A Pragmatic Europe Warms to Bush

“It’s a nightmare,” Sir Elton John announced shortly after the November election: “George W. Bush and this administration are the worst thing that has ever happened to America.” Yet, a few weeks later, the British chanteur was in the East Room of the White House accepting an award from the Toxic Texan.

It is always dangerous to read anything into a pop star’s political posturing, but Sir Elton’s rapid candle-in-a-hurricane change of heart is actually representative of a deeper change in the mood music of Old Europe. In the wake of the election, the Continent is slowly coming to terms with Bush.

This, it should be stressed, is not a first choice. Numerous surveys showed that if Europeans had a vote on Nov. 2, John Kerry would have won by a landslide. The morning after the election, the London Daily Mirror asked, “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”

For European leaders such as France’s Jacques Chirac and Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, Bush’s victory reflected not just a tragedy but a failure of foreign policy.

Yet if the chancelleries of Old Europe are famous for anything, it is coldhearted pragmatism. “There is no point wondering what might have been,” says one German diplomat. “Foreign policy cannot just stop for four years.”

Paradoxically, the very thing that neoconservatives detest most about European diplomacy -- that Machiavellian willingness to cut deals with anyone -- is now working in Bush’s favor. But there is arguably more to this sea change than just a grumpy acceptance of the status quo. From a European perspective, three things are making it easier to warm to the Bush White House.

One is the death of Yasser Arafat. No issue divides Europe and the U.S. more keenly than the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. For the last few years, Europeans have criticized Bush for failing to put enough pressure on Israel to get out of the occupied territories and for refusing to deal with Arafat. But since Arafat’s death, Europeans and Americans have been able to find common ground: supporting Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza, putting pressure on Israel to let the Palestinians hold elections and, covertly, backing Mahmoud Abbas to become the next Palestinian leader.

A second reason is Europe’s growing worries about Islamic terrorism. The murder last month of Theo van Gogh, a provocative Dutch filmmaker, at the hands of an Islamic militant has been called Europe’s 9/11. Though the two events are obviously not fully comparable, it is certainly true that American conservatives, such as Francis Fukuyama and Bernard Lewis, have found a wider audience recently for the idea that radical Islam is inimical to European traditions of tolerance.

The third force is the reappearance, albeit in a milder form, of the threat that kept the transatlantic alliance together for half a century. The Russian bear is growling again. The Ukrainian election -- complete with its KGB-style poisoning of the opposition leader and heavy-handed electoral fraud -- has reminded European diplomats of Vladimir V. Putin’s determination to control his “near abroad.”

European bankers, who have invested a fortune in Russia, have been spooked by the state-sponsored bankruptcy of Yukos, once hailed as Russia’s most Western company. These worries are magnified by the growing influence of the eight new members of the European Union from Central Europe, all of which are instinctively much more anti-Russian (and pro-American).

If these three things have prompted Europeans to reconsider Bush, European leaders also claim that the White House is reconsidering them, particularly in the light of the Iraqi quagmire. They point to the relatively warm response from Washington to the EU’s attempts to negotiate with Iran (something Bush might well have previously dismissed as pointless). One former prime minister points out that second-term presidents have generally been more conciliatory figures, less interested in posturing and more in horse-trading. He cites Ronald Reagan as an example. There is a personal edge to all this. Just as the snooty continentals eventually came to admire the gormless Hollywood actor, there is a grudging willingness to rethink some prejudices about the inarticulate Texan.

Many European leaders once swallowed the Michael Moore version of history: that Bush was an ignorant interloper who stole the White House. His thumping reelection, however, shows that he represents a large body of conservative American opinion.

In short, Europeans are getting used to the idea that it is not Bush who is the exception, but the U.S. itself that is exceptional -- and that if they want to deal with this exceptional superpower they need to humor it rather than rile it. Strangely enough, this has been Tony Blair’s strategy all along; it is rapidly becoming the Continent’s strategy too.