Mr Bush goes to Europe

The Atlantic alliance is in trouble. It is worth making some sacrifices to save it

LAST week Condoleezza Rice buttered the natives up nicely. Next week George Bush braves the wilds of Brussels at the start of a European tour of his own, in order, as his new secretary of state put it in Paris, “to continue our conversation”. How reassuring that the United States and Europe are conversing again, not shouting as they did before and after the war in Iraq. But how deep does this new warmth go? And if it is only skin-deep, how much does the continuing chill matter?

In the past several months, three big things have helped to warm the currents across the Atlantic. The foremost is that, against the hopes of most Europeans, American voters have given Mr Bush a second term. Whether they like him or not, and they still do not, France's Jacques Chirac, Germany's Gerhard Schroder and Russia's Vladimir Putin have no choice but to do business with the man who has just won four more years in the White House.

A second big help is that Mr Bush is not preparing to invade foreign countries right now. Though the Americans do not rule out future strikes against suspected nuclear proliferators such as Iran, or confirmed ones such as North Korea, the word from Washington is that military action is not yet on the agenda. For the time being, America endorses the efforts of Britain, France and Germany to use diplomacy to extract nuclear good behaviour from Iran. Europeans of a nervous disposition find it easier to shake Uncle Sam's hand when he is not using his other one to sharpen a bayonet.

He's back, wearing a halo

Last, on this visit to Europe Mr Bush has a better story to tell than he did last year. When Iraq's much-feared weapons of mass destruction failed to materialise, and after the American invasion produced both chaos and the torture scandal of Abu Ghraib, Mr Bush's claim to be acting in a noble cause rang hollow throughout the world. Now much has changed. Iraqis showed in January's election that they take their new democracy seriously, even if politicians in France and Germany did not expect them to. In a speech in Munich last week, Donald Rumsfeld, America's defence secretary, hooped together the elections in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and the Palestinian territories - plus the Palestinian ceasefire with Israel - in a single narrative of peace and democracy on the march, helped on their way by a freedom-spreading America. Onlookers are entitled to question just how much credit America deserves for a few of these welcome developments, especially those in Palestine. But the cumulative effect of all of them is to have put substance on the claim Mr Bush made in his inauguration speech that he was pursuing America's “great liberating tradition” in foreign policy.

Mr Bush's freedom talk is associated in European minds with a readiness to reach for the gun in a world drawn too simply in cowboy blacks and whites. It raises obvious questions of consistency: why so hard on Syria and Iran (which have just formed a “common front” to resist America), so soft on Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? But it behoves Europeans at least to give Mr Bush's ideas a hearing. This is not only because it was indeed America that liberated their own continent - one half in the second world war and the other in the cold war. It is also because Mr Bush's formula - “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands ” - -is not so different from what Europeans claim they believe too: that the right answer to what happened on September 11th 2001 is not only to hunt down and kill the terrorists but also to pull up terrorism's “root causes”.

A simple and scary idea

One glaring difficulty is that reasonable people can disagree about what terrorism's causes are - or, if they do agree, on how the uprooting is to be done. In his second-term pronouncements so far, Mr Bush has given no sign of disavowing the neo-conservative view that the chief motor of terrorism is the incomplete spread of democracy in the world, and especially its absence among the Arabs of the Middle East. Some European policymakers agree with this diagnosis. Others find it too simple. Almost all find the idea of actually doing something about it audacious - perhaps even reckless.

That may be why Europeans prefer to say that the root cause of terrorism is poverty - or the unresolved conflict in Palestine, which they accuse Mr Bush of having dangerously neglected during his first term. The true answer is plainly a combination of these things. Israel - sometimes because of its post-1967 occupation of Palestinian territories, sometimes just because it exists - does inflame Muslim rage. But for a long time authoritarian Muslim regimes have also used the conflict as a pretext to postpone reform and democracy at home.

In principle, this difference of emphasis ought not to prevent the European Union and the United States from combining their efforts in the Middle East. Both are spending money on programmes to strengthen “civil society” and preach the virtues of freedom. Both are co-authors of the “road map” to peace. Both advocate an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza after these have been evacuated by Israel. Europeans and Americans alike have welcomed the election of the moderate Mahmoud Abbas as Yasser Arafat's successor, and both are now helping to improve the efficiency of the Palestinian Authority and raise living standards in the occupied territories. On the face of it, there is little reason for Mr Bush and his European partners to fall out over Palestine.

And yet, when the time comes to negotiate a final peace, they probably will. Many Europeans, blaming mainly Israel for the impasse since 1967, would love to see America “deliver” the Israelis by forcing them right back to the pre-1967 border, even if this means uprooting all the settlements Israel has built in the occupied lands. Mr Bush, however, has already offended Arab and European sentiment by conceding last year that it is unrealistic to expect Israel to make a “full and complete” return, or accept the return of Palestinian refugees in numbers that would extinguish its vocation as Jewish state.

Do such differences boil down to tactics, or do they reflect a deeper split? It is more than tactics. European leaders, tending to see Israel's colonisation of the Palestinian territories as a version of their own colonial sins, are no longer as willing as they once were to give Israel the benefit of their post-Holocaust guilt. Americans are more apt to see Israel as a plucky democracy in a sea of dictatorships, compelled as America itself was after September 11th to use extreme force against the suicide terrorists and those who send them. This point of view is buttressed by powerful domestic constituencies, including Christian fundamentalists as well as American Jews. In such circumstances, no American president can be relied on to apply the brutal pressure on Israel which some Europeans consider necessary - and Europe does the Palestinians no favours by misleading them to expect it.

Europeans may deplore the domestic interests in America that prevent it from taking the remedial action they think is called for in the Middle East. But, of course, Europe's own posture in the region is no less constrained by calculations of interest. Its fast-growing Muslim population detests Zionism. The Arab world, a long way from America, is the European Union's neighbour across the Mediterranean, and will be a land neighbour too if Turkey becomes an EU member. This makes it harder for European governments to empathise in public with Israel, and they are less casual than Mr Bush often sounds about shaking up the existing order in the Middle East in the name of an idea as abstract as spreading “freedom”.

Regime change, part two?

Naturally, European governments profess an attachment no less adamant than America's to democracy and its benefits. And in recent years they have done a great deal to enlarge democracy's domain by accepting as EU members those countries of central and eastern Europe that have shown themselves able to embrace the Union's norms. Mr Bush, however, seems to believe that a corollary of loving freedom is loathing tyranny - and that to promote democracy it is sometimes necessary for outsiders to remove dictatorial regimes. So although, to Europe's great relief, new American military action is not “on the agenda” at present, the invasion of Iraq has been followed by a rising tide of American threats against “outposts of tyranny” such as Syria and Iran. Here too, the differences across the Atlantic are partly tactical, but in part also a reflection of diverging interests - and ideas.

As in Palestine, America and Europe would seem to share the same broad aim in Iran. Both say that as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Islamic Republic should not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. The Americans claim to support the efforts of Britain, France and Germany to make Iran stop enriching uranium and take other steps to prove that despite a well-documented history of deceiving international inspectors it is not building a bomb. This unity of purpose, however, masks a split. In private, the Americans do not expect the European effort to succeed. They are convinced that Iran does indeed crave nuclear weapons, and are impatient for the Europeans to admit failure, so that the issue can be moved to the Security Council for sanctions to be applied - with the possibility of military action later.

On one level, this looks like a quarrel about methods. American diplomats reckon it will take pressure or even force to deflect Iran from its nuclear trajectory. European diplomats assert that persuasion could work - if only America did its part by removing Iran's fear that America intends to clobber it. But the difference is weightier than this. One reason Mr Bush would find it hard to give Iran the security guarantees it wants is that the Iranian regime - a repressive theocracy, which calls for the destruction of Israel and supports the terrorists trying to undermine the ceasefire in Palestine - is the antithesis of everything America now says it wants for the region and beyond. In Washington a lively debate is now taking place over whether it might be simpler and more satisfactory to change the regime in Tehran than to curb its nuclear aims.

To some degree, these cross-Atlantic differences follow a pattern. Mr Bush is building his second-term foreign policy in a spirit at once more paranoid and more optimistic than Europe's. As the president on watch when al-Qaeda struck the twin towers, he continues to see the world as a more dangerous place than Europeans take it to be. Yet in spite of all the problems he has run into in Iraq, he retains his faith in the power of robust American deeds, and the export of American values, to make it safer. Europe's leaders seem by contrast both less anxious and more pessimistic. They are less anxious about terrorism (Europe has lived with it for generations) and about threats such as a nuclear Iran (undesirable, of course, but why can it not be contained like other obnoxious nuclear powers by a system of deterrence?). They are less optimistic than Mr Bush claims to be about the healing power of democracy, especially its power to transform the Arab world.

All of this suggests applying a proper scepticism to the warm speeches Mr Bush will deliver and listen to on his progress through Europe next week. Though it suits Europe and America to put some of the awkwardness of Iraq behind them, there are bound to be collisions ahead - not only over what to do in Palestine and Iran, and whether to “force” democracy on the Arabs, but also over European arms sales to China, the standing of the world criminal court, the Kyoto climate treaty, reform of the Security Council and much else.

The alliance can be saved

These differences matter. The Iraq war accelerated the growing apart of a Europe free at last from the Soviet shadow and an America with work to do elsewhere. Terrorism is a common threat, but one too amorphous to provide the same sense of mutual dependence. There will, as Mr Schroder said last week, be no going back to the old European habit of deferring to the protective superpower. The Atlantic alliance could indeed die, if politicians neglect it.

But it does not have to. Increasingly - in the Balkans, Afghanistan, even Iraq - European members of NATO are picking up a share of America's burden. The values that hold America and Europe together are still stronger than the differences pulling them apart - and stronger still than whatever bonds Europe or America seem likely to form elsewhere. During the Iraq quarrel, France and Germany seemed at one point to be edging closer to Russia, the embryo of an alliance that was stillborn and looks entirely preposterous now that Mr Putin has retreated so far from western values. For the same reason, fears that Europe will attach itself to a rising China to balance the power of America belong to the distant future.

America and Europe no longer have precisely the same view of danger, or identical interests, or a similar appetite for risk. They will not always be able to act together in the outside world. But when they do, they can still command unparalleled military and moral power. Keeping open the possibility of joint action is something for which each side should be willing to make sacrifices. An alliance such as this needs to be nurtured, not left to wither unattended on the vine.

Editorial previews the visit of US President Bush to Europe, 21-24 February 2005. It says that the Atlantic Alliance is in trouble and that it is worth both sides making sacrifices to save it.

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