Happy Birthday, Mr. Prime Minister. Blair turns 50 this week, something he says he's been "dreading," but he knows that "now is not the time for a quiet life." He also knows that his own re-election will not come from the champagne of high strategy but the real ale of domestic politics, mainly grinding out noticeable improvements in badly run schools and hospitals — he doesn't even mention highways and railroads anymore. Last week he got a sharp reminder that some voters still harbor resentment over the war while others are impatient with slow progress at home, as his Labour Party lost control of a net total of 28 councils (out of 340) in local elections. He can't afford to give the impression that his first priority is to be a traveling salesman for global harmony.

If things are tough now, they were worse before. In March, opposition to the war from his own party was so heated that he says he talked to his children about moving out of 10 Downing St., and then suffered the greatest backbench revolt (139 Labour M.P.s voted against the war) in the history of Parliament. Then opinion veered back, with one poll showing 63% of the public supporting the war once Saddam's army collapsed. He faces another backbench revolt over his plan to put some hospitals under local control and private finance, and his long quest to have Britain join the euro appears doomed, at least during this Parliament, by a combination of sputtering economies and public distrust. A recent MORI poll revealed that 55% of British voters consider France Britain's least reliable ally. The strain of riding this roller coaster has been showing, with Blair looking more haggard during the war than at any time in his premiership. But he has bounced back, launched a new domestic p.r. offensive to go with his Eurodiplomacy — granting interviews, posing for the hip fashion photographer Rankin — and appears ready to join the battle anew.

A senior aide says starkly that Blair "is engaged in a fight for the soul of Europe, against the Gaullist impulse to define it as a counterforce to America." Because Bush turns Europeans off, it is up to Blair to persuade them that cooperating with Washington is crucial to global stability. "This strategic partnership is the only alternative to a world in which we break up into different poles of power, acting as rivals to one another, with every single dispute in the world being played off against these different poles of power," he argued last week. "That is a real danger for our world."

On the Middle East peace process, India-Pakistan, China-Taiwan, to say nothing of global issues like poverty and debt reduction, Blair sees only peril and chaos in an international system where Europe is trying to strut its stuff in opposition to the U.S. — like the solar system with the gravity turned off. In particular, he worries that disunity between Europe and the U.S. will tempt Russia to play divide-and-conquer games reminiscent of the cold war.

But he badly miscalculated in believing that France and Russia would back the Iraq war, and last week's encounter with Putin and the nascent E.U. military headquarters sandbagged him again. Is Blair a Pollyanna? In a period when fear and resentment of American power has established a powerful hold on broad swaths of European opinion, is he embarking on an argument he cannot win? That depends in part on the leaders of Russia, Germany and France.

This strategic partnership with the U.S. is the only alternative to a world in which we break up into different poles of power, acting as rivals to one another in every dispute. — TONY BLAIR

RUSSIA According to several Kremlin officials, Putin's outburst at Blair was partly due to the profound sulk into which he has fallen after making a spectacularly wrong bet about the Iraq war. His diplomats and spies advised that the coalition would get bogged down in a Vietnam-like quagmire; he expected then to ride to the rescue as a "concerned friend," says a former intimate, thus earning gratitude in Washington, stature among Arabs and contracts in Iraq for Russian firms.

A Russian diplomat says Putin's inner circle is now trying to shift blame for this miscalculation onto Washington, of all places, claiming it waged a sophisticated misinformation campaign to trap and humiliate Russia. Less conspiratorially, Putin is understandably unhappy about simply trusting America to do what is right — a problem which has no coherent solution if the U.N. is not strong or legitimate enough to be effective. "If the decision-making process ... is democratic," he said last week, "it is something we can agree with, but if decisions are being made by just one member of the international community ... we cannot." But most experts believe that Putin will revert to his mantra that a close alliance with the U.S. is a strategic imperative. Russia has never got what it wanted out of the E.U. — whose criticisms of human-rights violations in Chechnya are worse than Washington's — and with the U.S. likely to downgrade its attention to the U.N., Putin, at heart a realist, will see that Russia's status in the world will depend on proximity to the superpower.

GERMANY Gerhard Schröder is awkwardly poised between a strong tradition of close German ties with Washington and gratitude to Jacques Chirac for not abandoning him in the run-up to the Iraq war, which would have installed him as Bush's European Public Enemy No. 1. "The French saved Schröder and since then German policy is very much in France's wake," says Frank Umbach, an analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations. British officials worry that Schröder's thin majority, in a period when he must pass controversial domestic reforms, will tempt him to placate his left wing with further anti-American stands. "He only has tactics, no strategy," says one. But bobbing in Chirac's wake has its own perils, and in Washington at least, the welcome mat is not large but at least it's out. This week Schröder's foreign-policy adviser, Bernd Mutzelburg, will meet National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, their first encounter in almost six months.

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