The trip was supposed to be something of a “charm offensive,” designed to dispel misapprehensions of the American president as a conservative, Bible-banging, gun-toting, global-polluting, undiplomatic stumblebum. He made clear progress. Europe’s leaders exercised their well-learned politesse. But charmed they were not. “We don’t agree on the Kyoto treaty,” Bush said bluntly at the close of Thursday’s summit. That’s putting it mildly. At Gothenburg, the environment and the issue of global warming emerged as the main flash point in American-European relations. Yet Bush’s other initiatives won a more receptive hearing than almost anyone expected. On contentious matters of trade policy, European commissioner Pascal Lamy felt “good vibrations” from the White House. And Europe’s leaders kept an open mind on missile defense. “It’s simply logical to consider it,” said Pio Cabanillas, spokesman for the Spanish government. Even those who are against Bush’s plan to jettison the 1972 antiballistic-missile treaty have concluded that, as one senior EU official puts it, “we really do need to think twice about deterrence in the 21st century.”
That in itself is significant. In the end it appears Europe is prepared to cut America’s new president some slack, even if the protesters and much of the international press do not. European media recorded Bush’s linguistic bumbling with malicious glee. In Madrid he made poor attempts to speak Spanish. At NATO in Brussels he lapsed into mangled cold-war rhetoric, talking about “other leaders of the free world” even as he derided “cold-war thinking.” But it was global warming that kept raising temperatures. While Secretary of State Colin Powell and Europe’s foreign ministers used a “working dinner” in Sweden to craft strategies for dealing with crises in the Balkans and the Middle East, the presidents and prime ministers talked about the environment.
French President Jacques Chirac, especially, was “very tough” with Bush about the United States’ rejecting the Kyoto treaty, according to one of those around the table. “You are not going to get away with this,” Chirac told the president, as national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice diligently took notes. In public, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson was almost as blunt, dismissing Bush’s contention that study of greenhouse gases is needed more than the treaty. “Climate change is not isolated to Europe or to America,” said Persson. “It is a global effect. If you are in favor of or against the Kyoto Protocol, you have to take action.”
Background interviews with senior European officials suggest that many leaders suspect Bush’s motives on environmental matters. They don’t exactly call him a shill for the oil companies lobbying against Kyoto. But as one put it, “Bush is perceived as representing only the interests of a small group of corporate America. In Europe you have to be perceived as the leader of a whole society.” The environment may have faded from the agenda of gas-guzzling America, but it clearly has not in conservation-minded Europe, especially for younger voters. Bush’s policies and views are simply “not coherent,” says Heidi Hautala, a Finnish member of the European Parliament and head of its green caucus.
It’s unlikely that the American-European agreement to disagree over Kyoto will cause an enduring rift. A real diplomatic partnership appears to be taking shape in too many other areas, despite the first rough weeks of misunderstandings about U.S. intentions in the Balkans and the Middle East. Bush won’t be pulling U.S. forces out of Bosnia or Kosovo before his NATO allies. He backs efforts to calm the situation in Macedonia. And the United States and European Union are playing tag-team diplomacy in their efforts to build a truce in the Middle East, which used to be treated as a U.S. preserve. “If there is failure,” said one European official, bemusedly, “I think the Americans will be happy to share it.” Anti-Christ though Bush may be to some, Europe’s leaders last week showed a certain, well, sympathy for the Devil.
