There's One Thing the US Presidential Contenders All Have in Common: God

Note: In this article, Timothy Garton Ash, a British commentator and author, gives his perspective on the 2008 presidential race from the other side of the Atlantic.

We all know Christmas begins earlier every year, but imagine if it were to begin in May. And that's May the year before. This is what's happening with the presidential elections in the US. There are another 17 months until the actual vote next November, but the campaign is well under way. On Tuesday, I watched a television debate between 10 Republican contenders, following a similar one between the Democratic hopefuls last Sunday. At this rate, election fatigue will set in before we've even reached election year. Candidates are not merely nailing their colours to the mast; under media interrogation, they are compelled to take up detailed positions that they'll then find difficult to shift. This is not good for US policy.

Meanwhile, the inhabitant of the White House is, in an important sense, already ex-president Bush. As a key former vice-presidential aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, goes to jail for perjury, the Bush administration increasingly resembles a badly shot-up, heavily listing aircraft carrier, limping towards port with, still faintly visible on the bridge, the tattered remnants of a sign proclaiming "Mission Accomplished." Even the Republican candidates in Tuesday's debate either damned Bush with faint praise or praised him with faint damns. Or not so faint. Asked by CNN's Wolf Blitzer what use he would make of ex-president Bush if he became president, congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado said Mr. Bush would never darken the doorstep of the White House again.

Yet for another year-and-a-half, Bush will be the most powerful man in the world, invested with the powers needed to block a G8 initiative on climate change, push through an irrelevant and divisive antiballistic missile shield and order a tactical nuclear strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The one thing he'll find it difficult to do is to put together international coalitions for action based on trust in current US leadership. Apart from anything else, everyone will be looking to his potential successors. This long limbo is not good for the world.

The post-2009 US one begins to glimpse in these early pre-presidential debates is a defensive, resentful, slightly truculent place. Although leading Republican candidates such as John McCain will not accept this, the American people have basically decided that the Iraq war is over and the mission has not been accomplished. It's not a matter of when but how the US withdraws militarily, even if that withdrawal is, in the first instance, only to a few fortified camps and a fortress embassy in the green zone in Baghdad while the carnage and ethnic cleansing continues all around. The lesson that most Americans seem to have drawn is that the US should have less of these foreign entanglements in future, and look to its own.

Both on trade and on immigration, the atmosphere is increasingly protectionist. The fiercest clashes in the Republican debate were about immigration. Partly this was internal politics. Because leading candidate John McCain is co-sponsor of a bill that could have the effect of legalising some 12 million illegal immigrants, other candidates had a chance to score off him. Rudy Giuliani described the bill as "a typical Washington mess". But there's something deeper going on here as well. The undertones of panic recall nothing so much as Europeans agonising about Muslim immigrants in their midst, despite the fact that the majority of migrants here come from a western cultural background, being mainly Spanish-speaking and Christian. "We are becoming a bilingual nation," said one of the candidates, "and that is not good." A sentiment that would be entirely at home on the French or German right.