PRESIDENT BUSH sought to repair his tattered reputation in Europe yesterday, talking of his “deep desire” to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and conceding that his response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks had not been understood by much of the continent.

At a summit with the EU leadership in Vienna, Mr Bush rejected as inadequate Iran’s promise to reply in August to a US-European offer for talks on its nuclear programme. “It should not take the Iranians that long to analyse what is a reasonable deal,” he said.

The US has offered to enter talks once Tehran shows that it has stopped enriching uranium, a process used to build nuclear weapons. “We will come to the table when they verifiably suspend. Period,” said Mr Bush.

He also gave warning that North Korea faced deeper isolation if it test-fired a long-range missile capable of reaching the US. “It should make people nervous when non-transparent regimes who have announced they have nuclear weapons fire missiles,” he said.

About 1,200 people demonstrated against Mr Bush’s visit, but the President adopted a conciliatory approach at odds with the more defiant tone of his first administration.

A poll published by he Pew Research Centre in the US last week suggested that a record majority of Europeans held a negative view of the US. A Harris poll this week suggested that most Europeans considered the US a bigger threat to world peace than Iran, North Korea or China.

“I think that it is absurd for people to think that we are more dangerous than Iran,” Mr Bush replied, when that figure was quoted to him at a news conference in the glittering ballroom of the former imperial Hofburg Palace. “We are a transparent democracy that debates things in the open,” he said.

Mr Bush forestalled the Europeans by raising the issue of Guantanamo Bay at the summit, saying that he understood their concerns. He spoke of his “deep desire to end the programme”, adding: “I’d like to end Guantanamo. I’d like it to be over with.”

Some of the inmates would be returned to their home countries, he said. But “there are some that need to be tried in US courts. They are cold-blooded killers. They will murder someone if out on the street.”

Wolfgang Schüssel, the Austrian Chancellor who holds the EU’s rotating presidency, said that Mr Bush had given “a clear commitment that there would be no torture, no extra-territorial positioning to detain terrorists”.

Europe’s misunderstanding of the US dated from the attacks of September 11, 2001, Mr Bush said. “For Europe, September 11 was a moment. For us it was a change in thinking . . . I do not govern by opinion polls. I do what I think is right. I think when we look back at this moment it was right to act and encourage democracy in the Middle East.” In an oblique reference to Europe’s reservations over the invasion of Iraq, he said: “Some people say that it’s OK to condemn people to tyranny. I did not believe that it was OK to condemn people to tyranny . . . Leadership requires making hard choices.”

Mr Bush beamed when the Austrian leader hailed the freedom that America had provided for it after the Second World War when it was in ruins and threatened with Soviet occupation. “I will never forget that America fed us and gave us economic support with the Marshall Plan,” said the Chancellor, who was born in 1945.

Mr Bush and the Europeans also committed themselves to attempting to save the Doha round on world trade, which is threatened with failure, largely over transatlantic differences over farm subsidies and other items.

Mr Bush will visit Budapest today to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

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