BILL CLINTON drew huge cheers from the Labour Party yesterday. The day before, Tony Blair, lecturing on the dangers of recoiling from the US, did not mention President Bush.

It is a delusion to pretend that Bush is a one-off villain, an aberration, from the country that so recently produced Clinton. In two years, the dream goes, he will be gone and we shall all be free to love America again.

That is a misunderstanding of the forces that produced Bush — and Clinton. True, Bush’s excessive decisiveness has produced a chaotic presidency. But his rise still says something important about the direction of US politics. To disregard that would be a recipe for perpetual disillusionment with his successors, Republican or Democrat, and for disappointment in America, which would be unjustified and destructive.

Blair was right not to mention Bush. This President is toxic beyond repair in Europe. Six years of images, from the arm-swinging walk to the grinning nod as he pronounced “Mission accomplished”, have fused together, garnished by an industry of joke masks and mangled English. Bush’s image is set — the frat boy from the cowboy state who took the Middle East to war — and for a politician to shake his hand is to risk a palpable tremor in the opinion polls.

Some of that goes for Republicans in Congress who have shied away from his help as they campaign for the November elections. Even before Iraq blew a hole in Bush’s ratings, many of them felt that he had jettisoned any aim of fiscal discipline. The economic slowdown and high petrol prices may boost the power of this camp.

On the other hand, Bush, under the War on Terror banner, has won victories for what might be called results- orientated Republicanism: not explicitly ideological, and justifying the means by the ends. The crumbling of opposition to his Bill on the treatment of suspected terrorists is the latest sign.

Some Republicans, led by the senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner, had protested that Bush was overturning fundamental legal protections and overextending the power of the presidency. But the implosion of their protest, in a compromise that looks like granting most of the victories to Bush, showed how little support Congress feared this position held in the country.

Terrorism is one reason for America’s new impatience with international law, frustration with coalitions of the half-willing and absorption in its problems. Demography is another. As Europe agonises about taking in Turkey, it might consider that the US is contemplating, on all projections, a rise in its population from the present 300 million to more than 400 million in the next 40 years.

Most will be from immigrants, or their children; many will be Hispanic. Faced with mixing all those people together, how could the problems of the rest of the world not seem less pressing?

Except those of Israel, perhaps. Clinton is right to remind European leaders, as he does pointedly, that Israel believes, if its existence is threatened, that it could not rely on Europe, only on the US. Bush’s critics in Europe are wrong to pin that reflex on his Administration or on Republicans; it is deeply woven into American politics.

David Cameron played with fire when he mused on the need for balance in dealing with Israel. That provoked rage in the US, most of all on the Right. As Blair warned Manchester, if you distance yourself, you may find it is a long way back. That is no argument for assenting to US politics that offend other countries’ values. Britain has let it be known that it considers America’s treatment of terror suspec ts, encapsulated by Guantanamo Bay, to be abhorrent. It is right to point out that the US is in danger of losing sight of its values.

But the clashes about those values reflect the huge changes confronting the US itself. Better to work out how to deal with them, and even influence them, than to pretend that when Bush rides into the sunset that episode is over.

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