Meanwhile, while Britain under Blair was a stalwart ally of the US on every front that mattered, Brown has been a disappointment in this regard, appearing scarcely to have a foreign policy worthy of the name. At Bucharest, he failed to stand alongside the US in defence of Macedonia, Ukraine and Georgia, and his one initiative of note with regard to the region has been a wrong-footed statement in support of the Greek Cypriots, that appears dangerously to indicate a retreat from the UK's traditional support for Turkey. The one major West European state upon which the US has traditionally been able to rely - except under John Major's disastrous Conservative government - is no longer a known quantity.

In sum, in the years to come, the burden of defending Western interests and values in the region stretching from the Adriatic to the Caspian and from Ukraine to the Iraqi border will fall more heavily on the US's shoulders alone. And it is precisely at this moment that we are faced with the prospect of an Obama presidency.

The dangers of this are twofold. The first is that, at the very moment when there is greatest need for US leadership, and for more US unilateralism to compensate for Europe's retreat into short-sighted selfishness, a President Obama would defer to the West Europeans on issues relating to South East Europe, on account of his own inexperience and lack of interest in foreign affairs. This is precisely what Clinton did, but in Obama's case, there is the additional incentive of desiring to be seen to break with the diplomatic style of the Bush Administration. Obama's policy statements over Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Israel show all the hallmarks of a politician who sees foreign policy solely through the prism of his domestic popularity, and who flip-flops between wanting to appear hawkish and wanting to appear dovish. Such a president would be highly unlikely to overrule narrow-minded but stubborn West European governments over a part of the world that does not readily excite American public imagination; nor is it certain he would stand up to Russia when necessary.

The second danger is less certain, but potentially greater: it is that Obama is genuinely sympathetic to trouble-making elements in South East Europe. As recently as August 2007, Obama sponsored Senate Resolution 300 in support of the Greek position on the Macedonian name dispute - this after the Bush Administration had already wisely recognised Macedonia under its constitutional name. In a letter to the Serbian Unity Congress, an arm of the US's Serb lobby, following international recognition of Kosovo's independence in February, Obama appeared to endorse the Serbian position on Kosovo - that rejects any solution to the Kosovo question, such as independence, that is not acceptable to both sides. According to US analyst John Sitilides of the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Obama is politically sympathetic to Serbia, partly on account of the large Serb community in his state of Illinois. Obama has recently appointed Lee Hamilton as his foreign policy advisor; Hamilton has received funding from the leaders of both the Greek-American and Serb-American communities in the US. Obama has also prominently supported US Congressional recognition of the Armenian genocide, a move that would damage US relations with Turkey and strengthen the hand of Turkish anti-Western, ultra-nationalist elements (Turks may legitimately wonder why, of all the historic cases of genocide, it is this one alone that inspires the activity of certain US Congressmen, who meanwhile show no readiness to recognise the historical genocidal crimes of which Ottoman Muslims were victims). All this could be rationalised simply as Obama's attempts to maximise his votes among Greek-American, Serb-American and Armenian-American voters, but it does not bode well for the policy his administration would adopt toward South East Europe.