If Vladimir Putin and George Bush are elected to the highest offices, it is odd to think that for the first time since Lenin, the leader of Russia will be better travelled and more conversant with issues of foreign policy than the President of the United States.

One can only hope, in the first instance, that Bush is not elected. In the rough and tumble of politics where people who are both wise and good rarely prosper, we often have to make do with men (it is mostly men) who are either callow or callous.

Mr. Bush is both. He is exactly the sort of man who will care more about the road rage canicide than the judicial murder of the poor.

It is, however, unfair to personalise this; as a man he might be what he is but as a politician he is what his electors want him to be. At a level of base selfishness voters might want a man who is inclined to let poor blacks be killed in gaols but at a slightly more elevated level of selfishness, is it too much to hope that people will not want a president whose ignorance is egregious?

Well, yes, it is too much to hope.

The last man who entered the White House with any real understanding of the world outside Disneyland was Richard M. Nixon. This explains why it didn't take him years to learn enough to set out a clear course in foreign policy. So, in the second instance one can only hope that there is not a major crisis before Bush has time to distinguish Transylvania from Ruritania.

There will be those who will have deep misgivings about Putin but at least he is very unlikely to make a serious error that triggers a crisis so that the new American President will have some time to settle. The notion that he will be less respectful of civil liberties than Yeltsin is a piece of theoretical persiflage. Just as impoverished denizens of urban ghettos in the West care very little for voting and the self-regarding panoply of ballot box democracy, so most Russians will not mind any slight alteration in an always Wintry libertarian climate if the economic mayhem abates.

In the meantime, all the great crises which might destabilise relations between the great powers are rather slow burning; any of them may explode but not yet. The Russian economy is in a mess and Reagan's mad hatters have damaged it beyond early recovery by handing over moderately well run state industries to organised crime, but Putin is likely to have more coherent answers than Yeltsin ever had and he certainly won't allow things to get worse. He will also have a better notion of how to deal with the army and to ensure nuclear stability. If there is to be a nuclear crisis the overwhelming evidence shows that it is more likely to be triggered by Bush than Putin.

The GOP Candidate and Congress are beginning to make outrageously belligerent statements in the face of a former superpower they have destroyed; a conspiracy theorist would easily conclude that Reagan's destruction of the Russian economy through the introduction of mindless free market economics was a deliberate ploy.

The Middle East is always likely to produce sparks but there is not much tinder. Barak has been steadily clearing the ground and the wily Assad has made plenty of inflammatory statements which have resulted in exactly nothing. the Egyptians have enough internal problems to discourage any radical shift in policy and for various reasons Iran and Iraq have plenty of internal business to occupy them.

As has been true for the past half century, the most powerful country capable of springing any number of unpleasant surprises continues to be China. The tension between economic dynamism and political sclerosis is sooner or later bound to trigger a huge wave of internal dissent which will, in the course of time, inevitably tempt the gerontocracy into gestures of hostility to its supposed enemies but wise men know all about gestures.

There is the rub. No matter how sanguine people may be out of office they tend to take insult personally until such time as they develop the carapace of office. George Bush shows every sign of petulance to complement his superciliousness.

All of which leaves the occasional quirk in the 'back yard' of Latin America and the generality of trade disputes which have become largely a matter of bureaucratic fencing. Bush shows every sign of misunderstanding Latin America and being more hawkish on trade than Clinton who, for a Democrat, has been rather good at posturing on behalf of plutocrats to an extent which makes Lyndon B. Johnson look in retrospect like a disciple of Mother Theresa.

There will be a proper time to write Clinton's political obituary but of one thing I am already certain and that is that Clinton will be thought of in retrospect as a much better President than he is now thought to be. That will be less intensely felt if Gore rather than Bush is elected because Gore will simply be a much more competent President who will, ironically, regardless of what he does for the poor, be much more use to the rich than Bush; in their own self interest the millionaires should put their money behind the man who actually knows how big his hard drive is and what to do with it.