Why The Bushies Make Europe Nervous

With the blueish Parisian light of a mid-January afternoon streaming into his cavernous office, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine pauses to consider the new foreign policy team about to take over in Washington. "Many of these people," Vedrine says slowly, referring to Secretary of State-designate Colin Powell, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and prospective Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "last had positions of [government] responsibility over eight years ago. The world has changed a lot since then. So it would be very interesting for them to speak with all their European allies to figure out where we all stand."

Vedrine is too much the veteran diplomat to state the obvious: Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright--for Europeans, at least--are going to be a hard act to follow. Clinton and Albright were perceived as Europhiles at heart, on more or less the same wavelength as the center-left governments in power throughout much of Europe. Sure, the Europeans would cringe at American grandstanding, such as Albright's definition of the U.S. as the world's one "indispensable" country. But basically the Good Guys in the White House were fighting the Bad Guys in Congress, like Senator Jesse Helms, who is deeply mistrustful of the Europeans. The Bad Guys, of course, tended to be Republicans.