential trouble spots, Iran is right at the top of the list."

Cheney noted that he preferred to turn back Iran's nuclear program through diplomacy, but he pointedly refused to take the option of military action off the table and noted that Israel might attack Iranian nuclear facilities if it feels sufficiently threatened.

"This dwarfs every other national security challenge facing us," said the Hoover Institution's Diamond. "If Iran breaks through [to develop a nuclear weapon] while being a member of the NPT [nuclear nonproliferation treaty] it will shred the NPT."

Seymour Hersh reports in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine that the United States already has surveyed Iranian nuclear sites with an eye toward potential military action. Some analysts have argued, however, that U.S. options are severely constrained by its ongoing military commitment across the border in Iraq.

"The administration may want to take a hard line in Iran but it can't.... It doesn't have the capacity; it's too bogged down in Iraq," said Ottoway.

That is just one reason the United States needs to re-evaluate its relations with European countries, she said, who are trying to convince Iran not to pursue nuclear weapons.

"Because of the way the Bush administration has been totally focused on Iraq and terror, it has dropped a lot of balls along the way," Ottoway said. "Relations with Europe have been becoming more difficult and I really think we are at a turning point."

Several analysts also cited the politics of the former Soviet republics as potential flash points.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has denounced what he characterized as Western interference in the dramatic round of elections in Ukraine. Russia also has looked warily at expanded U.S. influence in bordering nations such as Uzbekistan, where the Pentagon set up U.S. bases to support the war in Afghanistan.

The Uzbek regime is widely viewed as repressive and corrupt, hardly a model of the ideals voiced by Bush in his inaugural address.

And it might be unstable: there have been reports of power struggles within the government, which also must deal with Islamic terrorists.

Protests in Kyrgyzstan and impending elections in Tajikistan have stirred frictions and accusations of western interference, as well.

Given all these tensions, the long-standing Palestinian-Israeli conflict ironically seems to hold out the best hope of progress during Bush's second term.

"We have a huge opportunity in the Middle East,'' said Diamond. "The stars align only once in every five or 10 years to admit of the possibility of movement toward a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.''

Movement toward a settlement would not only be cause for celebration in the region, it would also be welcome news for President Bush. And if the Bush administration could somehow help produce peace between the Palestinians and Israelis along with relative stability in Iraq, the president's ambitious inaugural vision of democratizing large parts of the world might begin to take hold.

The prospects for improved U.S.-China relations also seem relatively good, so long as the president continues to avoid confronting the Chinese government over its democracy deficit.

Bush came into office pointedly defining China as a "strategic competitor" and criticizing his predecessor for soft-pedaling the communist regime's human rights abuses.

The most serious pre-9/11 crisis of the new administration was the forced grounding of a U.S. spy plane on China's Hainan Island.

But reinforcing the nations' burgeoning economic links, the threat of Islamist terror has proved a bonding force between the U.S. and China, which has faced unrest among Islamic minorities in some of its rural provinces.

"The Chinese are smart enough to know that American preoccupation with Iraq, etc., is in their interest," said Dr. George Lopez, a fellow of the Kroc Institute at Notre Dame University.

That preoccupation, along with China's role as an increasingly important financier of U.S. debt., has helped Beijing resist American pressure to revalue its currency, a step that would make its exports more expensive for U.S. consumers and help bring down its huge trade surplus with the United States.

Taiwan is a persistent source of potential friction between the two countries. But while the U.S. has irritated China with arms sales to the island, the Bush administration also has pressured Taipai to avoid inflammatory proclamations of independence.

Nevertheless, Lopez said, "I'm surprised that the administration has resisted pressure to confront China on [freedom of] religion.... There are plenty of other places in the world where this administration feels it has to dictate events. They're not doing it in China. There's no grand vision for China policy other than adapt and grow and, over time, the more shared cooperative behavior we have, the better."

A prime example of such cooperation involves North Korea, where China has been a crucial facilitator of the on-again, off-again negotiations aimed at defusing Pyongyang's nuclear program.

However, the steadily weakening dollar and the trade deficit that drives that weakness, Lopez warned, could at some point precipitate an economic crisis that would strain U.S. ties to China and many other countries.

"Under any other climate, in any other administration, especially a conservative one, that would be a major concern," he said.

But with the project in Iraq at such a critical stage, and with its success or failure carrying such enormous consequences, even the potential for a world financial crisis has been put on the back burner for now.