I would sum up his two terms in four words: hubris followed by nemesis.

Remember the mood music of eight years ago. The greatest power the world has ever seen. Rome on steroids. An international system said to be unipolar, and Washington's unabashed embrace of unilateralism. The US as 'Prometheus unbound', according to neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer. Wall Street investment bankers bestriding the financial globe as Pentagon generals did the military globe and Harvard professors the soft-power one. Masters of the universe. Personifying that hubristic moment: George Walker Bush.

And now: nemesis. The irony of the Bush years is that a man who came into office committed to both celebrating and reinforcing sovereign, unbridled national power has presided over the weakening of that power in all three dimensions: military, economic and soft.

'I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan,' Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional committee earlier this month. By misusing American military power, Mr Bush has weakened it.

Economically, the Bush presidency ends with a financial meltdown on a scale not seen in 70 years. The conservative deregulators now oversee a partial nationalisation of the American economy that would make even a French socialist blush. A government bailout that will total close to US$1trillion (S$1.4trillion), plus the cumulative cost of the Iraq war, will push the national debt to more than US$11trillion.

The decline in soft power - the power to attract - is also dramatic. The Pew Global Attitudes Survey has recorded a precipitous worldwide fall in favourable views of the US since 2001. The map is chequered, of course, but the distaste extends beyond policies of the Bush administration to things such as 'American ways of doing business' and 'American ideas about democracy'. Iraq has been central to this collapse of US credibility and attractiveness. When Mr Bush denounces Russia for invading a sovereign country (Georgia), as he did again at the United Nations on Tuesday, a cry of 'humbug' goes up around the world. Now American-style free market capitalism is taking a further hit, while some of the alternative models are looking better.

Last weekend, five former US secretaries of state - two Democrat, three Republican - gathered for a panel discussion on the future of American foreign policy, televised by CNN. Asked what should be the biggest concern for the new president, Mr Colin Powell replied: 'To restore a sense of confidence in the United States of America.' Ms Madeleine Albright added that the world of 2009 would be full of issues 'that can be solved only in cooperation with other countries'. Republican and Democrat alike, they chorused: 'Close Guantanamo.'

Even Mr Bush now seems to concur with this criticism of Mr Bush. Eight years ago, he hardly seemed to know what the word 'multilateral' meant. In his farewell address to the UN General Assembly this week, he used the word 'multilateral' 10 times.

Obviously not all this mess can be blamed on Mr Bush. He's not responsible for the epochal rise of China, nor for Islamic terrorists' hatred of the West.

But a great deal of it can. At the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, you can still see the painted glass sign that Harry Truman placed on his desk in the oval office: 'The Buck Stops Here.' The contrast between Truman and Mr Bush is painful. Judgment, prudence, vision, patience, honesty - every quality that the 33rd president so signally possessed, as the US remade the world after 1945 - has been signally lacking in the 43rd.

Iraq, America's greatest strategic blunder in at least 30 years, is Mr Bush's fault. The buck stops there. And the more we learn about it, the clearer it becomes that it was pursued with a mixture of self-deception and lies. Reporter Ron Suskind has a new book out, in which he recounts how in the run-up to war, British intelligence secured unique access to Saddam Hussein's head of intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush.

Habbush told them what turned out to be the truth: that Saddam had ceased his programme of weapons of mass destruction, but would not admit it, because he was obsessed with keeping regional enemies such as Iran in a state of fear and uncertainty. That version was corroborated by Saddam's foreign minister, to whom French intelligence had originally secured access. The Bush-Cheney White House ignored both reports, preferring what turned out to be the fabrications of a German intelligence source codenamed 'Curveball'. The Bush-Cheney White House wilfully pressed ahead to war, on a fraudulent prospectus. As a senior member of the administration told Mr Suskind: 'We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.' Hubris has rarely been better expressed.

Something similar happened with hyper-leveraged Wall Street investment banking over the last decade. The financiers' motto, too, could have been: 'We create our own reality.' Again, nemesis follows hubris as night follows day.

As for the decline in American soft power, that is something for which Mr Bush was directly to blame. His arrogance, his unilateralism, his insensitivity, his long-time denial of the need for urgent action on climate change, all fed directly into the plummeting credit of the US around the world.

For years now, we have seen those who hate America burning effigies of Mr Bush. The truth is the anti-Americans should be building gilded monuments to him. For no one has done more to serve the cause of anti-Americanism than George Walker Bush. It is we who like and admire the United States who should, by rights, be burning the effigies.

The writer is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.