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Can Europe Work With Bush?
Eyeing Odds of Bush Re-Election,
Nations Seek Ways to Mend Ties

By MARC CHAMPION
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 4, 2004; Page A15

LONDON -- Jacques Chirac made a request in August that surprised U.S. officials. The French president, one of President Bush's chief sparring partners in international affairs, asked the White House to meet with his foreign-policy chief.

Such meetings aren't unusual, but the timing was. It was the middle of an American presidential campaign -- a notoriously bad time for negotiating foreign policy -- and the U.S. and France had been at odds as recently as June at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Turkey.

Still, the lengthy meeting resulted in an agreement for France and the U.S. to co-sponsor a United Nations Security Council resolution that passed Sept. 2. It demanded that all non-Lebanese -- meaning Syrian -- troops pull out of Lebanon.

The French initiative is one sign that European countries at loggerheads with Mr. Bush in the past are preparing to work with a second Bush term, as opinion polls ahead of the Nov. 2 election have tipped slightly in Mr. Bush's favor.

Indeed, a few weeks after the joint Security Council resolution, on Sept. 22, France agreed to allow 300 NATO trainers to go to Iraq -- something Mr. Chirac had ruled out at the June NATO summit.

The overtures to the Bush administration come after months in which the debate in European capitals had focused more on what changes Sen. John Kerry, Mr. Bush's challenger, would make if he were to win.

In recent weeks, Mr. Bush's resurgence in the polls has prompted some European nations to pay more attention to what it would mean to them if Mr. Bush was re-elected and how a second Bush term might differ from the first.

"Don't consider that Bush 2 would start the same way as Bush 1" was the message one Washington ambassador says he sent home.

In terms of U.S. attitudes, "now NATO is back; even the U.N. is on the way back," the message said, according to the ambassador.

Foreign diplomats say they would watch what roles prominent foreign-policy hawks would be given in a second Bush term for an indication of whether the administration would, in their words, be more pragmatic.

Of course, the U.S. election is still a month away, and the race was viewed as tightening last week after Mr. Kerry's widely perceived strong performance in Thursday's presidential debate.

For many European leaders, a victory by Mr. Kerry would be a welcome chance for a fresh start.

But Mr. Kerry's claims that he would be able to produce troops for Iraq from allies that have rebuffed Mr. Bush have prompted some concern among officials in France as well as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Germany, the two European countries most consistently at odds with the Bush administration. Both governments have been sending out quiet warnings not to raise expectations, because they would likely decline to provide troops even if Mr. Kerry wins.

There is a lot at stake in the outcome of the election for many countries. The next few years will decide the structure of international affairs for decades to come, says Simon Serfaty, director of global policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. He likens the moment to the U.S. Truman-Dewey election of 1948, after which U.S. President Harry Truman built a Western alliance to deal with the threat from the Soviet Union.

"Will we have a U.S. strategy, a European strategy, or a Western strategy" toward global problems such as terrorism, Mr. Serfaty asks.

Whoever wins the White House, there could be a limited window of opportunity to figure out whether the divisions that emerged over the war in Iraq can be healed, officials say. For example, the U.S. on one side and France, Britain and Germany on the other will have to try to reconcile their approaches to Iran's refusal to abandon its uranium-enrichment program, which could be used for nuclear weapons. The next board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency to discuss Iran is on Nov. 25 -- less than a month after the election.

Decisions will come quickly in Iraq, too, as countries respond to elections set for January. Also outstanding are differences over how to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; how to spread stability across the Middle East; and how to handle Russian President Vladimir Putin's growing authoritarianism.

Officials and analysts say all sides are likely to take one issue at a time, rather than try to hammer out some grand new trans-Atlantic agreement. But it won't be easy.

Take Iran.

U.S. officials say they believe Britain, France and Germany have realized the deal they made in Tehran in October 2003, offering improved trade terms and other incentives in exchange for a suspension of Iran's uranium-enrichment program, has failed. Iran said last month it was restarting its enrichment program.

U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton, the American point man on antiproliferation, has said the next step should be to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council. But many European officials describe a Security Council referral as a last resort, and reject setting a "hard trigger" -- or automatic referral to the U.N. Security Council -- if Iraq failed to meet requirements set by the IAEA's Nov. 25 meeting. They worry it isn't clear what the Security Council would be able to do, while the act of referral could end any chance of getting Tehran to cooperate.

In Europe, meanwhile, officials are weighing ideas for offering Iran a new grand bargain: The U.S. and European Union jointly would promise trade, restored diplomatic relations and guaranteed fuel supplies for Iran's civilian nuclear-power program. In exchange, Iran would offer to give up all activities that could be used to create fuel for a nuclear weapon and cease its support of groups that carry out terrorist acts, including in Israel. Many analysts and even some European officials say the U.S. is unlikely to buy into such a deal.

Some observers say no matter who wins the U.S. election, it will no longer be possible to create a broad Western alliance against terrorism like the anti-Soviet alliance that existed during the Cold War.

Harvard University history Professor Niall Ferguson notes that, unlike 1948 when Americans and Western Europeans all saw Soviet expansionism as a clear threat, there is little agreement now on the nature and scale of the threat posed by Islamist terrorism. In the U.S., the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were seen as a new threat that required tearing up the old post-World War II rules for keeping the peace. But many in Europe saw the attacks as simply the worst expression of a familiar threat -- terrorism -- and one best dealt with by strengthening existing security structures and treaties.

"The Western alliance is dead," Mr. Ferguson says.

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109683992336434671,00.html?mod=politics%5Fprimary%5Fhs