George Bush has not been too clever about making friends round the world, and now he is running out of the few he had.

George Bush has not been too clever about making friends round the world, and now he is running out of the few he had. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was one of his closest personal bonds outside the United States, and his departure is another reminder of the incoherence of Bush's foreign policy.

The White House neo-cons argued American intervention, pre-emption and regime change would help spark democratic change. They never figured out what to do when democratic choice favoured Islamists, against the United States, against its Israeli friends or - as in the case of Hamas in Palestine - all of the above.

In Pakistan, they invested heavily in Musharraf and the use of force, but their presence undermined him domestically. After nine years of trying to please the military, the electorate, Islamists and Washington, no wonder it came unstuck.

Washington cannot be sure what leverage it now has in this strategically vital country. Its new rulers have many of the same priorities of its former dictator, but they will be wary of getting as close to Washington. The Bush administration has tried to build bridges with its Indian neighbour, but the offer of a nuclear technology alliance ran into opposition within Delhi's ruling coalition.

This simplistic approach to making friends extends to Georgia, where Washington's ally, Mikhail Saakashvili, leaned too much to the West and offered the Kremlin an excuse for reasserting itself decisively in its backyard. This sent not only a message to Tbilisi and other Russian neighbours tempted to get closer to Washington and Nato, but it also underlined the era of America's global hegemony is at an end.

It is less than 20 years since the US could claim the status of unrivalled hyper-power, able to project its force pretty much where it wanted. Yet that moment is gone. While the Kremlin last week underscored its disdain for America's global reach, George Bush was at the Beijing Olympics, a willing participant in promoting China's superpower message to the world. No wonder, when you look how much the US depends on Beijing to finance its external debt.

The word Iraq is, of course, scrawled across the first draft of the Bush years' history, but the bit that gets forgotten is that he started with good intentions, soon strayed into neo-con arrogance and has since sought to return to more consensual ways. Washington knows mistakes have been made and has tried hard to turn around its isolation.

The Olympic trip made Bush the most-travelled president in history, surpassing even Bill Clinton's air miles. The first stage of the Asian visit was to South Korea, trying to build on significant progress in defusing nuclear tensions with its northern neighbour. Bush has realised that his only hope in Iran is to work with European partners. He has sought to put behind him the haughty arrogance towards "Old Europe" when France and Germany failed to back him on Iraq five years ago. Having let the Israeli-Palestine conflict stew, he has tried to engage with it in the dying months of his presidency.

In the latest Foreign Affairs periodical, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, penned a justification for the closing stages of the Bush presidency, stressing alliances and airbrushing neo-con American exceptionalism. She argues the main change in approach since the early months of the War on Terror is in recognising that failing states present an unprecedented challenge and need help more than missile attack.

She fails, of course, to acknowledge the colossal waste of America's opportunity to ally its moment of international dominance to its unique and powerful idealism. Instead, her article is an admission that the world has turned out much more complicated than previously thought. And it ends with the contradiction of America's presence in world affairs being that of intense impatience for change, combined with immense patience in seeing change through.

The latter is purely wishful thinking if the presidential campaign is any guide. Economic woes on America's Main Street will likely decide who becomes 44th president, but Bush's ineptitude in world affairs has forced the question of which successor would do better. It was Hillary Clinton who raised concerns about Barack Obama's inexperience of international crisis, questioning who was better placed to take a 3am crisis call. Russia's invasion of Georgia brought that question back.

But the spotlight turning back on to John McCain should raise at least as many concerns. Although presenting himself as a maverick who liked to be out of step with the Bush White House, a recent New York Times trawl through the Republican contender's past 10 years on the record shows his main difference with George W Bush is that he has been even more eager than Dubya to reach for his gun and think later.