Americans have not made a wise choice. Mr George W. Bush shouldn't have been made President.

A president with a shaky legitimacy is not best placed to deal with the global responsibilities that America has wished upon itself, the responsibilities of the only superpower. I also believe that the cabinet he has lined up would have served his father very well 10 years ago but that today it does not have the fresh – even radical – view required to provide leadership in finding a solution to the world's most intractable problems.

I also think Mr Bush might have been born with 10 gold spoons stuck in his mouth, but he wasn't born under a lucky star; as soon as he walks through the White House gates, the American economy isn't feeling too good. California – the largest piston in the economy – is threatened with the kind of power blackouts we have experienced and a host of other domestic problems.

But it is not the domestic issues that worry me, even though – the world economic hegemony being what it is – America's domestic problems end up on my bankbook. What worries me is Mr Bush's ability to deal with the major global issues. If he follows through what he said during the campaign, then Mr Bush isn't going to be able to deal effectively with our concerns – Africa's economic and debt crises and Aids.

Even more important are the issues of global security. In 1998, an American mistake was visited on this country. It left hundreds of us dead and damage that is yet to be completely repaired, if it ever will. It is the generation responsible for the policy blunders that created these kinds of mistakes that Mr Bush has brought back.

What exactly did Mr Bush mean when he twice said in his inaugural speech that "an angel rides the whirlwind and directs this storm''. Does "this storm" mean America's historical saga?

I believe the anti-American sentiment that culminated in the 1998 attack is widespread and deep, particularly in the Middle East and the Arab and Islamic world. I think most ordinary people in these countries blame America for the real and latent instabilities in their countries. If the analysts of the Middle Eastern problem I have been reading are representative of the ordinary Arab, then a lot of people believe that America has interfered to create unrepresentative, unpopular and undemocratic governments which it has then exploited to obtain natural resources, especially oil, and used to sustain an injustice against the Palestinian people, and Arabs in general.

Going by the number of coups America is said to have backed in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq since the First World War, then it begins to make sense why the people of these countries believe that America has had a hand in creating the elite that rules them today and is, therefore, at least partly, responsible for the absence of democracy in their countries.

I doubt that Mr Bush will be able to think outside the box in the Middle Eastern peace process. Will he be able to overcome his right-wing conservatism to realise that his country has not been an honest broker in the process and that (a) there never will be peace in the Middle East unless there is a country called Palestine, however small, however disjointed, and home of the Palestinians, and (b) there never will be real stability unless America disowns the regimes it has guarded so jealously for decades and allows the evolution of representative and democratic institutions?

The question of the day is perhaps no longer the security of Israel – most of its enemies, including the Palestinian leadership,have accepted its right to exist – but the future of the Palestinian people. The Lebanon identifies itself as the only Christian country in the Middle East (Israel practises Judaism) but the Maronite Christians, who have traditionally called the shots, constitute perhaps less than half of the population. The rest of them are Muslims, a lot of them Palestinians. If Jordan were a democracy, Palestinians would most probably be determining who governs it, for it's half Palestinian.

The point is that two inevitable forces – democracy and time – can only empower the Palestinians. Five hundred years from today, Israel will be perhaps 500 hundred times stronger than it is. But Palestinians won't be poor and living in refugee camps either. They will be in a position to influence the direction of a large part of the Middle East. And that direction will depend on the kind of deal that Mr Bush is able to cut with a certain 72-year-old engineer name of Arafat al Qudawa Al Husseini, namely, Yasser Arafat.

It is the ability of the new American administration to see 500 years in the future, to realise that supporting undemocratic regimes provides the oil and stability today, but offers no guarantees for the future, that Palestinians are throwing rocks in the streets today, but will be throwing something totally different a century from today. It is the ability of people steeped in conservatism and suffering a king size Cold-War hangover to see these things that I am doubting.

Mr Gore has his problems, but he is a modern man. Mr Bush's team brings with it a certain whiff of mildewed tweeds.

* This columnist can be reached at mutuma@dailynation.com