Nevertheless, the next US president will have a much more difficult job managing South East Europe than either Clinton or Bush was faced with. The principal reason for this is the resurgence of Russian aggressiveness and power under Vladimir Putin. Moscow has successfully prevented a resolution of the Kosovo problem, keeping this sore festering and bolstering Serbia's self-destructive determination to keep the Balkans permanently on the brink of a new conflagration. Moscow has reignited its dormant conflict with Tbilisi over the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, making war between Russia and Georgia more likely than at any time since the early 1990s. And it has embarked upon a sustained campaign to obstruct and derail NATO's eastward expansion. The next US president will be faced with a dangerous opponent in South East Europe, one that Clinton did not have.

Unfortunately, just as the threat posed by Russia and its satellites is greater than ever, so democratic Europe's commitment to regional progress has weakened as the West European powers have regressed back toward more short-sighted, selfish policies. Germany is building an axis of its own with Russia, at the expense of the unity of the Western alliance and in contempt of the feelings of Poland and other states that have traditionally had reason to fear an axis of this kind. France under Nicolas Sarkozy is pursuing a traditionally Gaullist policy of apparently gratuitous bloody-mindedness, one that appears calculated to upset regional stability and undermine the US and NATO - almost as ends in themselves. At the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, Germany and France defied the US to veto the granting of Membership Action Plans to Georgia and Ukraine, weakening the ability of these two frontline states to resist Russian bullying. Germany and France also backed Greece in its successful effort to keep Macedonia out of NATO, on account of the unresolved ‘name dispute' - a staggeringly irresponsible blow against a fragile, ethnically divided state whose collapse would bring regional cataclysm. Paris is also reverting to its traditionally pro-Serbian policy in the Balkans, undermining any possibility that Belgrade can be pressed to adopt a more responsible attitude vis-a-vis Kosovo.

Bush was also faced with obstruction from France and Germany, something that is often wrongfully attributed to their opposition to the Iraq war, though this has been more an excuse than an actual reason for Franco-German mischief-making. But Bush at least has had the benefit of constructive support from some key allies. The next US president will have less of this. Turkey, the US's most important ally in the region, has been under the constructive rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) for the best part of the 2000s. Yet the country is currently undergoing an internal upheaval that could result in a judicial coup d'etat by anti-democratic elements in the old, Kemalist establishment determined not to share power with the new middle class represented by the AKP. This could lead to a turn by Turkey toward an ultra-nationalist, anti-Western path; its realignment with Russia, China and/or Iran; and possibly even a civil war on the Algerian model. These dangers are increased by the Franco-German determination to keep Turkey out of the EU; Paris and Berlin appear less concerned with the geopolitical dangers of abandoning Turkey than they are with maintaining their dominance within the EU and pandering to the anti-Islamic sections of their electorates.