A review of Kerry's positions over his career and presidential campaign strongly suggests the senator would try to take U.S. policy back to the basic ''realism'' of both former president Bill Clinton and his predecessor George HW Bush (the current president's father), who believed that in order to retain its international dominance Washington must take the interests of other nations, especially its allies, into account to the greatest extent possible before shaking up the global order.

That preference for multilateralism, which is bolstered by the host of former senior Clinton officials and retired diplomats who surround Kerry, has been a constant throughout the campaign.

''We must work with the international community to define a global strategy (against terrorism) that is collective and not imperial'', he told the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) last December in his most important foreign-policy address.

At the same time, Kerry, who voted -- with reservations -- for the congressional resolution to authorize war against Iraq, also shares with Bush Sr and Clinton the view that, while multilateralism is always preferable, the United States may act unilaterally if its vital interests are under serious and imminent threat.

''As president, I will not cede our security to any nation or institution'', he said recently. ''And adversaries will have no doubt of my resolve to use force if necessary''.

Whether these views would translate into major differences with Bush in substance -- and not just in style -- has become a source of endless debate among policy analysts.

Besides, even if the differences really are substantive, many observers wonder whether Kerry, if elected, could translate them into real policy, particularly if Bush's Republicans retain control of Congress. Clinton, after all, had promised an ''assertive multilateralism'' when he took office in 1992, only to be almost completely stymied after the 1994 elections that swept the Republicans to victory in both the Senate and House of Representatives.

Nonetheless, there appears little doubt that Kerry himself is genuinely angry about what he believes the past three years -- and particularly the war in Iraq -- have done to U.S. power and standing in the world. ''Simply put'', he told the staid CFR, a bastion of the foreign-policy establishment, ”the Bush administration has pursued the most arrogant, inept, reckless and ideological foreign policy in modern history''.

According to recent biographical accounts, Kerry's aversion to U.S. arrogance is quite genuine. When Clinton officials, for example, began referring to the United States as ''the indispensable nation'', Kerry reportedly complained to a veteran foreign policy aide, ''Why are we adopting such an arrogant, obnoxious tone''?

That sensitivity may be based in part on his unusually cosmopolitan upbringing and background, not to mention his marriage of 10 years to Theresa Heinz Kerry, the outspoken Mozambique-born, South African-educated, multilingual billionaire, who wowed the Democratic convention Tuesday night.

As noted in a recent article by 'The New Republic's' Franklin Foer, Kerry's father Richard, who died in 2000, was a career diplomat whose 1990 book 'Star-Spangled Mirror' strongly denounced moralism in U.S. foreign policy and the propensity of the public to ''see the world and foreign affairs in black and white''.

Kerry, who as a boy attended schools in Europe where his diplomat dad was posted, loved to talk about foreign policy with his father. According to Douglas Brinkley, a highly regarded historian and recent biographer of the candidate, the senator's basic ''foreign policy worldview comes straight from Richard Kerry''.

The challenger recently told the 'Washington Post' his father taught him ''the benefit of learning how to look at other countries and their problems and hopes and challenges through their eyes ... we don't always do that well''.

If anything, that worldview was reinforced by his experience in the Vietnam War, where he served as a highly decorated combat officer on Navy ''swift boats'' in the Mekong River. He returned to the United States as an outspoken and particularly articulate leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), although, with eye already fixed on a political career, he was careful not to associate himself with its more radical positions.

Once elected to the Senate, Kerry, along with former prisoner-of-war, Republican John McCain, took the lead in promoting reconciliation with Vietnam, an effort that offered few political rewards.

In Kerry's view, the Bush administration, particularly after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, has taken U.S. foreign policy in a radical new direction that threatens to destroy the post-World War II alliances that gave Washington, as the first among equals, far greater influence than it could ever deploy on its own.

Thus, his main foreign-policy goal will be to restore those alliances to the greatest extent possible, beginning with what Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld derisively called ''old Europe'' within the NATO alliance if, for no other reason, than to try to get more help in extracting U.S. troops from Iraq without leaving a ''failed state'' in their wake.

At the same time, Kerry will likely move quickly to try to defuse other burgeoning crises -- notably over North Korea and Iran -- where the current administration's stubborn refusal to deal directly with the charter members of what Bush called the ''axis of evil' has not only permitted them to advance nuclear-weapons programs, but also contributed to the alienation of Washington's closest allies, both in Europe and East Asia.

On a third front, Kerry has said he will make a series of gestures towards the larger international community, particularly the United Nations, to demonstrate that Washington will once again pursue a more multilateral approach.

Among those moves, he will almost certainly bring the United States back to the bargaining table over the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the Biological Weapons Convention; sharply cut programs for developing a national missile defense (NMD) system and eliminate funding for new nuclear weapons; commit substantially more money to the multilateral Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and restore U.S. contributions to the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA); and abruptly halt Washington's effort to undermine the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Soon after taking office, Kerry said in his CFR address, he would ''go to the United Nations and travel to our traditional allies to affirm that the United States has rejoined the community of nations''. He also promised to convene an early summit of U.S. allies ''to discuss a common anti-terrorism agenda, including a collective security framework, and a long-term strategy to build bridges to the Islamic world''.

Whether such an agenda is achievable depends heavily on what kind of a mandate Kerry wins in November, and particularly whether Democrats can win back a majority in at least one house of Congress. But it will also depend on how willing the international community, and particularly traditional U.S. allies, will be to help extract the United States from its current isolation -- beginning in Iraq.