President Heading To G-8 Meetings

Saturday, June 2nd 2007, 3:03 pm

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ New penalties against Sudan _ check. More dollars to fight AIDS in Africa _ check. A respected internationalist to lead the World Bank _ check. Friendly words about tackling global warming _ check.

George Bush is ready to go to Europe.

His bag packed with a pre-emptive agenda he spent all week detailing, the president leaves Monday on a trip that will take him to six countries in eight days. Bush journeys from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, with the centerpiece of his travels a three-day summit in Germany with leaders from Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia.

The president made certain not to arrive empty-handed.

``The operative phrase ... that sums up the week is when the president said, `We are a compassionate nation,''' said Charles Kupchan, director of Europe studies for the Council on Foreign Relations.

Most of Bush's presidency has been about ``hard power'' _ fighting terrorism and waging the Iraq war _ and still is. But heading into the Group of Eight meetings, he chose a different focus.

``He's cycling back to this nicer, kinder America,'' Kupchan said. ``This is an agenda that is much more popular in Europe than the talk about fighting al-Qaida and chasing the Taliban through the mountains of Konar province'' in Afghanistan, on the eastern border with Pakistan.

Over the past week, Bush:

_Announced his selection of Robert Zoellick to head the World Bank. The choice won praise in Europe, which had pushed for an end to Paul Wolfowitz's stormy tenure.

_Matched his impassioned rhetoric about what he decries as genocide in Sudan's Darfur region with tougher U.S. action against some of those blamed for the suffering.

_Urged Congress to renew his program to fight AIDS in poor African countries. He requested $30 billion over five years, nearly twice the amount being spent for the program's first five years.

_Proposed that the U.S. and the world's 14 other biggest polluters spend the next 18 months deciding on a long-term global goal for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

In one speech, the president said, ``Once again, the generosity of the American people is one of the great untold stories of our time.'' He also told foreign reporters, ``We've got a very strong agenda that I'm looking forward to sharing in the G-8.''

It remains to be seen how this agenda will be received in Heiligendamm, Germany, the seaside resort town hosting the summit. Yet on Saturday, demonstrators hurled stones and flagpoles at police during a protest by tens of thousands of people against the summit.

For Bush, there is a changing lineup among world leaders.

He faces a deep loss with the departure on June 27 of ally Tony Blair, who is being succeeded as British prime minister by Gordon Brown. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the summit host who has been in office less than two years, has put a premium on strong relations with the United States.

France just elected a new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who expressed fondness for the U.S. during his campaign and has promised renewed ties with Washington.

Bush has scheduled a get-acquainted meeting with Sarkozy on the sidelines of the summit _ along with a goodbye chat with Blair and a much-anticipated session with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Even Italian Premier Romano Prodi, one of the few in the group without a center-right government, has been careful to tend the relationship with Bush. He rates a visit from Bush to his country after the meeting.

``You do not have among the leaders there now the kind of the hostility and the dismissiveness at the personal level that was apparent even before Iraq,'' said Simon Serfaty, a senior adviser to the Europe program at the Center for strategic and International Studies.

``Both sides of the Atlantic have essentially decided to call a political truce,'' Kupchan said. ``The Bush administration has realized ... that there's no longer this `Are you with us or against us?' And I think the Europeans have essentially moved off of boxing Bush around the ears on Iraq.''

These gathering often get overtaken by outside events. For instance, there is the U.S. bombing on Friday of a Somalia village where Islamic militants had set up a base and the situation in Lebanon, where fighting rages between the military and militants in a Palestinian refugee camp.

How everyone deals with Putin is a wild card.

Moscow and Washington are in an escalating war of words over a proposed U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe, worsening already frayed relations. But Putin has problems beyond Washington.

Sarkozy and Merkel have taken a harder line. Britain was rebuffed when it sought the extradition of a Russian accused in the polonium poisoning of a former KGB officer in London.

Bush's shift on climate change reverberated loudly in the days before the summit. It is ``difficult to exaggerate'' the importance of the issue to Europeans, Kupchan said.

But while welcomed cautiously overseas, Bush's proposal for negotiations among nations that include developing energy guzzlers like China, India and Brazil falls far short of the hard, huge reduction targets Merkel is advancing for approval at the summit.

Bush envisions reaching for what the president's top environmental adviser said were nonbinding goals.

The president's moves on Darfur, meanwhile, were more about trying to push allies than impress them.

The unilateral penalties against Sudan are not too ambitious; they target the financial transactions of three people and about 30 companies with suspected links to the violence.

But Bush also wants a U.N. resolution to pressure the Sudanese government to lift its opposition to a U.N. peacekeeping force. He will need his counterparts' backing to get it.