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When you poke under Europe's high-minded objections, you discover a lot of hostility toward Bush personally, whom a U.S. diplomat ruefully calls the "toxic Texan." His rhetoric plays better in Crawford than in Calais. Across the Atlantic, his style grates: Europeans are offended by his swagger, tough talk and invocations of God and evil. "People in Germany feel threatened by such wording," says Ludger Volmer, foreign affairs spokesman for the Green Party, and they dislike identifying an enemy with evil, oneself with good. "Politicians here," says Gerald Duchaussoy, 27, a Paris office worker, "don't speak with his language." Many Europeans have no patience with the argument that Bush is adopting a tough-guy posture to make sure Saddam knows he means business. A former British cabinet minister in the pro-American Conservative Party leaned over toward a TIME correspondent at lunch recently to say he considered Bush "terrifying," "ignorant," "a prisoner of the religious right" and "like a child running around with a grenade with the pin pulled out." The compliment is returned; it's no secret across the Atlantic that Bush's people frequently call their allies "Euro-wimps."
6 AMERICA'S FOREIGN POLICY IS TOO ARROGANT
Many Europeans complain not just about Bush's style but about his substance as well. They disagree with a broad range of his policies, ranging from his opposition to the Kyoto treaty on global warming to his support of the death penalty. The gravest gulf comes over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where Europeans believe Bush's inaction and support for Israel lend credence to Islamist claims that the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq are really a war against Islam.
To many Europeans, this war looks like U.S. imperialism. And hypocrisy: they don't see why diplomacy can deal with North Korea's nuclear-weapons program but not with Iraq's, or why U.N. resolutions should be enforced on Iraq but not on Israel. That makes even historic allies dig in their heels. Last fall's protracted struggle to negotiate U.N. Resolution 1441 was not just about Iraq, said a participating diplomat, but also about U.S. power in the world. Europeans, says Stephane Rozes, director of France's CSA polling firm, "see the Americans harnessing their superpower status not to the greater interest of the world but to its own national interests." That is, of course, something other countries think France does very well itself.
Europeans largely accept the U.S. as the undisputed world leader. But they want Washington to take their concerns and approaches into account. Bush's provocative doctrine of pre-emptive war--and Iraq is its first example--plus his Administration's triumphalist tone boil down, in European eyes, to a dismissive message: We're strong; you're not; so shut up and do what we want. Says Lousewies van der Laan, a Dutch member of the European Parliament: "They need the rest of the world more than ever, and they seem to be going out of their way to offend it."