Politics

Bush Heads To Skeptical Europe

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

June 9, 2001 / 5:01 PM EDT / CBS

President Bush visits Europe this week to meet America's closest friends. What he'll find is more doubt, skepticism and disagreement about the United States than at any time in years.

Whether Washington is pressing for a ballistic missile defense system, or abandoning plans for emissions controls, or pushing genetically modified foods, there's plenty of sharp opposition.

CBS News White House Correspondent Peter Maer reports the president leaves for Madrid, Spain, at around 7:50 p.m. EDT Monday. Then Mr. Bush flies to Brussels on Wednesday to meet NATO leaders.

He heads to Goteborg, Sweden, on Thursday for talks with European Union members. He will speak on U.S.-European ties Friday in Warsaw, Poland, and hold his first summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

At each stop, the president is likely to encounter skepticism if not outright opposition.

Many Europeans see the United States today as a nation absorbed with its own interests and ready to go it alone in the world if its allies don't bend to its will.

"The administration is perceived as unilateralist, aggressive and in many ways more interested in protecting itself, the United States, from the world than protecting the world from itself," said Dominique Moisi of the French Institute for International Relations.

As a consequence, criticism of the United States is rising as the conservative administration in Washington attempts to deal with the largely center-left governments of Europe.

The Bush administration wants to build a system capable of shooting down ballistic missiles fired by from unpredictable nations like North Korea, Iraq and Iran.

Some allies are skeptical about the threat. Others agree the threat exists, but see the response as political. Still others agree with the Kremlin's claim that abandoning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty between Moscow and Washington will spark a new arms race and weaken security in Europe.

When it comes to the U.S. missile-defense plans, "France and Britain, the two western European nuclear powers, have a shared interest with Russia and China," said Svein Melby of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

"I'm sure that both China, Russia and the two western European nuclear powers to some degree are skeptical of increased efforts on ballistic missile defense because this will reduce their international influence and give the United States an even stronger position," he said.

If the Russians can be persuaded to go along with the missile defense plans, however, the European allies would probably fall into line, Melby said, predicting the same would be true for Democrats in the U.S. Congress who are also wary about the administration's aims.

But missile defenses are not the only point of contention across the Atlantic.

Europe was outraged earlier this year when the Bush administration announced it would not adhere to pollution-cutting targets set ithe 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement aimed to stem global warming.

In addition, the execution of Timothy McVeigh has drawn international criticism.

None of the 15 countries of the European Union, where the last execution was in France in 1977, allows capital punishment. Of 40-odd states from Russia to Iceland, only ex-Soviet Belarus — and until last year Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia — has rejected a Europe-wide treaty that bans executions in peacetime.

And the arrest in France of fugitive James Kopp, a murder suspect who was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, has also thown death penalty disagreements into relief. France has held up Kopp's extradition because of the potential for a death penalty trial in the U.S.

Last week, a Council of Europe human rights committee recommended that the United States and Japan, the only two wealthy industrialized countries that still execute criminals, should lose their observer status at the Council unless they take steps to repeal the death penalty by the end of 2002.

The draft resolution, to be voted on by the main assembly this month, referred with particular concern to the execution of juvenile offenders, mentally retarded convicts and innocent victims of what it called the "fallibility of human justice."

Europe's U.S. ties are also frayed by trade disputes over issues including aircraft sales, beef hormones and steel supplies.