Major Garrett: Bush faces European criticism

President Bush

Major Garrett is a White House correspondent for CNN. He is reporting from Madrid on President Bush's trip to Europe.

Q: What is the purpose of President Bush's visit to Europe?

Garrett: The president's first trip to Europe starts in Madrid, Spain. He's coming here basically for two reasons. One, he likes to continue to connect with Spanish-speaking people across the globe -- his first trip outside of the united states was to Mexico to see President Vincente Fox, but also to remind Spanish-speaking and Hispanic voters in the United States that he cares about their interests. The second reason he came to Spain was to begin his first trip to Europe on a high note. There's very little controversy with the Spanish government, Spanish leaders have made clear here in Madrid that they want to be a strong U.S. ally on questions of trade and defense. Eventually, they say they want to be as strong an ally of the United States as Great Britain.

MESSAGE BOARDS The Bush presidency   National missile defense   Environmental issues

Then it's off to Brussels, Belgium, for a meeting of NATO leaders. The main topics there are the future of the U.S. relationship with NATO, and national missile defense. The U.S. has been trying aggressively to persuade NATO allies that its proposal for a regional missile defense system is workable, and that should eventually be supported by all NATO nations. They haven't been as successful as they might have hoped, but they are continuing their consultations and that process will be done face to face.

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From Brussels, the president then travels to Gothenburg, Sweden, for a meeting with European Union leaders. Missile defense will also be an issue there, but will be secondary to the issue of how to confront global warming, something uppermost in the minds of European leaders, chiefly because Bush has made it clear he will not participate in the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which created binding reductions for 167 nations in greenhouse gas emissions. The president said before leaving for this European trip that this treaty was effectively dead, and that the United States, Europe and Asia would have to think about new and more realistic ways to confront global warming, ways that he said did not harm the United States' economy, and also brought developed nations into a system where global greenhouse gas emissions were reduced. That's going to be a very contentious topic.

The Europeans now understand that the president does not want to use Kyoto as the means of achieving this goal, but they have no idea what the president wants to put in its place. The president is going to have to persuade Europeans that he has a better idea than Kyoto, because without Kyoto, the Europeans fear the United States will not act aggressively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That's a big issue for them, because the United States contributes at least 20% annually of all the greenhouse gas emissions globally.

Q: Does President Bush have anything specific to offer on global warming to his European critics, and why does he not wish to ratify Kyoto?

Garrett: The only specifics he has offered so far is a renewed commitment to spend more on research into the underlying causes of global warming. Many European leaders believe that this issue has been settled, and that they know why the global temperature has been increasing. They believe it is because of industrialization, with greenhouse gases as the underlying cause. The president said before leaving on the trip that that may be a cause, and there have been several scientific studies that suggest that it is, but he also said that the cause of the increase in global temperatures could be the result of natural variability, that is, things other than greenhouse gases could be causing the temperature to rise. He wants more scientific study into that question. So what the president is doing is coming here and saying we need to study this issue more carefully and then decide what to do. This is not going to be popular point of view with European leaders.

The protocol has been around since 1997, and 167 Nations have signed on to it, but to my knowledge, only three European nations, Cyprus, Georgia and Romania, have actually ratified it. That is one of the president's main criticisms. No major European nations have, the United States hasn't. When the U.S. Senate looked at the treaty and asked itself the question of whether we should address the issue of global warming with this kind of treaty, by a vote of 95-0, the Senate said "no." Bush says this proves the Kyoto protocol has no chance of being ratified in the United States as Democrats and Republicans rejected it, and therefore it needs to be changed.

Also, China is the number two emitter of greenhouse gases, and the president says that if you are going to have any rational approach to reducing greenhouse gases, you have to include nations such as China in whatever system you are creating to do that. He says that if you exempt China and just have developed nations tackle this problem, you are not going to get your arms around it.

Q: What has the public reaction in Europe been to the president's trip?

Garrett: Here in Spain, there have been three anti-American protests in Madrid, mostly about the U.S. environmental policy, but there was also a protest about the U.S. imposition of the death penalty generally, and specifically in the Timothy McVeigh case. It's not unusual for new U.S. presidents to get a frosty reception in Europe, particularly for conservative Republican presidents. Ronald Reagan had a big problem in Europe, and George W. Bush has been encountering the same kind of opposition. There is a sense in many European nations that Bush is not as experienced in international policy as they would prefer. They have an image of him as sort of a wild West cowboy-like figure coming from Texas. They also have fears that he is beholden to powerful business interests in the United States, and that perception is increased by his attitude to global warming. Some Europeans believe this isn't a policy difference so much as powerful oil, natural gas and electricity interests in the United States persuading the White House not to go down this road of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

So what the president has to do in Europe, at least initially as he cannot do it all in one trip, is to persuade European leaders and the public at large that he knows the policy and is capable of being president, that he isn't this wild-eyed Texas Westerner, and that he's not beholden to special interests in the United States. He has to persuade them that he has legitimate differences and does really care about issues such as global warming and national missile defense, but his ideas are different and new. It will take a great deal of political persuasion on his part to alleviate some of the anxiety European leaders feel about the course his administration has set. Typically, U.S. presidents persuade leaders long before they persuade the general public, so at the leadership level, the president's goal on this first visit is to make the case that he is up to the job, and has some good and worthwhile new ideas.