The polls in America remain uncertain, and though Bush seems to be leading there is still a significant chance that we might wind up with a President John Kerry come January 20. But what would a President Kerry be like? One interesting aspect of the campaign is that nobody's really sure.

One theory - which you might call the "George W Kerry" theory after an article by that title in the journal Foreign Policy - is that Kerry will be more like Bush than most of his supporters suppose.

In that article, author Moises Naim argues that the president whom Kerry will most resemble - at least in terms of foreign policy - is the one we've got now, and that, paradoxically, if re-elected President Bush will be more like Kerry than he is today: "If re-elected, Bush will have difficulty sustaining the foreign policies of his first term, whereas a first-term Kerry presidency is bound to emulate some of Bush's more aggressive positions."

There's some truth to this. Presidents are powerful, but they are also influenced by the world, and neither the world, nor America's interests in it, change as much as people think from one election cycle to another. Nixon, remember, ran as a "peace candidate" in 1968, but was still fighting LBJ's war in 1972. And although George W Bush invaded Iraq, Bill Clinton threatened to, and even, in 1998, signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change official US policy...