It has become an annual ritual of late spring. Air Force One flies in to Europe bearing George W. Bush. People in the eastern half of the continent seem pleased to see him and he equally happy to view them, while opinion-formers in the western part again solemnly declare the President to be an idiot and condemn his foreign policy as dangerous and reckless.

The script will, though, be more intense than usual this week. This is partly because France is to host the G8 meeting. Jacques Chirac’s choice of venue — Evian — is inspired. He has settled upon a location that epitomises perfectly the essence of international summitry. It is, after all, a product for which you can pay a small fortune when you could easily have something almost identical on tap.

The aftermath of the conflict with Iraq has prompted a huge debate (in Europe at least) on America’s role in the world. The tone of the discussion has been apoplectic. Forty years ago Harold Macmillan mused that it was Britain’s fate to be the Greeks to the American Romans. Modern Tories of his stripe, such as Chris Patten, now seem to think that it is Europe’s burden to be the Greeks to the American Vikings. Even rational observers contend that the transatlantic relationship is in trouble. Divorce, they will claim loudly this week, is on the cards, a break-up caused by irreconcilable differences.

Two metaphors have emerged to capture this trauma. The first is that of Robert Kagan’s soundbite: “Americans are from Mars, (continental) Europeans from Venus.” In this thesis, completely different concepts have evolved on either side of the Atlantic about the character of international order, especially after September 11, 2001, and this in turn explains disagreement about everything from Saddam Hussein to global warming. I am not convinced by the theory, but it does have one enormous attraction. Namely, if Americans do inhabit Mars and the likes of France hail from Venus, then the British might well be based on planet Earth.

The second, presently fashionable, idea, which writers such as Martin Wolf in The Financial Times have embraced, is focused more directly on the President personally. It pits two of his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, against each other. The argument is that Roosevelt personified a nationalist, assertive foreign policy with little interest in securing the consent of others, while Wilson promoted an internationalist, essentially pacific strategy in which it is possible for the planet as a whole to develop laws, norms and rules not unlike those which apply within a contemporary democracy. Europeans, the contention runs, bought Wilsonianism from the Americans after 1945 but have discovered to their horror that the Bush Administration has, unreasonably, reverted to the Rooseveltian model.

It is a clever contrast, but is it compelling? It is surely open to question. There are, I think, three respectable arguments that can be marshalled against it. The first is that it is debateable whether American foreign policy has actually been consistently and credibly “Wilsonian”. The second is whether it is really fair to brand Mr Bush’s outlook on the world as “Rooseveltian”. Finally, if it is necessary to pick any former President as the forerunner of the current one (and it is a dubious practice), then there is a figure who suits this President better than either Wilson or Roosevelt.

American foreign policy has never been wholly Wilsonian. Indeed, it wasn’t that Wilsonian when Wilson was President — as the Senate’s decision not to endorse his beloved League of Nation testifies. It has had certain Wilsonian moments, such as when the United States negotiated the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 in which nations formally renounced war as a means of policy (it was no great success, that one) but, unsurprisingly, it proved difficult to sustain a foreign policy on the basis of love, peace and all holding hands in a circle to resolve international disputes.

It would not be unduly cynical to suggest that presidents assume Wilsonian clothing when they are either searching for an excuse for inaction or want others to do something for them that they cannot mobilise a domestic consensus to do alone. To that extent, Bill Clinton did have a Wilsonian foreign policy of sorts. But one based on Harold Wilson, not Woodrow.

Nor can it reasonably be asserted that Mr Bush is a “Rooseveltian” President. Europeans might like to think that he speaks softly and carries a big stick, but they exaggerate the extent to which the Pentagon dominates foreign policy in Washington. They overstate the numbers and influence of the so-called “neo-conservatives” in this Administration. There are a number of people who broadly fit that label but to insist that they are running the show is akin to saying that because there are several members of the British Government who are committed Christians, it follows that the final verdict on the euro will be taken only after a prayer meeting.

If Mr Bush should be compared with anyone it is Harry Truman. Truman was a slightly accidental President (he took office on the sudden death of Franklin Roosevelt), widely mocked by American and European elites. He was swiftly confronted with the end of the Second World War, the invention of nuclear weapons and the emergence of the superpower struggle. He had to shape foreign policy on the hoof, invent institutions at home and abroad to match new circumstances, set precedents and draw lines in the sand. Substitute the chads of Florida, religious terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and it is not a bad (if imperfect) fit.

It was also Truman who said that a statesman is “a politician who has been dead 10 or 15 years”. It was certainly a decade after he left the White House before his approach was universally appreciated. Much the same will be true for Mr Bush.

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