Erhard Haubold:

Europeans are experiencing an American charm offensive: first a changed Donald Rumsfeld (at the security conference in Munich), then smiling Condoleeza Rice. And now the big man himself, visiting Brussels in Belgium and Mainz in Germany, praising the old continent as a strong partner and claiming that no power in the world will ever divide the transatlantic alliance.

A changed George W Bush? Most probably not. But a dramatically changed US strategy most certainly. Washington has exhausted its military options. What has followed is a political, administrative and humanitarian desaster. European security experts are convinced that US cannot afford another military adventure, that the US-Army is already overstretched, that Washington cannot continue to carry the Iraq burden more or less alone as it has done over the last two and half years. Burden sharing therefore is one of the main aims of Bush’s recent charm offensive. He needs diplomacy and cooperation of other countries.

In Europe, however, this agenda provokes a great deal of scepticism. There is so much pathos, so much missionary zeal loaded onto it. Driven men like Bush often “do not act rationally, are difficult to calculate and sometimes even dangerous”, says Martin Schulz, chairman of the socialist faction in the European Parliament. Many Europeans are worried about an America they once admired, an America that under Bush is leaving the western canon of values, that violates the Geneva Convention, that tortures detainees in Guantanamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that “renders” prisoners to regimes in Syria or Egypt so that they can be tortured even more severely.

Many “average” Europeans did not quite like the reception Bush got. But French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have a different agenda. They like his advances; his praise for European unity and his admission, that even the sole super power needs “strong partners”. That is electorally helpful: while about 70 % of the German population were against the war in Iraq and are convinced that America will attack Iran, there is also a strong feeling of gratitude for what America did for the continent after the devastating Second World War. There is furthermore the knowledge that Europe cannot guarantee its own security. It needs America as a partner in security, let alone the US as a major export market.

Thus Schroeder and Chirac applaud the recent elections in Iraq. And they promise Bush some concessions he can present to Congress at home: a tiny liaison bureau by the EU in Baghdad and the training of a about 700 Iraqi law officials in a neighbouring country. The Germans will continue their sizeable military assistance in Afghanistan and their training of Iraqi policemen. But, opinion in German and French governments still is that the war in Iraq was wrong.

The EU has developed what America has lost: soft power, creditability that recently helped to solve the electoral crisis in Ukraine. Europe has become a strong competitor to the US. Major questions have been settled by the EU against the opposition of America: the Kyoto protocol, for example. It is this new European self-confidence that has moved the US to sing a new diplomatic tune. But times have changed. Bush seems to want a new world order without regard to the classic balance of powers. Distrust and alienation are likely to continue between the old world and the new.

Haubold, a journalist, writes for THT from Berlin