A Tour Without A Trip

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The discussions in Sweden, at the semiannual summit between the E.U. and the U.S., were bound to be trickier--and were. On their own territory--Bush was the first sitting U.S. President ever to visit Sweden--the Europeans set the agenda, which consisted mainly of beating up on Bush for his decision to junk the Kyoto accord. Climate change dominated both the formal meeting and the dinner that evening in Goteborg's town hall. Bush, said an Administration official, found the dinner a "long two hours."

He had better get used to it; with European leaders under electoral pressure to show green hearts, global warming will feature at summits for years to come. And so, for all the grips and grins in Ljubljana, will missile defense. Bush has asked Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to work with their Russian counterparts on a "new security framework." Those talks won't be easy; Washington may have changed the dismissive, almost contemptuous tone in which it discussed Moscow earlier in the year, but Putin has deeply held positions on missile defense and NATO enlargement--and powerful constituencies who will see that he sticks to them.

So future meetings between the Americans and the Russians are certain to be tougher than the one last week, and Bush's relationship with the West Europeans will continue to have its fraught moments. The values gap between Europe and the U.S. may be smaller than many think, but there are two senses in which the Atlantic dialogue is moving onto new and, for Americans, unfamiliar ground. The first involves the growing economic power of the European Union. Welch allowed that he was "surprised" by the demands made by Mario Monti, the E.U.'s antitrust commissioner, which only goes to show that one of America's most respected CEOs can't always be well informed. The E.U. has been exercising jurisdiction over mergers between non-European firms for more than a decade, and under Monti's leadership has taken an aggressive line on anything that seems to dilute competition. That's part of a larger picture. Whether it's in world-trade talks, international rules on computer privacy or standards for food safety and labeling, American companies are increasingly finding that the rules of the globalization game are at least as likely to be set in Brussels as in Washington.

More significantly, U.S. policymakers, for the first time, have to cope with "European" attitudes toward economics, the environment and even defense that is just that--European. The E.U. is slowly but surely turning into something less than a nation state but much more than a trading club. Even its leaders who are "pro-American"--like Aznar--have staked their future on turning the E.U. into a true political force.

Americans will find it easier to cope with such a development if Europeans are modest about their own habits. Whatever may have been true before last week, this is hardly the time for Europeans to claim they are more virtuous than the gun-loving, arrogant Americans. Ask the police and the demonstrators in Goteborg what they think of European values.