This unbrave new world would be bad news for us

A Republican presidency offers alarming possibilities for Britain
Special report: the US elections
Tony Blair has never met George W Bush. The newest episode in the Anglo-American relationship, which may begin in a fortnight's time, will get off to a jarring start. Governor Bush was due to tour Europe and Asia last spring, to make himself known to foreign leaders and enrich his image back home. That's what presidential candidates do. But the visits were called off, because Bush's campaign handlers thought they wouldn't help. They feared he would make a fool of himself. Since then, the evidence has accumulated that they were right.

For Mr Blair, and therefore for Britain, a Bush presidency offers alarming possibilities. It is true that, when he woke up to the fact that he was president, Mr Bush would probably survey the world and recognise Anglo-London as a first foreign haven. Though knowledgeable about Latin-America, he is ignorant of Europeans, and would be inclined to fall back on the British bonds familiar to George Bush I.

But the culture-shock to Mr Blair will be great. He has grown close to Bill Clinton. They talk more often and more equally than any prime minister and president for 50 years, Thatcher-Reagan included. Their brains as well as ideology are a match. The third way, so-called, is a common project, their version of a globalised idea. As well as enjoying exchanges of wonkishness about healthcare or education reform, the two helped each other out of tight corners, and if Al Gore wins, the continuities will be pretty seamless.

Mr Bush comes from somewhere else. Though wallowing in a sea of unspecifics, he knows what he doesn't like, and most of it is represented by Clinton-Gore and, by extension, Blair. His biggest pitch is anti-Washington, which means anti-government. He has entered into little policy talk with the American people, so it's a fair bet there would be none with his friends across the ocean. Bush is aggressively uninterested in that way of being a political leader, let alone in the kind of social democratic world that has given several European leaders more useful relationships with Washington than have existed for decades.

But that's only the beginning. It is now clear that Bush and his people regard 21st century Europe very differently from the view that prevailed in Washington in the second half of the 20th. They positively desire a greater distancing, especially of the American army. When Bush began to hint at this a few months ago, most of the foreign policy establishment here put it down to campaign talk. The protection of our boys from crazy foreign adventures made useful headlines. Actually we now know Bush has every intention of withdrawing American troops from the Balkans, as part of a philosophy which is working towards an end to interventionism anywhere on any grounds other than US strategic interest.

His chief foreign policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told the New York Times that "peace-keeping" missions would be out, because they were a distraction from America's prime duties in the Gulf and the Taiwan straits. In Europe, there had to be a "new division of labour": a statement made, by the way, in apparent ignorance of the fact that Europeans currently supply more than 80% of the peacekeeping force in Bosnia and Kosovo. When Bush's spokesman was challenged with the implications of the new doctrine, he said that the governor was "100%" behind what Ms Rice had said.

So an unbrave new world beckons, which is likely to destabilise Nato as well as re-positioning Washington's global relationships. American economic dominance will grow and grow, but American responsibilities as the only super-power are set for the kind of drastic re-think that the European left once dreamed of, but which is now more likely to upset our modernised social democratic governments.

If the Bush doctrine takes hold for four years, it will pre-empt most of the British argument against Blair's efforts to build Europe's own security. Tory objections to the embryonic Euro-defence force will be emptier than ever - the St Malo agreement that got it under way will look like a singular piece of Anglo-French prescience. But, shorn of major bits of US capability, Nato could look radically different. Forget about more enlargement. Forget about much more peacekeeping. Meanwhile, a unilateral American national missile defence (NMD), pushed through without regard for what allies have to say, grows naturally out of the coming mind-set. One Washington expert, who monitors security issues with an intimate insider's eye, told me he regarded NMD as now certain to be deployed if Bush wins.

He will surround himself, of course, with advisers. General Colin Powell is regarded as the prime candidate for secretary of state, and might even be announced as such before November 7, to reel in those voters who look at Governor Bush and see only a dim-witted Reagan without the excuse of being an actor, or the defence of having a simple vision he will cling to. Reagan did have the big idea that he needed to beat the Soviets, a task in which he succeeded. Because of that governing notion, the times accommodated, and even profited from, a leader otherwise unqualified for world leadership, whose purpose everyone could easily figure out.

Modern times are different. There is neither big idea nor big challenge: no missile gap, no space race, no evil empire. Foreign policy is the task of building alliances, largely by personal persuasion. A president can't subcontract the task of choosing between advisers whose opinions, however clever, conflict. He has to decide himself, about matters of great complexity. Nor can he cajole allies or persuade Congress except by his own negotiating talents. The hands-off president is not, these days, an option. But the hands-on president needs a set of skills, including an interest in policy detail and a sophisticated alertness to the world, of which George Dubya Bush has shown staggeringly little command.

In foreign policy, Congress will be no counter-force to a new era of US-first unilateralism. Internationally, a do-nothing president will meet only the grateful acquiescence of the legislature. On the Hill, the age of internationalism is dead, something Clinton at first did not work hard to repudiate. But in the end he did so. Gore blows the same muted trumpet, and Blair, the liberal interventionist, chimes with him. The new President Bush would be the man who said earlier this year that "we should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide in nations outside our strategic interest". His adviser's words about Nato seem just as reckless, but just as revealing. They are not a posture, but a position. They're probably the decided view of a majority of Americans, whose ignorance, however, has until now always had an enemy in the White House.