Sidney Blumenthal:

President George Bush has reached a dead end in his foreign policy, but he has failed to recognise his quandary. His belief that the polite reception he received in Europe is a vindication of his previous adventures is a vestige of fantasy.

As the strains of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, filled the Concert Noble in Brussels, Bush behaved as though the mood music itself was a dramatic new phase in the transatlantic relationship. He gives no indication that he grasps the exhaustion of his policy. His statement on Iran reflected this: “This notion that the US is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table.’’ Including, presumably, the “simply ridiculous’’.

Bush is scrambling to cobble together policies across the board. At the last minute he rescued his summit with Vladimir Putin, who refuses to soften his authoritarian measures, with a step toward safeguarding Russian plutonium that could be used for nuclear weapons production. This programme was negotiated by Bill Clinton and neglected by Bush until two weeks ago.

The European reception for Bush was not an embrace of his neoconservative world view, but an attempt to put it in the past. New Europe is trying to compartmentalise old Bush. To the extent that he promises to be different, the Europeans encourage him; to the extent that he is the same, they pretend it’s not happening.

The Europeans, including the British government, feel privately that the past three years have been hijacked by Iraq. Facing the grinding, bloody and unending reality of Iraq doesn’t mean accepting Bush’s original premises, but getting on with the task of stability. Ceasing the finger-pointing is the basis for European consensus on its new, if not publicly articulated, policy: containment of Bush. Naturally, Bush misses the nuances and ambiguities.

Of course, he has already contained himself, or at least his pre-emption doctrine, which seems to have been good for one-time use only. None of the allies is willing to repeat the experience. Bush can’t manage another such military show anyway, as his army is pinned down in Iraq.

The problem of Iran is in many ways the opposite of Iraq. The Europeans have committed their credibility to negotiations, the Iranians have diplomatic means to preclude unilateral US action, and Bush — who, according to European officials, has no sense of what to do — is boxed in.

The secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, seeking to impress French intellectuals while in Paris, referred to Iran as totalitarian, as if the authoritarian Shia regime neatly fitted the Soviet Union model. With this rhetorical legerdemain, she extended the overstretched analogy of the “war on terrorism’’ as the equivalent of the cold war to Persia. Her lack of intellectual adeptness dismayed her interlocutors.

Regardless of Rice’s wordplay, it is not a policy. Rice has vaguely threatened to refer Iran to the UN security council. The “simply ridiculous’’

remains on the table at the same time as the US is unengaged in diplomacy. Bush doesn’t know whether to join the Europeans in guaranteeing an agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons or not.

Bush has hummed a few bars of rapprochement. With their applause, the Europeans have begun to angle him into a corner on Iran. In time Bush must either join the negotiations or regress to neoconservatism, which would wreck the European relationship.

If he chooses a course that is not “simply ridiculous’’, on his next visit the Europeans might be willing to play Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica. —The Guardian