Bush's Foreign Affair.(Brief Article)

Bianca Jagger, the celebrity activist, isn't exactly a fan of George W. But she loved the U.S. president's first European tour, looking on with pleasure from among thousands of shouting, marching protesters. They jeered him, reviled him, even mooned him. They trashed him as the "Toxic Texan," hoisted banners proclaiming bush go home and burned American flags. More than a hundred were arrested and dozens injured as rioters threw stones and broke shop windows in some of the uglier violence to cloud a European summit. How would she sum up the man, from a European perspective? "The contemporary antichrist," she says.

The trip was supposed to be something of a "charm offensive," designed to dispel misapprehensions of the American president as a conservative, Bible-banging, gun-toting, global-polluting, undiplomatic stumblebum. He made clear progress. Europe's leaders exercised their well-learned politesse. But charmed they were not. "We don't agree on the Kyoto treaty," Bush said bluntly at the close of Thursday's summit. That's putting it mildly. At Gothenburg, the environment and the issue of global warming emerged as the main flash point in American-European relations. Yet Bush's other initiatives won a more receptive hearing than almost anyone expected. On contentious matters of trade policy, European commissioner Pascal Lamy felt "good vibrations" from the White House. And Europe's leaders kept an open mind on missile defense. "It's simply logical to consider it," said Pio Cabanillas, spokesman for the Spanish government. Even those who are against Bush's plan to jettison the 1972 antiballistic-missile treaty have concluded that, as one senior EU official puts it, "we really do need to think twice about deterrence in the 21st century."

That in itself is significant. In the end it appears Europe is prepared to cut America's new president some slack, even if the protesters and much of the international press do not. European media recorded Bush's linguistic bumbling with malicious glee. In Madrid he made poor attempts to speak Spanish. At NATO in Brussels he lapsed into mangled cold-war rhetoric, talking about "other leaders of the free world" even as he derided "cold-war thinking." But it was global warming that kept raising temperatures. While Secretary of State Colin Powell and Europe's foreign ministers used a "working dinner" in Sweden to craft ...