WASHINGTON — President Bush leaves today for his first meeting with the leaders of France and Germany since their battles over the Iraq war, but officials on both sides are saying that the three combustible personalities are unlikely to do more than paper over the deep fissures between the "old" and "new" Europe and the United States.
Diplomats noted that Bush had chosen not France or Germany but Poland, a supporter of the American-led invasion of Iraq and a crucial part of what he considers the "new" Europe, as the place to deliver his keynote European address on the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
Bush has also cut short his stay, from two days to one, at a meeting of leading industrialized nations in Evian, France. His reason is that he must leave early for Mideast meetings with Arab leaders, then with the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers.
"When I say something, we actually go do it," Bush told Nile-TV, an Egyptian network. "And when I say that I'm going to be involved in the peace process, I mean I'm going to be involved in the peace process."
In another interview, Bush made clear the United States and France still have a troubled relationship.
Bush told the French newspaper Le Figaro, in an interview Thursday to be published today, that he expected to have a "good discussion" at Evian with the French president, Jacques Chirac.
At the same time he warned that French leaders "must work to convince their own citizens and show that France is ready to cooperate with the United States."
Nonetheless, Bush said that Evian "will not be a summit of confrontation" and that "it will be a pleasure to talk with Jacques Chirac." He added, "Vive la France."
Bush has a half-hour meeting Monday with Chirac, the host at Evian. The agenda calls for discussions on the Middle East, AIDS, and the reconstruction of Iraq, but foreign policy experts said the agenda will be overshadowed by the leaders' body language, as will Bush's encounter with the German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, which will occur in a group.
"It could be a kumbayalike get-together with everyone holding hands and committed to forgetting about the past," said Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a director of European affairs on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton. "But more likely, it will be a schoolyard fight with bullies on opposite sides glaring at each other and still angry about the fight they just had." Earlier this month, Bush acknowledged that the summit meeting would be seen as a gathering of warring egos rather than a triumph of substance when he told a German delegation visiting the White House that he knew that every public moment he spent with Schroeder would be under scrutiny.
"I know that when we meet all the the television crews will be watching to see if we get into a fist fight — and we won't," one of the German visitors quoted Bush as saying. Such is the state of Bush's relationship with Schroeder that the delegation interpreted the remark as conciliatory.
Officially, the White House says that Evian will be about the future of the trans-Atlantic relationship, and that the leaders will work together to combat terrorism and the sagging world economy. The trans-Atlantic split over Iraq is past, they insisted — just another squabble, to use Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's favored metaphor, in a marriage that has been in counseling for 200 years.
"I imagine that in marriage counseling the first thing you don't do is, item one, get up and over coffee talk about the fight you had last week," said a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the trip this week. "That probably doesn't strike me as the best way to build the relationship of the future. You talk about the chores you need to do together that day. And the relationship then starts righting itself, so to speak."
Unofficially, administration officials said that Bush was still angry with Chirac for actively working against the United States on the Iraq war, and that Bush will never again trust Schroeder for campaigning on an anti-war — and, they said, anti-American — platform in Germany last fall.
Administration officials said they now view Bush's Evian trip as an obligation squeezed into a schedule that also includes a trilateral meeting in Jordan on the Middle East, a meeting with the Russian President Vladimir V. Putin at the 300th anniversary celebration of St. Petersburg and Bush's speech in Krakow, Poland.
White House officials said it was no accident that Bush chose Poland. Poland's President Aleksander Kwasniewski committed 200 Polish troops to the Iraq war to help secure the southern oil fields.
Scholars note, however, that Poland and other Eastern European nations of Bush's "new" Europe date back further than nations like Germany, which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld infamously derided before the Iraq war as part of the "old" Europe, along with France.
"They're all old — Europe is old," said Daalder. "In that sense, it's nonsensical. There are countries that are now members of the 'new' Europe that predate countries of the 'old' Europe. Germany was unified and became a single state long after Poland was an independent country."
Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador to the United States, said Thursday that Bush and Chirac had a "positive, relaxed" 10-minute phone conversation earlier this month in preparation for Evian, and that they "want to go beyond the bitterness of the past."
Levitte said that France did not see its role as serving as a check on American power in the world.
"I hear that time and again," Levitte said. "Our problem is not that there is too much American power. Our problem is that there is not enough European military capacity. It has nothing to do with the supposed desire of France to limit American power."