Rank the 10 most powerful national leaders in the world

[Stranger in a strange land]

Why do people think Pope Benedict is so powerful? He's certainly not more powerful than Obama: he doesn't even have a military. Now he may, at least in theory, have a billion people who think he's the voice of God, but how many of them really follow every pronouncement he makes? This isn't the middle ages where popes could dethrone kings.

Of major world leaders, Putin's power is the least constrained, and he's the closest thing to an absolute ruler among the major powers. Hu Jintao's power is constrained by the politburo and the PLA, while Obama's power is constrained by the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the state governments. He can't tell the congress what to do, he can't tell a governor what to do, and he can't even safely tell the CIA, FBI, or NSA what to do (because they'll leak against him if they don't like it). Merkel, however, is more powerful than is generally appreciated, due to Germany's dominant position in the EU.

Therefore, my list would look something like this:

1. Vladimir Putin
2. Barack Obama
3. Hu Jintao
4. Angela Merkel
5.  Francois Hollande
6. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
7. Sonia Gandhi (public opinion in India is pretty unanimous that she's calling the shots and that Singh has been outmanueverd and is basically just a figurehead at this point)
8. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
9. David Cameron
10. Benjamin Netanyahu

What's telling is that nobody has listed Yoshihiko Noda so far. I actually had to use wiki to find out who the current Japanese prime minister was, which goes a long way in terms of explainig why the