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Goodbye to all that

This article is more than 15 years old
Editorial

World leaders have legacies. Global disasters have aftermaths. George Bush will be in office seven months longer, but as he flew into London yesterday on the final leg of his continental au revoir, Europe was already coping with the aftermath of his presidency. There are some positives. The mere prospect of Mr Bush's departure is enough to lift spirits. A study of 24 nations around the world, conducted by Pew, found that the image of the US had improved, but that the optimism was driven by the impending regime change in Washington. Even so, the damage Mr Bush has inflicted on America's image is impressive, especially with close allies like Turkey: only eight of the nations surveyed had majorities with a favourable view of the US.

Rebuilding global trust will be the major task of the next US president. The last thing he should think about is continuity, the idea that Bush-era polices are somehow set in stone. Nothing could be more toxic than the notion that the next president will carry on the policy of "coercive democracy" - as Scott McClellan, Mr Bush's former press secretary, phrased it - and that the next country to feel it will be Iran. The first casualty of a Kosovo-style air campaign on Iran's nuclear facilities would be the Iranian people. The second casualty would be the Iraqi people. Little that Mr Bush has done in the Middle East adds up to a coherent strategy, and nothing in the case of Iran, which has blossomed under his presidency. As a result, Iran's nefarious regional influence now extends from the deserts of Afghanistan to the shores of the eastern Mediterranean.

The president's valedictory tour of Europe, just like his recent tour of the Middle East, is a reminder of just how much his personal authority has shrunk. Asked whether she would miss him, Chancellor Angela Merkel praised him as a leader who would call a spade a spade, but refused to answer the question. In Rome, a gushing and unnecessary gesture by Pope Benedict XVI (he granted the president a rare tour of the gardens where he prays) was criticised by a number of cardinals for being excessively friendly. Paris responded to his presence with indifference. On the substantive issues, while backing stronger sanctions on Iran, Ms Merkel refused to back his plea to keep the use of force on the table. And so too should Gordon Brown today ignore Mr Bush's warning about setting a timetable for a British pull-out from Iraq. If it is not clear to British army commanders what 4,200 of their troops are still doing in Basra airport now then it will not be any clearer by the end of the year when they should leave.

Redressing the errors of the last eight years cuts both ways. Europe's leaders have not covered themselves in glory for the way they stood up to Mr Bush when he was at the height of his power. Because they did not. They looked the other way over extraordinary renditions or dabbled in the dark art themselves, as British intelligence officers did with detainees tortured in Pakistan. Tony Blair had no discernible curbing effect on Mr Bush's unwavering support for Israel. And when it came to real decisions, Britain invariably found itself on Washington's side of the argument, actively stalling a ceasefire when Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 2006. The list of Mr Bush's foreign policy failures is long. But just as inglorious is the way most European nations cloned his policies.

If the age of unilateralism is drawing to a close, the next US president will be more anxious to root major decisions in international consensus. But that will need European leaders capable of independent thought and radical action. As Mr Bush praised European unity in Paris, the EU was plunged into an institutional crisis that threatens to paralyse its ability to project a collective policy on behalf of its 27 member states. It is no use looking to Barack Obama for deliverance if the EU constantly balks at being bigger than the sum of its parts.

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