After U.S. elections, worse to come? Bernd Debusmann

By Bernd Debusmann

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Presidential elections in the home of free enterprise regularly produce an array of paraphernalia, from campaign buttons and T-shirts to bumper stickers. This season, the range has been expanded by a large variety of Bush countdown devices.

They come as wall clocks, desk clocks, key chains and screen savers. They show the days, hours, minutes and seconds remaining until noon, Eastern Standard Time, on January 20, 2009, when the next president of the United States is sworn in. Most of the clientele for the device (from $9.95, batteries not included) are people who think that no matter who wins in November will be an improvement on Bush, lead the U.S. to a better future and restore America's prestige around the world.

They may be in for disappointment -- even though one of the candidates, Democratic Senator Barack Obama, shares that view. "Either Democrat would be better than John McCain," he said recently, referring to Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, and Republican nominee John McCain. "And all three of us would be better than George Bush."

Would they? Can one take that for granted? Particularly on foreign policy, it is not all that difficult to imagine a time of nostalgia, eventually, for George W. Bush. Let's assume for a moment that the winner will be McCain, the hawkish senator from Arizona who says the United States is the greatest force for good on earth and therefore must lead the world in the 21st century just as it did in the 20th.

If McCain gets a chance to implement his recently-introduced foreign policy blueprint, he will, in one fell swoop, antagonize China, insult Russia, undermine the United Nations, and set the U.S. against the majority of countries not fully under democratic rule. "We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact - a League of Democracies - that can harness the vast influence of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world..."

Deciding who would qualify for the label "democratic" alone would cause enough friction to keep a good part of the U.S. foreign service busy for months. Would the League of Democracies be open to self-declared democracies? Welcome, Zimbabwe! Welcome, Kazakhstan! By one count, of the Economist Intelligence Unit, there are only 28 fully functioning democracies in the world.

McCain wants to expel Russia from the G8, the group of leading industrialized nations, to punish it for "nuclear blackmail and cyber attacks." India and Brazil would be added to the group, China left outside, at least until it moves to political liberalization.