LISTEN CAREFULLY. That unfamiliar noise you hear coming out of Washington is the sound of the Bush administration attempting to serenade Europeans.

After four years in which transatlantic relations has been conducted against a Wagnerian score, with leitmotifs of American unilateralism underpinning a saga of gathering storm and stress, the tunes since President Bush’s reinauguration last month have sounded more like Mozart. Condoleezza Rice dispensed a little night music with the diplomacy in Paris and Berlin this month. The man who sweet-talked Europeans last weekend at a security conference in Munich sounded at times more Don Giovanni than Don Rumsfeld.

On Sunday the overtures give way to the main movement when Mr Bush lands in Brussels at the start of a four-day visit in which restoring transatlantic harmony will be the theme. Since the President’s re-election US officials have concluded that there is nothing to be gained by gratuitously irritating the Europeans.

That does not mean any willingness to compromise on the basic thrust of US policy. Sharp differences remain over Iran, arming China and America’s broader goals of bringing liberty to the benighted Middle East. But Washington is brimming with goodwill, especially after the successful Iraqi elections, and next week’s focus is likely to be on some areas where a convergence that was once thought improbable might now be achievable. On climate change, the President will lay out ideas for technological investment to combat global warming, and on Israel-Palestine, he will pledge continued commitment to Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian leader.

All this is rare diplomatic good news for Tony Blair. The Prime Minister, after all, has built his foreign policy on the as yet wholly unproven proposition that the US and the Europeans can work together for a better world and that Britain can play a the unique role in facilitating that partnership.

But Mr Blair is especially happy to see America and Europe burying the hatchet, because after steady prodding from London, and in spite of its better judgment, the US appears to be warming to European integration.

Support for European unity in the abstract has long been an article of faith for US foreign policy. But events in the past four years made some in the Bush Administration realise that a Europe of nation states is much more likely to be of help to the US than one united under Franco-German leadership. But on her trip through Europe this month Dr Rice hinted that that view may be changing. She told a group of commentators that she thought the new European constitution, with its creation of a single foreign minister articulating a single foreign policy, was a good thing.

This was, on the face of it, an unusually blunt intervention in the domestic debates of European countries. The word in Washington is that the British think it would be quite helpful if the US were to get on the EU constitution bandwagon to improve the chances of success in our referendum next year. Britain is arguing that a unified Europe would represent no threat to the US but would help it to achieve its foreign policy goals.

Yet once again it seems that a combination of British naivety and misplaced confidence about its ability to control things European has infected the Government’s judgment. The real leaders of the EU — in Paris, Berlin and Brussels, are quite clear about where they want this newly united Europe to go, and it is not in London’s direction, still less Washington’s.

There is growing confidence in Europe that the US can be persuaded, once the constitution is approved, to change the terms of transatlantic debate; to recognise the EU as the principal interlocutor on US-European relations and to abandon the outdated notion of nation states making their own foreign policy.

A key element of this strategy is to encourage the US to abandon Nato as the principal forum for the discussion of transatlantic relations. As a genuinely multilateral body, Nato is an inconvenient obstacle to the EU’s superstate ambitions in foreign policy. Time to ditch it. At the Munich conference, Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, let slip the real agenda. Nato, he said, was no longer the place for consideration of transatlantic relations. He called for a review, leaving unspoken the clear hint that the EU should assume the primary role in representing European policy.

If Britain and the other nations vote to approve the EU constitution, the future is open for a dramatic change in the way European foreign policy is conducted. With US connivance in its federalist ambitions, the EU will claim the principal role as Europe’s foreign policymaker.

Fortunately there are some in America and Europe who are better able than the British Government to see the perils of this approach. Last weekend Mr Rumsfeld pointedly declined to endorse the EU constitution and said, archly: “Secretary Rice does not make US policy. The President makes US policy.” Eastern European countries are also distinctly nervous about having their foreign policy run from Brussels; to them Nato is not a Cold War relic but a living testament to their freedom. Which brings me back to Wagner.

In Munich, the German composer was never far away from the conversation. Mr Rumsfeld repeated the old saw about Wagner’s music being better than it sounds. Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, insisted that he preferred Mozart. But as I absorbed the changes in the landscape of European foreign policy, and noted the concerns among the Eastern European countries represented, I recalled Woody Allen’s observation: “I can’t listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.”

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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