John McCain sat in the elegant ballroom of the Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich and listened politely as President Putin delivered a full-throated rant against America and all that it stood for.

Mr McCain, the Vietnam War hero and Arizona senator, has long been one of Mr Putin’s most outspoken critics, but it was less a rush of anger that overwhelmed him as he listened to the Russian leader’s philippic, and more a mounting sense of irony.

Mr Putin used his platform at the annual Munich security conference last weekend to denounce a “unipolar” world dominated by a US that exercised unconstrained power over cowering nations.

For Mr McCain, the analysis seemed curiously inapt. If the past few years have proved anything, it is surely that the US is much less powerful than it or its critics imagine.

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Thanks to the mess in Iraq and the damage done to America’s reputation by flawed policies, the US is hardly even much of a superpower. Almost its entire available Armed Forces are bogged down in Iraq; across the Middle East it is powerless to stop growing turmoil; in Asia it seems to cede ground almost by the day to a rising China. Like a bound and supine Gulliver, it can only watch as its supposedly weaker tormentors advance at its expense.

For the senator, this irony is not simply a geopolitical observation: it strikes at the heart of his personal ambition. It is America’s very weakness and apparent powerlessness to alter events in Iraq that now pose the largest threat to the prospect of a McCain presidency.

In a few weeks Mr McCain, 70, will announce his candidacy for the 2008 election formally, joining an already crowded field seeking the Republican nomination.

Having run in 2000, against George W. Bush, then the Governor of Texas, Mr McCain starts with significant advantages — a wealth of experience, a large campaign war chest, near universal name recognition and an impressive posse of senior advisers and committed staff.

Perhaps his biggest edge lies in the somewhat courtly approach of the Republicans to the selection of presidential nominees — picking the man whose turn it is deemed to be — usually, like the senator, the runner-up last time.

But Mr McCain, like the US, has a superpower problem. He has spent the past six years repairing many of the rifts that grew between him and conservative Republicans, many of whom have despised him since 2000. He demonstrated loyalty by committing himself to the war in Iraq.

This was politically expedient, but required no compromise with his principles. Supporting a war in which he firmly believed would eclipse doubts about his conservative credentials. now, with the war highly unpopular, his passionate support has the potential to undo him.

His condition is, as some critics have noted, similar to that of Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Mr Humphrey was Lyndon Johnson’s Vice-President, committed to the unpopular Vietnam War. As the Democratic presidential candidate that year, he was unable to distance himself from the war and lost to Richard Nixon.

Last month, when President Bush announced his plan to send more troops to Iraq, Mr McCain was one of the few senators to back him publicly. That appears to be costing him support.

A USA Today-Gallup poll this week gave Rudolph Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York, a 16 per cent lead over Mr McCain among all Republican voters, up from only 4 per cent a month ago. A year out from the first primary elections, Mr McCain and his advisers insist that there is little cause for panic.

They question Mr Giuliani’s polling numbers, which indicate that many voters do not know that the former mayor has views that are well to the left of his party on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage.

More importantly, they say, neither Mr Giuliani nor Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and the other leading contender, who announced his candidacy this week, has expressed anything other than support for the Iraq war. Indeed, they argue, there is no plausible constituency among conservative primary voters for an antiwar stance.

Mr McCain’s national security credentials, then, are still an asset rather than a liability in the Republican field. And if he does win the nomination, while he will face a tough fight against a resurgent Democratic party and candidate, his personal characteristics — he is well liked and has shown a rare ability to achieve bipartisan results in Congress — should help to offset his association with an unpopular war. And yet, as he sets out on what must be his final attempt at the White House, Mr McCain must wonder if his own prospects are not an ironic reflection of the state in which America, the tightly constrained superpower, now finds itself.

For all his strengths, his future is dependent in large measure on the outcome of a war over which he has little control. He holds that most precarious and least enviable of political positions — responsibility without power.

Walking wounded

Presidents hurt by unpopular wars
Harry Truman didn’t run in 1952 because of Korea
Lyndon Johnson didn’t run in 1968 because of Vietnam

Candidates hurt by pro-war record
Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon in 1968
John Kerry lost to George Bush Jr in 2004 after voting for Iraq war

Candidates hurt by antiwar stance
George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in 1972
John Kerry lost to George Bush Jr in 2004 after criticising Iraq war

Source: Times archives

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