Smoother relations with allies focus of Bush trip to Europe

President Bush embarked Monday on a weeklong European mission in which he is seeking to restore the United States’ relations with some of its most important allies and move beyond the divisiveness of the Iraq war.

Bush, who arrived Monday night in this bustling Eastern European capital, aims to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the recent elections of a new, more pro-U.S. group of leaders as they discuss issues including global warming.

Beginning Wednesday, Bush will be joining other representatives of the Group of 8 major industrialized nations in a resort village on Germany’s Baltic coast. The forum is undergoing a potential leadership transformation over a two-year period, from Washington to Tokyo.

Five of the eight summit participants are just arriving in office or are nearing departure: French President Nicholas Sarkozy, elected last month, will be participating in the summit for the first time, as will Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in office barely eight months.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is about to step down but is likely to be replaced by another leader with an affinity for America, Gordon Brown. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, with whom the U.S. has had an increasingly contentious relationship, says he will leave office when his term ends in the spring of 2008. Bush has 19 months remaining in his final term.

“The lineup does matter. It matters collectively,” said Simon Serfaty, an expert on European politics and diplomacy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In Washington there is a sense that the U.S.-European relationship is on far sounder footing than during Bush’s first term -- at least among leaders, if not their constituents. Bush’s aggressive rhetoric and decision to invade Iraq angered European leaders long accustomed to a more collaborative approach.

Much of Europe’s leadership has “essentially moved off of boxing Bush about the ears on Iraq,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a National Security Council expert on Europe during the Clinton administration.

Yet the leaders will still bring to the town of Heiligendamm often-divergent domestic political pressures and little popular support for cooperating with the U.S. at a time of widespread popular opposition to the war.

“The good news about Iraq is that both sides of the Atlantic have essentially decided to call a political truce,” Kupchan said.

Still, three major questions hang over the week’s events:

* Will protesters disrupt the summit, for which an eight-mile security perimeter has been established?

* How will the other summit participants respond to Bush’s proposal to open new talks on climate change and to his acknowledgment that global warming is a problem?

* To what extent can heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow be reversed in coming months?

With U.S.-Russian relations troubled by differences over the U.S. plan to deploy missile defense units in the Czech Republic and Poland and over the still-uncertain future of Kosovo, “the most interesting issue on the agenda ... is Russia, and how the other seven will handle Mr. Putin,” Serfaty said.

Bush and his wife, Laura, arrived to a red-carpet welcome and headed to their hotel.

The six-nation trip will take Bush to Albania, for the first visit by a U.S. president, and to the Vatican, for his first meeting with Pope Benedict XVI. Bush also will visit Poland, Italy and Bulgaria.

The president sought last week to smooth U.S. relations with the summit participants. He set out toughened sanctions intended to force Sudan to stem the violence in Darfur, outlined new U.S. support for the global fight against HIV/AIDS and called for talks intended to set new targets, but not specific caps, for stemming emissions that scientists widely blame for causing global warming.

European governments have generally been more aggressive than the Bush administration in calling for specific steps to combat global warming.

In the only formal speech scheduled on the trip, the president plans today to return to the “freedom agenda” with which he opened his second term.

National security advisor Stephen J. Hadley said Bush would contrast democracy with terrorism, draw attention to Cuba and Myanmar, also known as Burma, among nations “where freedom has not yet made any inroads,” and raise the “challenge of promoting democracy” in such powers as China and Russia.

james.gerstenzang @latimes.com