Opinion: The conventional wisdom is that George W. Bush has seen the error of his unilateral cowboy ways and is spending this week mending fences with his European "allies".
I think not. Lester Pearson, the late Canadian prime minister, used to say that diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. Mr Bush is currently indulging in an almost ludicrously parodic reductio of Pearson's bon mot, wandering from one EU gabfest to another insisting how much he loves his good buddy Jacques and his good buddy Gerhard and how Europe and America share - what's the standard formulation? - "common values". Care to pin down an actual specific value or two that we share? Well, you know, "freedom", that sort of thing, abstract nouns mostly. Love to list a few more common values, but gotta run. Places to visit, European prime ministers to schmooze.
But ask yourself, at the end of this week, what's changed?
Will the US sign on to Kyoto? No. Will the US join the International Criminal Court? No. Will the US agree to accept whatever deal the Anglo-Franco-German negotiators cook up with Iran? No.
Even Tony Blair, widely derided by everyone from Chirac to his own party as Bush's poodle, is unlikely to be tossed a bone. The fact is that, even within the "coalition of the willing", Australia's John Howard belongs to the coalition of the willing to go a lot further with George than Tony ever would. Bush and Blair see eye to eye on Iraq; they disagree on Iran, Palestine, Syria, Kyoto, Europe and everything else. Bush and Howard see eye to eye on Iraq, Kyoto, tsunami relief, the uselessness of the UN, you name it.
As for the notion, popular in Britain, that Bush needs to repay his debt to Blair by talking up the European constitution, that's not the way Washington looks at it: Bush owes Blair nothing except a boot up the butt for making him go through that six-month pre-war diplomatic quagmire at the UN that gave Saddam, al-Qaeda, the Iranians and other interested parties all the time in the world to plan the current "insurgency".
The EU "constitution" is unrecognisable as such to any American. I had the opportunity to talk with Giscard on a couple of occasions during his long labours as the self-declared Founding Father. He called himself "Europe's Jefferson", and I didn't like to quibble that, constitution-wise, Jefferson was Europe's Jefferson - that's to say, at the time the US constitution was drawn up, Thomas Jefferson was living in France. Thus, for Giscard to be Europe's Jefferson, he'd have to be in Pocatello, Idaho, where he'd be doing far less damage.
But, quibbles aside, Giscard professed to be looking in the right direction. When I met him, he had an amiable riff on how he'd been in Washington and bought one of those compact copies of the US constitution.
Many of my New Hampshire neighbours wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching Congressmen and Senators at a moment's notice. Try going round with the European constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after 48 hours: it's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the US version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc. It's not content, as the US constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers.
A lot of that junk may well be worthy planks in a political platform, but they're not constitutional matters. It reads like a US defence spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures. To administration officials, the European constitution is a constitutional abomination.
But the fact is it's going to happen. Does America want the participation of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in the next war to be dependent on the approval of the European Union? No. But, if the British can't rouse themselves to defend their own national sovereignty, Bush is hardly in a position to do it for them. And there's something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as cut down the waiting and let it happen. CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I'd say, as predictions of doom go, that's a little on the cautious side.
President Reagan liked to say, "We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around." If you want to know what it looks like the other way, read Giscard's document - a constitution for a government that has a couple of dozen nations. I know of no-one in Washington who takes seriously claims that Europe is a superpower in the making. Most officials subscribe to one of two views: a) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater; or b) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater where the whole powder keg's about to go up.
For what it's worth, I incline to the latter position. But, either way, there's not a lot America can do about it. Europe's problems - its unaffordable social programmes, its death-bed demographics, its dependence on immigration numbers that no stable nation has ever successfully absorbed - are all of Europe's making. By some projections, the EU's population will be 40 per cent Muslim by 2025. Some of us think an Islamic Europe will be easier for the US America to deal with than the present Europe of cynical, wily, duplicitous pseudo-allies. But getting there is certain to be messy.
Until the shape of the new Europe begins to emerge, there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying, and Mr Bush this week is doing the equivalent of some big showbiz tribute where the current stars salute a once glamorous old-timer whose fading aura is no threat to them. The 21st century is being built elsewhere.