The Christian Science Monitor (TMV’s old news outlet) issues a good-news report for President George Bush and his administration: anti-Bush feelings may remain but he has clearly changed the dynamic in Europe.
The Monitor reports this:
As President Bush completes the leg of his trip focusing on traditional allies, he may well have changed the dynamic in US-European relations even if he couldn’t overcome differences on key issues dividing one of the world’s oldest geopolitical blocks.
For US officials, the trip has at least begun to focus the West on the one common value – spreading democracy – that underlies many of the issues the transatlantic alliance faces. European leaders, for their part, were ebullient about obviously warmer relations with Mr. Bush than at any time in his presidency, even before the Iraq war.
In other words: the freeze may not be totally over, but a thaw has begun. More:
But three days of intense dialogue allowed continuing differences – on Iran, China, and global warming – to come out in the open. Indeed, that may be the trip’s most lasting accomplishment: It put the bitterness over Iraq in the rearview mirror and returned relations to a more normal dialogue, where both accord and disagreement surface.
Still, it’s unlikely that the visit did much to turn around a deeply anti-Bush European public. At best, says Franck Bozza, an events planner in Brussels, “some people might have gone from hostile to skeptical, but that’s about it.”
That’s still a beginning, though. It starts redirecting the debate and energy towards mutual goals. Indeed, the Monitor notes that adminstrative officials view working with Europe as a “long-haul effort.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.