Four more years

JOHN Kerry was wise to concede the election to President Bush yesterday rather than submit the American people to the kind of long- drawn-out post-election trauma that disfigured the contest in 2000. The arithmetic of the Ohio voting, on which the outcome of the election eventually turned, did not offer the Democrats sufficient hope that, even with the counting of the so-called provisional votes, the Republican's lead in that State could be overturned. In making his decision, Senator Kerry will also have taken into account the margin of more than three million won by President Bush in the popular vote.

THOSE of us who are not American citizens must respect the decision of the American people. It is their decision, and they know that they will have to live with its consequences. However, as I have argued often in this newspaper, America's status as the world's only super power means that few people in the world can remain unaffected by some of those consequences. There once was a saying that “What's good for General Motors is good for America” and it has often seemed in the past four years that George W Bush believes that “What is good for America is good for everyone else.” However, as virtually all of the foreign polling about the Bush/Kerry contest has shown, very few people in the world believe this to be true. There has probably never been an American President so disliked, even hated, in the rest of the world.

Therefore, following Tuesday's verdict, the first question for those of us who count ourselves as basically pro-American is whether, with the security of a vote of confidence, President Bush will be less suspicious of the world beyond his shores and more tolerant of those who know from first-hand experience that global issues cannot be resolved by resort to such simplistic dogmas as “with us or against us” and “right or wrong”. And that the short-term solution of world problems by thinking of this sort inevitably results in longer-term and deeper-seated difficulties. A second question is whether the President will feel able to use his increased authority in a second, and final, term to take risks which he could not contemplate in his first four years. For instance, might he re-think his rooted opposition to the Kyoto Treaty on global warming and climate change now that all other indusrialised nations, except Japan, have endorsed it?

It is not easy to be optimistic about the answers to such questions. Although many factors were at work in the election it is fairly clear that Mr Bush maximised the Republican vote by warning of the danger of changing the Commander-in-Chief during the War on Terror and by appealing to the spirit of isolationism which is still to be found in great swathes of non-urban America.

GEORGE W Bush is now president of all he surveys in Washington. In addition to his personal triumph, the new Senate and House of Representatives will have Republican majorities. Three or four vacancies are due on the Supreme Court and he will be able to use his new-found power to appoint conservative judges to what is already a right-leaning Court. Thus three arms of the American constitution, President, Congress and Supreme Court, will be dominated for the next four years by right-wing thinking and action. Given the lack of respect which the first Bush administration has shown for human rights and the rule of law it is worrying that those who think long established legal principles and international law can be brushed aside with impunity may feel that they have greater freedom. This is the internal danger now facing the United States and, of course, it has international implications. The most difficult task facing President Bush may now be to restrain the authoritarian instincts of some of his closest collaborators.