WASHINGTON  President Obama heaped praise on the peaceful protesters who deposed Hosni Mubarak on Friday, declaring, “Egypt will never be the same,” even as his national security team acknowledged that the swift uprising would almost certainly upend American strategy in the Middle East.

Standing in the foyer of the White House, where just a week before he had started to press Mr. Mubarak for immediate reforms without calling for his resignation, Mr. Obama described the Egyptian uprising as a model of nonviolence and moral force “that bent the arc of history.” While comparing the 18-day protests to Gandhi’s peaceful resistance to British rule, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the student protests that brought down a dictator in Indonesia, he also set out a series of benchmarks that he said he expected the Egyptian military to follow, warning that “nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.”

“That means protecting the rights of Egypt’s citizens, lifting the emergency law, revising the Constitution and other laws to make this change irreversible, and laying out a clear path to elections that are fair and free,” he said. “Above all, this transition must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table.”

Mr. Obama’s tone was optimistic, and he promised the crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir Square  which was listening to his brief broadcast live via Egyptian state television  continued American support for Egypt. That support, however, is likely to take new forms: Administration officials agreed that the $250 million in economic aid was a pittance compared with the $1.3 billion in annual military aid, and the White House and the State Department were already discussing setting aside new funds to bolster the rise of secular political parties. Under Egypt’s current Constitution, alternatives to Mr. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party are all but banned.