Bush tries charm offensive in Europe

PARIS - There will be soothing words. But will there also be substance?

After four years of bluntness and division in relations with Europe, President George W. Bush this week will try a different tack - charm.

He will seek to rebuild the battered Atlantic bridge in summits with the European Union and Nato and in meetings with his most persistent critics, French head of state Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Bush was to have arrived in Brussels yesterday, on his first foreign trip since his inauguration last month.

European commentators say Bush appears to have been swayed by his new Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to seize the moment offered by a second term in office to patch the strained relationship.

"His father went to Germany to topple a wall - now George Bush arrives to mend fences," was the sardonic headline in the British Guardian newspaper.

Bush's schedule shows how much the European Union seems to have risen in American eyes, reflecting Rice's appeal, in a highly-successful preparatory trip this month, for the EU to become a partner, but not a rival or counter-weight, to the US.

In his first term, Bush gave scant attention to the EU as a political entity. It seemed to register on White House radar only when a trade dispute arose.

Bush's preference has been to ally with trustworthy national leaders, such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, and snub "Old Europe" - France and Germany and other countries that opposed the Iraq war.

This week, though, Bush will become the first American president to visit the EU's main institutions - a powerful signal that his cherry-picking ways may change.

His first step will be a speech in Brussels on how Europe and America can work together to promote democracy.

Then Bush will meet the 25-nation European Council, the EU's paramount decision-making body. Here, Blair and Berlusconi will be notably relegated to "first among equals" among fellow European heads of state and government.

After the 90-minute meeting, Bush will visit the headquarters of the EU's powerful executive, the European Commission, to see Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

Bush and Barroso will then dine with the EU's foreign policy representative, Javier Solana, and with Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, which holds the EU's six-month presidency.

American interest in Europe will also be conveyed at a Nato summit and lunch on Wednesday, where Bush will try to dispel the image that the US has cast aside the Atlantic alliance in favour of "coalitions of the willing".

Bush will dine with Chirac today and after flying to Mainz, Germany, will spend much of Thursday with Schroeder. On Friday, he flies to Slovakia, where he will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, another opponent of the Iraq war.

The meetings with Chirac and Schroeder, who both bore the brunt of America's wrath two years ago, are especially welcomed in Europe, which was dismayed by the cowboy-like unilateralism of the first Bush term.

There are other positive signs. US-European tensions over Iraq have recently eased thanks to the elections there, and European criticism of the one-sided US support for Israel has been muted by Israeli restraint, encouraged by Washington, in dealing with the new Palestinian leadership.

But both Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian problems are so chronic as to leave plenty of room for transatlantic friction to break out anew.

Europe and America are still playing to different music sheets when it comes to dealing with Iran's nuclear programme; with squabbling behind the scenes on whether to lift an arms embargo on China. They are miles apart on global warming and the primacy of the United Nations.

"The real test ... will come in the months after the President returns to the White House, when a likely EU decision to lift its arms embargo on China and a possible breakdown in the EU negotiations with Iran could once again set transatlantic relations on edge," says Robin Niblett, Europe programme director at Washington thinktank the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.