Bush aims to reassure Europe

By CNN Europe Political Editor Robin Oakley

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- U.S. President George W. Bush says his six-day European trip will be a “great opportunity to say how anxious we are to work with our European friends and allies.”

But he will have to exert a great deal of the famous Bush charm to convince his hosts that they are on the same wavelength.

European leaders, mostly from the political centre left, are suspicious of a conservative Republican leader from the U.S. whom many of them suspect of being a unilateralist devoted only to America’s interests and in thrall to big business.

Many of them fear that in the post-Cold War age his focus is concentrated much more on Asia and on Latin America.

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Over the environment, they have been infuriated not just by Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto agreement on climate change but by his brusque way of doing it.

No sooner had European leaders such as Romano Prodi, the European Commission President, and Goran Persson, the Swedish Prime Minister and current holder of the revolving European Union presidency, announced in March that it was a key issue to be resolved between the EU and the U.S. than Bush announced that for America, Kyoto was dead.

An EU delegation sent to rescue the situation was fobbed off with low-level meetings.

On defence, both sides are distrustful of each other.

The Europeans are alarmed by Bush’s missile defence plan and his readiness to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a move which they fear would spark an expensive new worldwide arms race.

Nor are they as keen as the U.S. administration to push on with the eastward expansion of NATO.

Both that and the missile defence plan, they fear, will complicate the West’s relations with a Russia with whom they would like to do more business.

For their part, the Bush administration is scornful of a Europe that talks big on environmental issues but which has not exactly rushed itself to ratify the Kyoto treaty.

Nor are they impressed by plans for a European Rapid Reaction Force that Washington fears can only undermine NATO, especially as European defence budgets are falling at the same time as the leaders talk up the new “European defence dimension.”

But the picture is not all bleak. In advance of his European trip Bush, chastened by the bleak reactions to his earlier moves, has sought to mollify critics over his environmental strategy.

He has announced that he takes the climate change question seriously and committed new funds to additional research and to improving technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

He is looking less of a unilateralist now America has converted to a new sanctions policy on Iraq and agreed to talks with the North Korean regime. Nor does he seem so much of a Cold War warrior.

Visits by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld failed to convince NATO allies of America’s need for a missile defence shield against the real or imagined “rogue states” whom America claims to fear and for the scrapping of the ABM treaty.

But the “national” has been dropped from NMD and Europeans have been pleased by the willingness to consult both them and Russia on the next steps. Bush now says that he wants a new relationship with Russia not based on the prejudices of the Cold war.

Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, has warmed Europeans who feared an American pullout from the Balkans with her assurance that “the President has been very clear that we’re going to honour our commitments in the Balkans, that he understands that we went in together and we will eventually come out together.”

And new hope has been given for the resolution of outstanding trade disputes by the deal fixed up in the long-running banana war by two old buddies, Robert Zoellick, the U.S. Trade Representative, and EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy.

Bush will face plenty of protests from environmentalists, peacemongers and opponents of the death penalty in his progress through Europe -- the visit coming as it does just a day after the execution of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh.

But leading European figures will not rush to pick a fight with him on his first “getting to know you trip.”

If he can demonstrate that he genuinely does want a continuing relationship with Europe and that he does, as he says, value their common heritage, then his first official foray into Europe can at least serve to neutralise hostility and to lessen tensions.

And if his charm is as potent as some Americans believe then he may even strike up a genuine rapport with some of his hosts.