Bush's Farewell Tour

They may be inky-fingered wretches, but political commentators have soul. That is why they always manage to find the poignancy that accompanies the departure from the stage of those who were once giants.

Admittedly, in the case of the European press and George Bush, who started a week-long five-nation visit to Europe on June 9, such generosity will not be easily granted. Bush could discover an unexpected love for cricket, announce that he and Laura were planning to vacation on the Côte d'Azur, declare that his most fervent wish was to march in Berlin's Love Parade, and it would do him no good. For many Europeans, no matter how hard he tries, Bush will always be considered an ignorant, incurious cowboy. He was and is, they think, a man who connived in the use of torture, and who marched into Iraq without considering the consequences of his actions. Rather like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, two of the least appealing characters in the American canon, Europe thinks that Bush was shruggingly careless about what it was he smashed up.

Bush himself seems to know how he is viewed in Europe, and to regret it. In a revealing interview with the Times of London before his trip, much of the old bluster was gone. He worried that the gunslinger language of his first term "indicated that I was not, you know, a man of peace." He tried to remind Europeans that "America is a force for good. America is a force for liberty. America is a force to fight disease." He even conceded — this from a Texas oilman — that the rich nations of the world would have to "transfer out of the hydrocarbon economy."

If Bush has changed the issues that he would like to choose as his legacy — less the war on terror, more the war on disease — it is because he has been mugged by reality. Nearly seven years after U.S. troops first set foot there, the reconstruction of Afghanistan is at best a work in progress. That of Iraq has hardly advanced beyond a blueprint — or, rather, many of them. In the Middle East, neither the democracy which the Bush team was supposed to promote, nor the Arab-Israeli peace such democracy was supposed to engender, is much in evidence. It's no wonder — most Europeans will think — that Bush wants to shift the subject to combatting HIV/AIDS and malaria.

But there is another way of looking at Bush — and at the whole sense of U.S. international relations during his administration. From the President on down, Americans are at least thinking — openly — about what went wrong, and why, and what can be learned from it. The latest issue of Foreign Affairs has a long article by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the national interest. If not always convincing, it is an effort to explain why specific ways of looking at the world keep cropping up among American policymakers, decade after decade. Rice joins — to name but a handful of luminaries — Robert Kagan, Michael Mandelbaum, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Fareed Zakaria, all of whom have recently written thoughtful, widely read books on American foreign policy and how it needs to be recalibrated after the Bush years.

And in Europe? Where's the debate there? Where are the intellectuals who take it upon themselves to educate the public on the possible roles that a small but prosperous peninsula of peninsulas can play in our century? Who is honest about Europe's economic challenge from the rising Asian nations? Who forces electorates to consider whether it is right, or wise, for the U.S. to shoulder such a large share of the world's peacemaking burden?

To ask such questions is to answer them. For nearly 20 years now, since those unforgettable six months in 1989 when the known world changed, most Europeans — and most European political leaders — have been self-absorbed in refining their own system of prosperity. That process, to be sure, has benefited the outside world; it has, for example, enabled the European Union to assist the transition to market democracy of former Soviet satellites in Eastern and Central Europe. But it is surely time for European leaders and thinkers to discuss something a little more expansive than that. Out of the challenges, and indeed failures, of the Bush Administration, a lively discourse on the nature of American power has been born. It would be nice if Europeans emulated it. But hey, it's already June. Time for the beach.