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Mending fences

Europeans will be watching and listening closely when George Bush arrives in the old continent tomorrow. There is weighty symbolism in the fact that the president's first foreign trip of his second term takes him across the Atlantic. Dinner with Jacques Chirac and talks with Gerhard Schröder will bring him face to face with the bitterest European critics of the Iraq war. But the message he is bearing is one of dialogue and diplomacy - the themes that have already been highlighted by his new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, on her recent fence-mending trip.

The mood on this side of the pond is warily optimistic. European governments have been accentuating the positive, faute de mieux, since Mr Bush's re-election. They recognise sensibly that there is no point going on about how much they wanted a John Kerry victory. Bush II is with us all for the next four years and there are some extremely thorny issues on the global agenda. Best, in that case, to work out how they can be tackled multilaterally by the US and Europe, the two wings of an old but nowadays very unequal alliance.

Timing, location and detail mean a lot when a US president travels abroad. With no disrespect to the Belgians, he would hardly be bothering to head their way if Brussels was not home to two important international institutions. Mr Bush has been to Nato before. Never before though has any American president visited the headquarters of the European Union. That is being seen, perhaps with some justification, as a sign that the US does now want to see Europe as Europe aspires to be: a more effective global actor - not so disunited that neocon unilateralists can cherry-pick willing allies like Poland, Britain and Italy and freeze out those Donald Rumsfeld sneered at as "old" Europeans. The EU is already an equal partner for the US in global trade and economic clout; but it has a long way to go before it can begin to match America in military strength, power projection or diplomatic muscle.

It is in these areas that the transatlantic gap is still painfully wide and on these that people of goodwill on both sides need to see progress if that wary optimism is to be justified. The success of the Iraqi elections has convinced few Europeans that the war most of them opposed was a good idea; or that regime change, in Iran, Syria or other countries Mr Bush now calls "outposts of tyranny", should follow. There is however growing recognition that it is time to move on. Even France and Germany are likely to agree to boost training for Iraq's fledgling security forces - their contribution to the stability that is in everyone's interest. There are hopes too for movement on Israel-Palestine, but Europeans will need to be far more certain than they are at present that Mr Bush is not acquiescing in Ariel Sharon's hopes of holding on to most of the West Bank once he has evacuated Gaza.

It is hard to see a way forward on Iran, where even if Washington's tone has softened, there is little enthusiasm for Europe's preference for diplomacy to persuade Tehran to come clean about its nuclear ambitions. But it will take two to perform this very difficult tango: Europeans may have to be prepared to get tougher too. Nor is it clear how the row over lifting the EU arms embargo on China will be resolved. Europeans have given up hope that the US will ever embrace the international criminal court they hold so dear.

Mr Bush has signalled that he may have something new to say about climate change, despite his refusal to sign the Kyoto global warming treaty. Brussels would be a great place to announce even a modest green downpayment on the transatlantic dialogue that everyone agrees Europe, America - and the entire world - so urgently needs.

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