Looking for Friends in Very Strange Places

By Mike Allen

Peter the Great built St. Petersburg on Russia's far northwestern edge as a strategic window on Europe. On his way to this year's G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, President Bush will stop off at his own strategic window on Europe: Stralsund. If you've been to Stralsund, the question might be, Why? The town, once in East Germany, has a population of about 60,000 and is famous for a local berry drink that tastes like flat, bitter orange soda. All that matters to the President, though, is that Stralsund was once represented in the Bundestag by Angela Merkel, who unseated Gerhard Schroeder last fall to become Germany's first female Chancellor. Bush and Schroeder barely spoke, but Bush and Merkel hit it off when she visited the White House in January, and the overnight Stralsund detour is indicative of the President's new stab at European diplomacy: find friends, even if the effort takes you to out-of-the-way places.

The President's image across Europe is so poor that in a recent poll on the Continent, a majority of respondents said the U.S. was more of a threat to world stability than China or Iran. When questioned about that poll at a news conference in Vienna last month, Bush snorted at what he considered an "absurd statement" and said, "For Europe, September 11 was a moment; for us, it was a change of thinking. I vowed to the American people I would do everything I could to defend our people, and will." The retort was part of the confident, nondefensive approach Bush took during 44 hours in Vienna and Budapest. "Let me talk about Guantanamo," he said early in one meeting, not waiting for his hosts to bring up the unpleasant subject of the military detention center. (It's a subject that, because of the Supreme Court ruling, is still likely to be a staple of the questions at his European press conferences this week.) The massive demonstrations that had been predicted in Austria did not materialize, and Bush was tickled when Austrian President Heinz Fischer slathered praise on the U.S., recounting the Marshall Plan's role in rebuilding his country after World War II and calling the poll's results "grotesque."

Bush occasionally got crabby on European trips early in his presidency; in 2002, after enduring days of anti-American demonstrations, he famously called NBC's David Gregory a preening "intercontinental" when Gregory asked French President Jacques Chirac a question in French. But Bush's advisers believe he has discovered a formula for dealing with the Continent that is working for him. The White House concentrates his visits and speeches on friendly countries and largely ignores the recalcitrant ones. "We're building relationships where there are relationships to build," said a White House official. That explains why the President spends so little time in France and Spain--the blue states of Europe--and so much in Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia, countries once behind the Iron Curtain where his odes to democracy are particularly resonant. Beyond just visiting, Bush has been pushing for the eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union, which would give the map of Europe more of a red-state look.

White House aides say that this is diplomacy pure and simple and that it would be wrong to give the President's approach a political cast. But advisers admit that Bush the healer and Bush the diplomat are the White House theme music for his final two years in office--out of necessity, because of the need to enlist Europe in pressuring Iran and North Korea and as part of an effort to burnish the President's legacy.

So he's trying to gain converts, one country at a time. In Vienna, First Lady Laura Bush toured the original megachurch, St. Stephen's Cathedral, built in the 1100s, and the President was jolly enough to tease a photographer about his tumbleweed-like hair. Austria was having a heat wave, but Bush patiently answered personal questions from students under hot lights and tapped along as the Vienna Boys' Choir offered up On the Beautiful Blue Danube. Afterward, one of the boys presented the President with a teddy bear. The boy was from Ohio. The President asked him how the Reds were doing. At least for a moment, Europe didn't seem so alien.

With reporting by Michael Elliott/ London