EVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — President Bush stepped onto French soil on Sunday to meet the European leaders who vociferously opposed the war in Iraq, but rather than rehash their differences he spent the day trying to increase pressure on two other nations he regards as major threats — Iran and North Korea — to give up their nuclear weapons programs.
Bush arrived here from St. Petersburg, Russia, after a meeting with President Vladimir Putin that both men used to put differences over Iraq behind them and to sign the recently ratified treaty that requires both sides to reduce their nuclear arsenals.
There was no such warmth during Bush's pro forma handshake and chitchat with President Jacques Chirac of France on Sunday afternoon, just as there was none with the German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, when the two men met in Russia on Saturday night.
Bush believed that those two European leaders undercut his effort against Saddam Hussein, and White House officials have made clear that there would be little effort to mend fences here at the meeting of the Group of 8, the major industrialized nations plus Russia.
Chirac described his encounter with Bush as "positive" but then curtly ended questions on the issue by declaring that he had no "discomfort" in dealing with the American president.
Rather than dwell on their differences, Bush pressed the main issue on his agenda — nonproliferation. By the end of the day, he appeared to have won at least a new hearing from Putin on Russia's technological aid to Iran's nuclear programs. There were also signs from China that North Korea, its close ally, might be willing to meet for a second negotiating session, this time with Japan and South Korea present, as Bush has demanded.
The president's aides worked behind the scenes to sign countries up for a new White House initiative to create an international legal basis for seizing missiles, chemical and biological agents, and nuclear components on the high seas or in the air. The proposal is clearly intended to give countries broader authority to quarantine North Korea, and perhaps Iran as well.
It was unclear how many of the traditionally American allies here would agree, at a moment when many Europeans view Bush and the United States as far too powerful and too willing to use military force to shape the world to America's liking.
Chirac made clear that American dominance was still one of his chief concerns. "I have no doubt whatsoever that the multipolar vision of the world that I have defended for some time is certainly supported by a large majority of countries throughout the world," he said to reporters on Sunday evening on his way to a dinner with the other leaders.
The concerns about American empire were also echoed in the huge protests — involving tens of thousands of Europeans — that moved through the streets of Geneva and villages in both Switzerland and France on Sunday. Police tried to contain the threat of violence with tear gas, and the Swiss had to send German anti-riot police into their streets.
But while there was a good deal of window-breaking and stone-throwing, the mix of antiglobalization protesters, anti-Bush protesters and and others did not appear as serious as the kind of rioting that marred the Group of Eight meeting in Genoa two years ago.
This year — as in western Canada last year — the protesters were kept miles from Hotel Royal where the leaders of the United States, France, Britain, Italy, Canada, Germany, Japan and Russia were meeting on the edge of the lake, and heard none of their chants.
Bush has said nothing so far about the protesters' concerns, insisting that the main economic challenge he must confront is getting the major economies of the world growing again. On Monday the leaders are expected to discuss for the first time the threat of deflation in Japan and Germany — and to a lesser degree the United States — and the fast-declining value of the dollar.
One of Bush's aides said on Sunday that the United States was "virtually alone now as an engine of growth in the global economy," though in the period before Sunday's opening session Bush's aides talked about no new global initiatives to get the three largest world economies in sync. That was the traditional purpose of this annual meeting, though one that has often gotten lost with the other competing agendas.
"If they deal with trade, exchange rates, and Iraqi reconstruction in an acrimonious fashion, that is likely to be very unsettling for the dollar and thus for the financial markets," said Robert Hormats, a veteran of many of these economic summit meetings and now the vice chairman of Goldman, Sachs International.
But those are also the issues that least invigorate Bush, who sees these meeting largely as a forum to press his case for the fight against terrorism, and to argue, as he did at the beginning of his trip this weekend, that the world must unify behind an American vision of confronting tyrants and unconventional weapons.
Within hours of his arrival at this small town on the southern bank of Lake Geneva, Bush turned from Iran's nuclear threats to North Korea's. He met with Hu Jintao, the new Chinese president. Hu is one of the 12 leaders of developing nations who were invited here by Chirac in an effort to, in his favorite phrase, "enlarge the dialogue" beyond the world's wealthiest nations.
Bush has met Hu twice before but not since the Chinese leader formally succeeded Jiang Zemin as president. In the interim, China has taken an active role in the North Korea nuclear crisis, acting partly as intermediary, and partly as neighbor who wants neither a nuclear North nor a collapsing government next door.
Hu, a senior administration official said on Sunday night, told Bush that he believes that the North Koreans would drop their demand that they would negotiate only with the United States, leaving Japan and South Korea on the sidelines. Now, Hu suggested, North would probably agree to multiparty talks as long as they were guaranteed that they could talk directly to the Americans, ignoring others in the room. "The president said, 'Look, in a multilateral format, sure, the North Koreans can look us in the eyes and say something,"' the senior American official said. That was essentially the approach that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage described to Congress several months ago, angering many at the White House who saw it as a way around Bush's strictures about how talks with North Korea's Communist government must be pursued. Now, Bush appears to have come around to Armitage's viewpoint.
Bush was clearly trying to cultivate a relationship with Hu on Sunday, one that would contrast sharply to the formal, sometimes icy relations he had with Jiang.
"It's a generational thing," one senior aide to Bush said recently. "He and Jiang were just from different planets. He has a chance now to have a relationship with the Chinese president akin to the one with Putin."
Bush is clearly trying to gain authority for a broader set of interdictions of unconventional weapons, and he has begun to discuss, informally his new initiative to organize countries to seize such weapons. It was driven, one administration official said, by the bitter experience of last year, when Bush had to let a North Korean missile shipment to Yemen go ahead, after it had been stopped by Spanish forces.
Bush is using the summit meeting here on Sunday to demonstrate that he can work with the traditional allies, even while bitterness over Iraq remains. "The most important thing, particularly after all the differences there have been over Iraq, is that the international community comes together and gives a very strong statement," Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Bush's greatest ally in the group here, said on Sunday, speaking of an expected statement on the need to halt proliferation. "It will be the quality of intent that is as important as anything else." .
Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada, who also opposed the Iraq war, said, "Everybody was concentrating on creating a mood of solidarity."
But mostly what Evian creates, of course, is water — lots of it. It is unclear whether solidarity can also be created, and by the time the answer comes, on Tuesday, Bush will be long gone — having cut his stay here short to move on to talks in the Mideast.