ONE POLITICIAN whom George W. Bush will not meet on his tour of Europe this week is Henriette Kjaer. Which is a pity. Until last week Ms Kjaer was Denmark’s Minister for Family and Consumer Affairs. She resigned when it was revealed that she neglected to pay the bill, until ordered to do so by the courts, for two sofas and some curtains that she had bought. “I did not want to stay in office,” she explained, “and be labelled as the over-consumption minister.” She had committed no crime, she insisted, but was ashamed that she had been “guilty of being too passive about my private finances”.
So instead of whipping around a home furnishings department in the company of Ms Kjaer, President Bush will have dinner tonight with Jacques Chirac. The contrast between France and Denmark could hardly be starker. While Mayor of Paris, M Chirac, among other perks, claimed the equivalent of £100 a day in cash for stocking up the fruit bowl in his official residence. One can easily imagine that M Chirac spent a great deal of his day reclining on a chaise longue, dressed in a toga, dropping grapes into his mouth. But that is an awful lot of grapes to consume. It would be impossible to accuse M Chirac of being “too passive” about his private finances. Hyperactive, more like.
Yet dinner with France’s greatest living authority on fruit is not the only treat in store for the American delegation. Tomorrow night Mr Bush is to break bread with José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, Javier Solana, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Policy and, wait for it, Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg. Mr Juncker is there because his country holds the rotating EU presidency. On Saturday The Times reported on a town in Nebraska where the sole remaining resident, Elsie Eiler, is the mayor, the tavern keeper and the chief librarian. Mr Juncker’s position is like promoting Mrs Eiler to serve as the President of the United States as well.
If three nights in Brussels is not enough, Mr Bush will travel on to Mainz in Germany. Here the highlight will be lunch with Gerhard Schröder. Herr Schröder is enjoying something of a revival after — having tried virtually everything else — rebranding himself as a man of principle. That this has about as much credibility as a kleptomaniac seeking salvation as a store detective has not disturbed German voters. Only then will Mr Bush escape east, ultimately to meet Vladimir Putin.
This itinerary begs one huge question of the White House. Why on earth are you doing it? The President did, admittedly, have to choose somewhere for his first foreign trip after his re-election. He could have come to Europe but only graced the capitals of those countries with troops stationed in Iraq. Or he could have conducted a whirlwind tour of those states in the Middle East that are progressing towards democracy. There would have been logic in heading towards China and India, a symbolic recognition of their emerging and vital roles in the coming world order.
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But Brussels, Chirac and Schröder? One is left with the horrible suspicion that the trip was set up during the early afternoon of election day last November when the exit polls pointed to a Kerry victory.
What will be on display over the next few days are hyperbole and hypocrisy. There will much talk of mending fences, building bridges and burying the hatchet (can one mend a fence, build a bridge and bury a hatchet simultaneously?). There has already been lofty chatter in Belgium that this presidential visit — with Mr Bush spending a few hours in the European Parliament and attending an EU Council meeting — constitutes formal acceptance of Brussels as the capital of Europe. Not only that, the visit is said by some to be a return to the “multilateral diplomacy” of the pre-neoconservative era, with the United States recognising the EU as a global superpower to which it must occasionally doff its cap.
All of which is close to nonsense. There are certain areas where the differences between what Donald Rumsfeld memorably described as “old Europe” and the Bush Administration have narrowed. The most important of these is the Middle East peace process. Progress there, however, has occurred only because of the death of Yassir Arafat, a man whom M Chirac and Herr Schröder fêted until his last breath and, unfashionable as it is to record, because Israel wiped out the most senior members of the Hamas hierarchy — a deed condemned loudly by the President of France and the German Chancellor.
The truth is that the next four years may be as turbulent for US-European relations as Mr Bush’s first term. This is because France, among others, is pushing to lift an arms embargo on China which, while arguably of limited practical value, is regarded in the United States as needlessly endangering Taiwan. Trouble will occur over Iran where the evolving position of the EU is that Mr Bush should offer bigger, better bribes to Tehran not to proceed with nuclear weapons and desist from supporting the Iranian opposition as part of the bargain. There will be splits over Turkey, which Washington would like to see in the EU, a notion that much of a supposedly secular Europe regards with horror.
So why is Mr Bush wasting his time with this venture? Perhaps he has been persuaded that he should encourage Europe to acquire, as Henry Kissinger famously suggested, a single telephone number that the United States can ring on foreign policy matters. If such a line could be set-up it would be at best Dial-a-Mumble on most major international questions.
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The President would have been better off dumping this idea, staying at home and keeping the card of a pizza company popular on both sides of the Atlantic in his wallet. After all, Domino’s — unlike Paris, Berlin and Brussels — can be relied on to deliver.