Well, gee, maybe GWB didn't do as badly as you claimed:
nytimes.com
New York Times:
June 18, 2001
Europe Sees Bush's Trip Exceeding Expectations
By SUZANNE DALEY
ARIS, June 17 — As the dust settled on
President Bush's first official visit to Europe,
many experts and newspapers on the
Continent called his five-country excursion a
success, at least compared with what they had
expected.
"He proved he was not quite the Texas dolt that
everyone thought he was," said Josef Joffe, a
German foreign policy analyst. "And he used
moderate language. In international relations, that is
very important."
To be sure, expectations were so low that some
believed that Mr. Bush could not fail to impress.
And the trip had no particular goals beyond getting
acquainted.
Mr. Bush had been derided on this side of the
Atlantic with nicknames like the Toxic Texan and
Bully Bush for the go-it-alone "cowboy" manner in
which he decided that the United States would not
ratify the Kyoto agreement on global warming and
for his willingness to toss out arms control
agreements in pursuit of building a missile shield.
Those are things that European leaders, including
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, have
opposed.
By the end of his visit, neither Mr. Bush nor the Europeans moved an inch from their starting
points, but the American president gave his Europeans allies at least some of what they
wanted: he came offering handshakes, back-slapping, some gentler wording and the promise of
future discussion.
Mr. Bush's brand of good cheer, first names and small jokes — for instance, he called Prime
Minister Tony Blair of Britain "Mr. Landslide" — charmed his hosts from Spain to Slovenia.
During a long dinner with European Union leaders in Sweden, he apparently deftly handled a
barrage of questions on global warming and defense issues.
"Really," a Scandinavian official said, "he left a very positive impression of knowing some
facts."
Still, the European press did not miss any of the president's gaffes. Mr. Bush mangled the last
name of Prime Minister José María Aznar of Spain. He made mistakes when he tried to speak
Spanish. He kissed Queen Sofia of Spain on the cheek when protocol called for a handshake. In
Sweden, he called Africa a nation.
But headlines across Europe suggested a softening of tone. "No More Mr. Unilateralist," said
The Financial Times of Britain. The left-wing French daily Libération wrote, "George W. Bush
is manifestly not the `superficial buffoon and arrogant Texan' portrayed in the media."
Editorial writers who 10 days ago were condemning him for a failure to consult suggested that
he was proving more flexible than advertised.
The leftist La Repubblica of Rome noted that Bush had responded to a question by saying,
"Unilateralists don't sit around tables listening to the views of others."
The editorial went on: "He did sit at the table. With passion he asked for the Europeans' help in
convincing Putin. With humility he asked for their trust, guaranteeing that he would consult at
every step."
Charles Grant of the London-based Center for European Reform said: "The personal stuff is
quite important. Europe's big worry was that he was not interested and ignorant. Just the fact
that he spent a week here goes a long way."
Experts point out that most new American presidents have been regarded at first with
skepticism and derision in Europe.
"It's a process," Mr. Joffe said. "They called Carter a peanut farmer, when in fact he was an
engineer. They called Reagan an actor in B- movies, when in fact he had run the state of
California with a huge economy quite successfully. Europeans have to work out their clichés
about Bush, and that has started to happen now."
For many here, it was actually Mr. Bush's last stop — his meeting with Mr. Putin — that was
deemed the most important, and there again many were relieved to see a friendly encounter
between the two men, even if their views seemed intractably apart.
Europeans have been much more reluctant than the United States to contemplate moves that
might rattle Mr. Putin, like the proposed defense missile shield and the enlargement of NATO
to include the Baltic States.
But while Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin made clear that they did not agree on those two issues, the
tone of the meeting was cordial enough to allay European fears, at least for now. That was
something Mr. Bush needed.
"Bush and Putin; first good friends" said the headline in the French weekly "Le Journal du
Dimanche." In Russia, too, television reporters cast the meeting as a success, emphasizing how
the two men had agreed to visit each other soon.
None of this is to say that Mr. Bush's intractability on the issues went unnoticed.
His refusal to budge on the Kyoto Protocol on global warming prompted headlines in Germany
like, "Bush disappoints Europeans' hopes: underlines his "no" to Kyoto agreement."
One cartoon in the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung showed Mr. Bush with a big grin and a
smoking six- shooter. The headline over the nearby article was "The Boss — charming but
tough."
Some newspapers said Mr. Bush's reiteration of his stand on the Kyoto Protocol was a
contributing factor in prompting the riots that plagued the European Union summit meeting in
Goteborg, Sweden.
And some experts considered his speech in Poland on the future of Europe to contain some of
the "usual" American misconceptions. In the speech, Mr. Bush called for the enlargement of
NATO and the European Union almost as if they were the same entity. Moreover, some said,
urging quick European Union enlargement failed to understand the complexity of the issues
involved.
"A lot of times, Americans talk about it like you just sign a bit of paper and you're in," Mr.
Grant said. "It is a little bit more complicated than that. There are 80,000 pages of documents to
go over. You are half way to joining a state. That's why it takes years to negotiate these
things."
But European leaders seemed eager to like Mr. Bush, and one measure of their newfound
comfort may be that as soon as he left, he was hardly mentioned again for the remainder of the
summit meeting. |
