United States President George Bush landed in Brussels on Sunday night for four days of talks with European Union and Russian leaders, which are being held amid unprecedented security.
With hopes for the talks tinged with wariness and anxiety in Europe, the first foreign trip of the second Bush term was a signal of the White House’s new priority to repair relations with Europe after three years of transatlantic crisis triggered mainly, but not only, by the Iraq war.
That priority was underlined by Bush in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro. ”The time has come to put to one side our differences with Europe,” he said.
In Brussels, Mainz and Bratislava Bush will have private sessions with the three key opponents of the Iraq war, the French, German and Russian leaders Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin.
While the rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic has been emphasising the promise of transatlantic reconciliation following years of acrimony, some of the gestures and announcements preceding Bush’s arrival on Sunday night indicated that any rapprochement may lack substance.
Less than a week before three hours of private talks with Bush in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, on Thursday, President Putin announced increased nuclear cooperation with Iran and said he intended to visit Tehran soon, challenging the Americans on one of the most important issues on the US agenda: how to tackle Iran’s suspected nuclear ambitions.
Meanwhile, Chancellor Schröder surprised an international security conference in Munich last week by questioning Nato’s usefulness and whether the alliance was the appropriate forum any longer for US-European policy-making — this in advance of Bush’s visit to Nato’s headquarters on Tuesday.
Bush’s trip to Belgium, Germany, and Slovakia will see the tightest and biggest security operations ever mounted in those countries.
Several thousand police were on duty in Brussels on Sunday night, almost double the quota deployed during EU summits, as several hundred demonstrators staged the first of several planned protests.
While Bush’s father and Germany’s then chancellor Helmut Kohl took a boat trip on the river at Mainz 15 years ago, on Wednesday the river will be closed to all shipping.
In the major speech of the trip today in Brussels, President Bush is expected to try to enlist Europe in his declared second-term campaign to spread and speed the global march of freedom and democracy.
”He’s coming with a message that the United States and Europe have a common agenda to advance freedom and democracy in the world,” Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser, told journalists in Washington.
”The president sees very much the opportunity for the United States and Europe to work together to advance the freedom agenda.” That aim will face the first test of the second Bush term on Thursday in Bratislava when Bush meets Putin, widely seen over the past year to be rolling back rather than advancing freedoms in Russia.
Members of the US Congress from both parties urged Bush last week to get tough on Russia, as did a group of respected international human rights and democracy activists. ”We urge you and the United States to publicly challenge President Putin’s authoritarian course. We urge you to make human rights, democratic practices, and the rule of law essential elements of the dialogue with Moscow and a precondition for the deepening of bilateral ties,” the open letter to the White House stated.
Hadley said: ”There clearly have been some developments [in Russia] recently that have raised some questions and concerns.”
But Bush signalled in pre-summit interviews that he was unlikely to jeopardise his friendly personal relationship with Putin and had no intention of publicly upbraiding the Russian leader.
”Vladimir has made some decisions that I look forward to hearing, in a very private way … why he made the decisions he made,” Bush told a Moscow newspaper at the weekend.
”I have a good relationship with President Putin,” he added in another interview with Slovak television. ”I can explain to him as best I can, in a friendly way of course, that western values are, you know, are based upon transparency and rule of law, the right for the people to express themselves, checks and balances in the government.”
The biggest announcement of the week is expected to be an agreement that just over 100 security personnel from Nato’s 26 members will train Iraqi police and soldiers either in Iraq or outside.
All sides will be looking for signs of the rapprochement in today’s presidential speech when Bush is expected to acknowledge European concerns about climate change and to try to enlist Europe in his declared second-term campaign to spread and speed the global march of freedom and democracy. – Guardian Unlimited Â