Solidarity forever?

That does not mean that Bush has silenced all his critics in Europe. But by the end of the week, there was more than enough evidence to reject the sense conveyed at times in some U.S. media reports of European jitters about backing Bush in his war against terrorism.

"We are going to back the Americans," said Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the Paris-based French Institute of International Relations, one of Europe's leading commentators on U.S.-European relations. "America saved the democracies of Europe twice in the 20th century. How would it look for us to betray them now?"

Moisi has been an outspoken critic of Bush, and wrote in the July/August Foreign Affairs magazine that "President Bush's foreign policy to date sounds inexplicably anachronistic and arrogant to Europeans."

But even he was willing to give Bush "between a B+ and a B-" for his speech before a joint session of Congress. He would have given it an A, he said, but "in a way you're still missing Clinton in terms of quality of communication."

Most tellingly, there seem few signs of Europeans bickering or carping among themselves. Bush welcomed Blair in Washington with all the warmth and appreciation that comes with the "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain. Only one problem: That special relationship had been in real question in recent months, and respected voices had floated the idea that it had run its course.

Meanwhile, Britain had begun to move closer toward the EU, after years of resistance, working to form a joint European Union policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example. And Thursday night, Blair had the honor of standing for all of Europe. Neither the French nor the Germans appear to have felt slighted, even though they are traditionally seen as the tandem that has the most power in European politics.

"Blair took the lead, especially in oratory, in words, on backing the Americans," Moisi said matter-of-factly. "It doesn't mean that the French are negligible or the Germans are secondary."

You could argue that these are all special relationships now, not just the longtime British-American friendship, as represented by the close ties between Roosevelt and Churchhill and Reagan and Thatcher.

"The special relationship was maybe sleeping in a way, and now it's awake," said Buchsteiner. "There is a special relationship between the U.K. and America. But I think Germany is surprisingly close to America these days. I mean, both Schroeder and Fischer leave no doubt that Germany is supporting America's actions. This is not easy for a red-green government."

European leaders are also following their citizenry, who overwhelmingly favor supporting the U.S. in its battle against global terrorism. Moisi cited a poll by the French paper Liberation that showed 73 percent of the French public and 79 percent of the British public support having their countries involved militarily in the U.S. pursuit of the terrorists it believes are responsible for last Tuesday's gruesome attacks.

The poll found that 53 percent of Germans support direct participation in a military campaign. The lower level of support there should not be surprising, since Germany has had only two brief military engagements -- in Kosovo and Macedonia -- in the half a century since the Third Reich was defeated. Also, Germany is led by a coalition between the left-wing Green Party of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and the left-center Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Even so, both leaders have strongly backed the United States -- and quickly pushed through parliament authorization of military action, which in the case of the Macedonia campaign came only after weeks of debate.

The support of the U.S. allies in Europe may become much more important in the weeks ahead. London's Guardian newspaper reported Thursday that it had obtained a diplomatic cable revealing that the U.S. government hopes to win European approval of a plan to "topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and replace it with an interim administration under United Nations auspices." The Guardian also reported that on Tuesday, two U.S. transport planes flew secret missions to Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, on Afghanistan's northern border, and a potential staging area for military action against Osama bin Laden and his associates.

That report could not be independently confirmed Friday, and a State Department spokesperson said the government would have no comment. But it would hardly be surprising if U.S. diplomats are talking in private communications about their desire to topple the Taliban government. Nor is it the least bit unlikely that U.S. planning calls for the creation of a new government there. The interesting part is that the Bush administration, which has openly scorned U.N. nation-building missions of the recent past, would call in the United Nations.

But these are times that upend the assumptions of even the recent past -- such as the notion that Bush cannot get along with Europe, and that Europe could not get along with him. As the French analyst Moisi noted, "These are exceptional times, and exceptional times call for exceptional measures."

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