This visit to Europe of this apparently most ignorant of contemporary American presidents will decide whether George Bush has inherited sufficient common sense to extricate himself from the hole he dug for himself in his first 100 days or whether he will ignore the first law of holes: when you are in one stop digging.
Bush is discovering that, in William Pfaff's telling phrase, Europe, "is not a used-up civilization." "For four hundred years, European civilization has dominated the world-for better or worse. It is convenient and flattering for Americans to assume that this is all over, but it is very rash to do so."There have been all number of good reasons for the US to regard Europe as washed up, not just the two world-shattering wars of the last century nor, going back further in time, the political corruption that led to the founding of the US in the first place, nor the ending of the great empires of Britain, France and Holland, nor the economic sclerosis and Euro-pessimism of the 1970s and early 1980s, but the inability of the contemporary Europeans to pull together when up against the single-minded determination of Washington. At last, that has come to an end, and some would add, not a moment too late.
This Europe is a Europe that has not been so confident since the rout of Napoleon and the Concert of Europe. Moreover, it now has, through the EU, the institutional strength to weather the kind of economic and political upheavals that so unexpectedly destroyed its tranquillity in 1914, which took the best part of forty years to put right. With the development of the euro-currency and, hard on its heels, the European defence initiative -- both of which with Tony Blair's re-election in Britain will now get a shot in the arm -- Europe has discovered a new confidence and sense of independence, one that was already well under way once Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear the Cold War was over and that Russia saw its future home in Europe too.
Clearly the new Bush Administration has been taken back by the strength of European resistance to its first efforts at policy making. Having thrown down the gauntlet on a range of issues from global warming to missile defence it now has shown indications that it has stopped digging down.
Friday's statement by Bush was a remarkable substantive change: "Russia is no longer our enemy and, therefore, we shouldn't be locked into a Cold War mentality that says we keep the peace by blowing each other up. In my attitude, that's old, that's tired, that's stale."
While, as a candidate, Bush had given hints that he believed that sharp reductions in nuclear armaments, which Clinton never seriously addressed, was a corollary of missile defence, he never spelt it out. Neither did he when he made his big pitch for missile defence last month. Indeed, one could say he still hasn't.
Nevertheless this statement of last Friday's, if it has any meaning at all, is saying in effect that the US. no longer needs to maintain nuclear deterrence with Russia. In which case, yes indeed, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is redundant and missile defences, if still regarded as necessary, can be done as a collective enterprise with Europe and Russia. Similarly, the administration's announcement that it is going to renew negotiations with North Korea is another somersault of great significance.
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