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Tony Blair walked into what one British official calls "an old-fashioned KGB-style ambush." After 90 minutes of cordial talk last Tuesday at Vladimir Putin's country house outside Moscow, the British Prime Minister and his host emerged for what Blair thought would be a routine press conference. Instead, he got a public flaying. The Russian President was defiant. He mocked Blair's oft-repeated claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. He refused to accommodate the victors in Iraq by agreeing to jump-start its reconstruction. He dismissed Blair's idea of lifting sanctions quickly. And he made the dead-on-arrival suggestion that Russian troops be sent to Iraq as peacekeepers.
No wonder the British press described the summit as a body blow to Blair from "Vlad the Impaler," as the Mirror called Putin. Behind the scenes, things got even uglier. At a small dinner with Blair later that evening, sources tell Time, Putin unleashed a full measure of pent-up fury. Over smoked fish with caviar and mushroom soup with croutons, he denounced Blair's ally George W. Bush for ignoring Russia, for not treating it like the great power it deserved to be, and for double standards. If Russia did in Chechnya and Georgia what the U.S. had done in Iraq, Putin fumed, it would never get away with it.
It was one more rivet busting out of the Atlantic alliance, and Blair — the alliance's self-appointed chief engineer — "is very worried," says a senior British official, about its coming apart. While Putin was venting in Moscow, the four European countries whose leaders were most opposed to the Iraq war — France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg — were holding what reporters dubbed the "Mini-Me summit" to announce they would create a headquarters for a non-NATO European military force. Though their communiqué was filled with fudges and the new force may not amount to much, the initiative was a deliberate thumb in the eye to NATO — and to American influence in Europe.
Spain, Britain, and other countries that backed Washington over the war weren't invited. A Dutch Foreign Ministry official derided the meeting in Brussels as "bad on timing, bad on content and bad on the participating states." Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told TIME that "these proposals are dangerous because they risk undermining NATO when we need to be strengthening it." Privately, British officials were scathing too, calling the new headquarters — which, deliciously, will overlook Burns' residence in a Brussels suburb — as "nonsense" and "ridiculous." One said the Germans had tried to temper France's passion to create an independent European force implicitly hostile to NATO, "but frankly, they failed."
Last month, many European foreign-policy experts were betting that the rancor generated by Bush and Blair's decision to fight in Iraq without a second U.N. resolution would soon dissipate, after opponents had a chance to absorb the reality of Saddam's quick defeat. Germany, Russia and France have made some initial moves to get along better with Washington, but for every step forward there have been at least as many back. So Blair is now moving urgently to try to shore things up.
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.
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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.
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.
FRANCE Chirac told Bush three weeks ago that he would take a "pragmatic" approach to Iraq's reconstruction, but on many fronts he appears intent on leading the countries that want to combat American domination. Last week's plan for the new E.U. military headquarters prompted one exasperated NATO official to ask, "If this is pragmatism, what does obstructionism look like?" But in Brussels last week, Chirac suggested silkily that history favored his vision over Blair's. "In looking at the evolution of the world," he said, "one can easily see that a multipolar world is creating itself quite naturally. Besides Europe, there's China, India, even South America," each developing its own viewpoint and proper role. And transatlantic relations require "complementarity and partnership between equal partners."
Pascal Boniface, director of the Institute of International and Strategic Relations in Paris, argues that Blair's yearlong straddle between Europe and the U.S., his struggle to find common ground between Chirac's multipolar vision and one that presumes American primacy, will become increasingly strained. "Appearances of accord don't work over a long period. I can't foresee America becoming more like Europe any time soon, so for Blair's bet to pay off, Europe has to become more like America" — not likely either, in Boniface's view.
But Blair is no longer trying find common ground with Chirac; he wants to beat him, in alliance with other E.U. countries that also worry about alienating the U.S. — and who suspect Chirac believes what De Gaulle said in 1958 — that "Europe is a means for France to regain the stature she has lacked since Waterloo, as the first among the world's nations." Asked in Parliament why Britain did not attend the Brussels meeting that announced the new E.U. military headquarters, Blair said, "For a simple reason: four countries were involved and 11 were not. We are part of the 11." Most of the new entrants to the E.U. — whom Chirac famously said had "missed a good opportunity to keep quiet" when they disagreed with France's position in February — are likely to back Blair too.
"It's a big battle of ideas," says a senior Blair aide, with Russia expected to shift toward Blair and Germany as the key swing vote. Blair has a lot of confidence in his persuasive powers, and he's persistent. His approach to Putin is instructive. He has now seen Putin at least a dozen times, since even before he became President of Russia, convinced that in the long run a big investment would pay off even if it sometimes caused him short-term embarrassment. Despite his rough ride last week, he invited Putin to London for a state visit next month, the first of a Russian leader since 1870. Just as he never bothers to dispel the "Bush's poodle" caricature by blasting the President in public, Blair was too disciplined to respond to Putin in kind last week.
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George W. Bush could make Blair's task much easier, or harder. Some show of respect for the opinions of Europe — making real the "vital role" Bush has promised for the U.N. in Iraq, putting pressure on Israel as well as the Palestinians to follow the road map to its destination — will make the American dominance Blair accepts a lot easier for others in the E.U. to swallow. But even Colin Powell, Europe's favorite Bushite, has said that France will suffer for playing hardball at the Security Council; elsewhere in Washington, Churchill's famous dictum "In Victory: Magnanimity" seems to have fallen off the required reading list. One National Security Council staffer, asked to confirm whether Rice really did sum up U.S. policy as "Forgive Russia, ignore Germany and punish France," said he had not heard her say that, "but it's not a bad description of things." And according to State Department officials, Administration hard-liners are now backing Israel in trying to eliminate all parties except the U.S. in monitoring compliance with the road map — including Russia and the E.U., who helped draft it.
With Bush flying to Europe at the end of this month, first to Russia and then to the G-8 summit in (where else?) France, a potential exists for another bust-up — or maybe for a moment of catharsis that exorcises the demons in the international system. In private, sources tell Time, Bush still talks about being "humble" and "gracious" in victory. British officials quietly suggest that the President take advantage of the moment to do something big with a European audience in mind — perhaps on the Middle East, or on global issues dear to Blair's heart, like poverty, health or debt reduction. Because, as one senior aide to Blair says, his boss not only faces a struggle for the soul of Europe, but "a struggle for the soul of George Bush" too — and he must win both to win either.
- By J.F.O. MCALLISTER | London
- The British leader battles to save the Atlantic alliance