Good News Is No News; Not much can help Tony Blair's numbers. Europe's looking to new leaders already.

Byline: Stryker Mcguire (With Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Kris Anderson in London and Stefan Theil in Berlin)

News flash! Tony Blair meets Jacques Chirac in Paris! If you missed it, don't feel bad. A few days before last week's summit, NEWSWEEK called the head of one of the premier think tanks on European affairs to ask about the agenda. There was an awkward pause. "What meeting?" asked the expert.

Contrast that with Angela Merkel's get-together in Berlin two weeks ago with Gordon Brown, Blair's chancellor of the exchequer and anointed successor. That got ink. Germany's popular new chancellor has also met with one of the front runners for Chirac's job, his fellow Gaullist Nicolas Sarkozy, who (tellingly) campaigns as the anti-Chirac. The French president has been irrelevant for some time--and so, increasingly, is Blair. If the killing of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is expected to provide only a temporary bounce to George W. Bush's poll numbers, it's likely to give the British prime minister even less. "Blair and Chirac are lame ducks," says Sarah Schaefer of the Foreign Policy Centre in London. "Interest in them is retreating because there is, really, little more that they can do."

The leaders are as united by irrelevance as they were divided by Iraq. Blair's fresh face and ideas once beguiled Europe, rallying support for military interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq--his Waterloo. The gangly Chirac tilted Quixote-like against the American windmill, challenging the legitimacy of the invasion and seeking to establish Europe as a counterweight to U.S. power run amok. Yet Chirac's approval rating hovered at a dismal 22 percent last week. At 73, all but certain not to run again in the 2007 elections, his name could be off the ballot for the first time since 1974. Blair, just 53, will also take a tired leave. According to a poll last week, 67 percent of Britons said they were dissatisfied with his performance.

As in the United States, Europeans are eager for a new generation of leaders. If they have their druthers, Merkel and the successors to Chirac and Blair will look inward, not outward. Farewell, Blairite internationalism and interventionism. With the British economy growing weaker, with low-growth Germany ...