When Tony Meets George

...This hardly sounds like an organization that intends to subordinate itself to NATO...

...relations that the prime minister's wish didn't come to pass...

...That will be a better basis for our relationship in the future...

...So Blair may miss Clinton's ability to enfold him in the cuddly jargon of the Third Way—which never really was much more than new wine in old bottles...

...Wolfgang Ischinger, described in the New York Times as "a senior official in the German foreign ministry," noted that the last time Rumsfeld was in office he did not have to consider an independent European defense capability...

...For Blair is between a French rock and an American hard place...

...This difference as to the role of government, however, cannot obscure important similarities on domestic policy that should help the two leaders to find common ground when they spend the weekend together at Camp David...

...True, center-left Blair and center-right Bush differ as to the overall role of government in the economy and in the private lives of citizens (still "subjects" in Britain...

...Times have changed...

...Of course, "when there is a need for NATO expertise on specific subjects," the Europeans will supplement dialogue "by inviting NATO representatives to meetings...

...He sees himself as every bit as much the leader of Middle England as of the declining band of industrial workers who populate Britain's trade unions...

...Unfortunately for Blair, that is simply not true...

...As Henry Kissinger recently pointed out in an interview in the Times of London (it appeared under the headline "Kissinger says honeymoon is over for Blair"), "There was too much reliance on the kindred spirit in the previous [Blair-Clinton] relationship...

...But Blair has gotten defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's message loud and clear: America will build such a system and would like Britain and our other allies to cooperate and to shelter under it...

...But words matter...

...There needs to be more reliance on national self-interest...

...Bush, of course, inherits a government that claims only about half that portion of the national income, and Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and director of regulatory studies at the Hudson Institute...

...If he has to, Blair will most likely side with the Americans, and against the French, on the question of missile defense...

...Although Gore as a Clinton clone appealed to the prime minister, the class warfare of the Gore campaign definitely did not...

...and the U.S...

...Blair's special problem is that his fondness for the French, Germans, and the superstate they are trying to create in Europe far exceeds that of his countrymen...

...The first is whether or not Britain will support America's efforts to put in place a missile defense system...

...Finally, little separates Blair and Bush on the role of the private sector in the delivery of social services...

...Neither the French nor the Americans are likely to alter their policies to allow Blair the luxury of becoming a bridge between them...

...That Blair wants to scrap the pound for the euro—and to surrender control over interest rates and, as a consequence, fiscal policy to a Brussels bureaucracy—is no secret...

...As a leading foreign policy adviser to Republicans put it to me, "Those nations that don't believe in such a system and do not want to be part of it can decide to do without our help in defending them from a missile attack by a rogue nation...

...Hence Bush's tax cut, which he proposed for government-shrinking, supply-side, incentive-creating reasons (and the anti-recessionary virtues he discovered only recently...

...Yet it may prove not to be such a bad thing for U.S.-U.K...

...Thanks to the tax burden on the British people that Blair's chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, has stealthily increased, government in that country claims for itself about 40 percent of all the goods and services the economy can produce—and rising...

...And he reports that British defense minister Geoff Hoon's attempts to argue that the new European army is consistent with Britain's obligations to NATO are entirely unconvincing...

...So he has to give them something else...

...And it certainly seems to be an autonomous army in every sense of that word...

...If any proof is needed that ideas travel, check the itineraries of the Blair policy wonks who have scoured the United States for ideas they might adopt to reform their nation's welfare system...

...The Blairites and the Bushies also think alike on welfare reform...

...But that lack of chumminess is not necessarily a bad thing...

...This presents Blair with a problem, and one that he will have to resolve if his meeting with the president is to result in a real working relationship, rather than an exchange of polite pleasantries of the sort that his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, mistook for policy consensus on his recent visit to this country...

...As one White House figure who is in regular contact with the president told me, "The British are always agreeing to words that they think don't matter, and then those words close in around them...

...The treaty specifies, "These forces should be militarily self-sustaining with the necessary command, control and intelligence capabilities, logistics, other combat support services and additionally, as appropriate, air and naval elements...

...It is on the question of the new army that Blair, who prefers to call the planned 60,000-strong land, sea, and air force a rapid reaction force, or a humanitari an force, or a police force, will find the going rough indeed...

...And that something is support for a new European army, designed to implement a European foreign policy and to confront America with a united Europe equal in population, wealth (well, almost), and power to the United States...

...Cook's advice is that Britain doesn't have to make a decision because it has not yet been asked...

...Just how Blair can bail himself out of the Nice treaty is unclear...

...And get on with building a foreign policy and security system that, Rumsfeld points out, it is the moral duty of the president to provide for our citizens...

...And if Tony Blair is insufficiently aware of his nation's history to want to link its security to the French rather than attempt to maintain what has come to be called "the special rela-tionship"—that vague yet real force that has more than once linked the U.K...

...But three out of four British voters want to keep the pound, rather than join Euroland...

...It has been the unremitting goal of French policy since America joined Britain in liberating France from the Germans to reduce the role of America in Europe—indeed to drive us from the continent if possible...

...Blair knows better than to do that, and he also knows that his country can benefit significantly from working with the Americans to develop the necessary technology...

...With China an increasing concern, North Korea a worry, and unrest in the Middle East a threat to America's oil supplies, why not, these folks argue, leave Europe to the Europeans...

...deems even that too much...

...Blair's fondness for Third Way schmoozing with Bill Clinton, his justified gratitude for the role Clinton played in stitching together a semi-peace in Ireland, and his natural center-left leanings made him an ideal partner for the outgoing administration, and gave him clear reason for hoping that Al Gore would be the next president...

...Cook sailed from meeting to meeting in Washington—by one count he saw 22 senators in addition to Bush's defense and foreign policy team—assuring everyone that the agreement between Britain and France at Nice does nothing to create a force independent of NATO...

...And it is the current goal of Tony Blair to be accepted by his French and continental friends as "a good European...

...All of this plays into the hands of Americans who question the need for NATO and for continued American involvement on the European continent now that Russia is no longer seen as the threat it once was...

...The compassionate conservative's reliance on "faith-based organizations" is not very different from New Labour's encouragement of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish organizations to run many schools, and its reliance on the private sector to deliver services to the elderly and what it prefers to call "at-risk children"—carefully avoiding making it clear just who is at risk from these children...

...Europe wants one more thing from Blair: British membership in European monetary union...

...The European Union, Isch-inger added, is becoming "an independent actor...

...The president has put education at the top of his list, as has the prime minister, who famously declared his priorities to be "education, education, education," and last week told a meeting of head teachers: "Any government with any sense is going to make education its number one priority," adding—shades of Bush—that his "desire [is] to lift every child...

...The fact is the development of the Union's defense identity is an accelerating process that it would be a mistake [for America] to oppose...

...As Blair sees it, he can then combine his nation's special relationship with America with his role as a leader of Europe to become an essential "bridge" between America and Europe...

...Blair has pushed for national tests, with the results of each school's performance to be published, and for the closing of substandard schools, to be replaced by privately sponsored "City Academies...

...Throw in Blair's new, seemingly close relationship with Vladimir Putin, and you have Britain once again astride world politics, a key player with the Americans, the Russians, and the Europeans—punching above its weight, as the Foreign Office is fond of putting it...

...Which is why the French love it...

...And Bush may know that he is entertaining a head of state who rather wishes Gore was at Camp David instead of teaching journalism at closed-to-the-press seminars at Columbia University, and that he—Bush—was still in Texas, a place like most others in America that Blair has never visited, and must imagine to be far less desirable than the politician-laden Washington he finds so congenial...

...True, he says he will do so only if the economic conditions are right, but he has recently made it clear that he will be mighty cross with his chancellor of the exchequer, the second most powerful British politician, if Brown fails to massage the data to show, voila, it is indeed in Britain's interest to join...

...Which brings us to Germany...

...Cute, but no cigar...

...BY IRWIN M. STELZER London British prime minister Tony Blair comes to America this week to meet our new president, and the PM.'s team is worried...

...The French don't want to cross any bridges to meet America's security needs, and America wants Britain to maintain its long-standing role as an ally, rather than become a bridge too far...

...French president Jacques Chirac, at last week's Franco-British summit in Cahors, parroted Russia's line and called such a system "a strong incitement to proliferation...

...It may well be, as some critics point out, that this is all talk, and that the Europeans with their shrinking defense budgets will never be able to fight a real war, or even mount an effective combat action of any sort...

...The official document enshrining the Nice agreement refers to the "decision-making autonomy" of the European Union and NATO, to "autonomous EU action," to "preservation of the [European] Union's autonomy in decision making, in particular in the definition, evaluation, monitoring and follow-up of capability goals," to the fact that NATO and the new defense force "will be dealing with the other on an equal footing...

...What has escaped most observers is that Blair's New Labour creed is not all that different from Bush's compassionate conservatism...

...But the initiative will be with the EU, not with NATO...

...Indeed, it is not clear that he wants to, as that would antagonize the French, with whom he must stay on relatively friendly terms if he is to achieve his goal of being a good European even while remaining independent of the continent's new single currency...

...So Blair will have to make two tough calls...

...in defense of Western values—we will mourn our loss...

...Richard Perle, who has emerged as a top Bush adviser on foreign and defense policy, used the occasion of a speech in London to describe Cook as a man who spent his "political adolescence among the unilateralists in the [anti-American, anti-nuclear-deterrent] Committee for Nuclear Disarmament, . . . eager to reaffirm [his] Cold War opposition to an American national missile defense system...

...Since the figure is higher on the continent, Blair thinks it a modest impost...

...Which means that Blair can't give his European Union partners what they crave, his country's surrender of its monetary and fiscal sovereignty...

...Blair has spent huge amounts of political capital, and risked his career to pull his Labour party away from its historic hatred of the rich and successful...

...A Gaullist dream come true...

...Which puts it to the visiting prime minister to define in his own mind and for his hosts just how he sees Britain's national interest in a world in which he is being pulled by strong forces, many of them self-manufactured, away from his country's traditional alliance with ours...

...Many of the Blair team are big fans of former governor (now secretary of health and human services) Tommy Thompson's welfare-to-work program: One of Blair's top aides recently argued to me that Britain's "welfare state now has an 'employment first' principle built into its operation," no small achievement for a party that still has a substantial bloc of old-left politicians and activists who view the dole as an entitlement, means testing as an insult, and an insistence that the able-bodied go to work as a form of capitalist exploitation...