A World of Possibilities: President Bush has an opportunity given to very few.

Not since Winston Churchill redrew the map of the Middle East after World War I has a Western statesman encountered such an opportunity for cartographical and strategic creativity as George W. Bush currently enjoys in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Nor does that opportunity stop with Iraq -- though it certainly starts there.

The broad lines of U.S. policy toward Iraq seem reasonably plain already. Washington has accepted that the United Nations and other "multilateral" institutions will provide humanitarian and reconstruction aid. But it would like to exclude the U.N. from any major role in the political reconstruction of the country. Anything more than that would be highly imprudent. The U.N. is simply unsuited to coping with complex and rapidly changing crises: U.N. involvement in Rwanda and the various Balkan crises resulted in agonizing delays while crucial questions were wired back to New York for final decision. In Rwanda, one such delay resulted in a massacre; in Bosnia and Kosovo, U.N. and other multilateral agencies have produced a bloated and apparently permanent aid bureaucracy rather than functioning economies. And these failures occurred even without the French, Germans, and Russians using "multilateralism" as a diplomatic weapon to frustrate U.S. policy at every turn. If the U.N. were shaping Iraq's political future, there would be endless scope for Europe's "Gang of Three" to obstruct, delay, and distort.

All the same, Washington will need more political cover for its exercise in nation-rebuilding than its acceptance of a humanitarian role for the U.N. The additional camouflage comes in the form of an Iraqi interim authority to draw up a democratic constitution and to govern the country until elections are held. Such an authority rests on the convenient democratic argument that Iraq should be governed by Iraqis rather than by the U.N. or the U.S.; but in the current unsettled climate it will rely on U.S. power and will probably not oppose American priorities. The likely result is a complicated constitution for Iraq -- combining federalism and power-sharing -- under which Iraq is divided into three regions, in each of which the governing authority has to be drawn from all the major ethnic/religious groups. Such constitutions tend to break down eventually, as in Lebanon, but they last long enough for the U.S. to make a graceful exit.

Now, the next step. Will it be Syria? Not unless the usually cautious Syrian government acts with spectacular recklessness. The U.S. has four aims for Syria: It should hand back Saddamite refugees who have taken refuge there; it should dismantle its armory of chemical and biological weapons; it should withdraw its troops from their de facto occupation of Lebanon; and it should abandon its support for terrorism. These aims are tough but they do not strike at the heart of Syrian interests. As Colin Powell has made clear, they will be pursued not by military methods but by economic and diplomatic sanctions (such as the recent announcement that the U.S. has cut off Iraqi oil going through a Syrian pipeline). And the presence of the victorious U.S. armed forces next door may persuade the Syrian Ba'athists to accept a large bribe to go along with U.S. policy.

A second war is only thinkable if the U.S. looks weak and embattled inside Iraq. Some Shiites already oppose the U.S.-sponsored interim authority; Iran is known to be assisting Shiite political groups. In a worst-case scenario, Shiite uprisings might break out, non-Iraqi radical Islamists might join them, and the U.S. might be distracted from its democratic reform program. All these hypotheticals, if realized simultaneously, might tempt Syria's inexperienced president, Bashar Assad, into resisting U.S. demands and aiding the anti-U.S. rebellion. Only in those circumstances is an extension of the Iraq war into Syria possible; and, plainly, U.S. policy does not aim to produce those circumstances.

Outside the special case of Syria, U.S. policy clearly hopes to use a stable and prosperous Iraqi democracy for its "demonstration effect" -- showing that Arab and Islamic culture is ultimately compatible with liberal democracy. This is not without risks: Iraqi democracy could fail spectacularly, as it has failed in the past. Even if democracy does succeed, it will not spread to neighboring autocracies without a political struggle by their peoples. And it might then produce radical anti-American Islamist governments -- which is why elections should be only the final stage of a long process of liberal constitutional reform.

But Bush's policy is nothing like democracy at the point of a gun; why, then, are European elites so nervous about the prospect of a series of neoconservative wars across the Middle East? To some extent, they are frightening themselves with ghosts of their own imagining. European elite opinion is not far behind Middle Eastern opinion in embracing extravagant conspiracy theories about a sinister cabal of neoconservatives dictating a reckless foreign policy to a simple-minded President Bush. Having embraced such theories, they then interpret any official U.S. statement as a step toward this rolling Armageddon. Thus, the diplomatic warnings from the administration that Syria should not harbor Saddamite refugees were treated as virtual declarations of war in the European press.

There are also deeper reasons why Europeans so readily dupe themselves into believing the worst about U.S. intentions. In the first place, it flatters Europe by comparison with a brutal and unsophisticated U.S. More significantly, it justifies the desire of many Europeans to reject the U.S. and the Atlantic alliance and to build the European Union as a counterweight to American power. Todd Weiner of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out that in polls, the French, Germans, and Italians overwhelmingly opposed the U.S. liberation of Iraq even when they acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant and that Iraqis would be better off without him. Weiner's explanation is that the Europeans hate U.S. power and want to thwart it even when it is doing manifest good. That is probably right, but it applies less to ordinary voters than to European elites. Ordinary Europeans pay as little attention to foreign affairs as ordinary Americans; unless they have a very good reason to become knowledgeable, their attitudes on these topics are shaped largely by the media.

And Europe's media elites propagate exactly the attitudes depicted by Weiner.

This elite opinion will also make itself felt in West European government policy. These governments just now are rushing to repair relations with Washington, but that won't last. After a brief interval of repairing Atlantic relations, the French and German governments are likely to revert to their pre-crisis attitudes, in which anti- Americanism was a vital element, half concealed but growing steadily more prominent. Europe's humiliation over Iraq, far from occasioning second thoughts, is accelerating the drive toward creating a European rival to American power: The European Parliament has just voted overwhelmingly to establish a "European Armaments and Research Agency"; a Franco-German-Belgian summit on speeding up the creation of a European defense force is about to take place; a new federalist European constitution is just around the corner.

If Bush wants to reverse this powerful trend, he will have to counterpose a vision of equal power and attractiveness to the "European idea" that animates his opponents. Both isolationism and the "global interventionism" advocated by some neoconservatives would further accelerate the Euro-nationalist trend. That leaves a revived Atlanticism, in which the U.S. would seek like-minded political allies throughout the Continent and seek to reshape the EU along free-market and pro-American lines. To take hold, such an Atlanticism would require a sense of crisis -- and in Europe, this is now at hand. Economic, social, and demographic trends show Europe declining and America growing: By 2050 the U.S. economy will be almost three times the size of the current EU economy. Taken together, however, the U.S. and the EU would amount to almost 40 percent of world gross domestic product. In other words, Europe's clout is bound to diminish vis-a-vis the U.S. and every other region -- unless it is part of a united West enjoying a global economic and political dominance.

Such facts are a powerful antidote to a reflexive anti-Americanism, but that's not enough: Atlanticist Europeans also need to see vigorous leadership from the White House. America's European policy has been drifting along on a pro-EU autopilot since the end of the Cold War. What is now needed is a major rethink, along the above lines. President Bush has shown he has the courage thing needed for such a dramatic initiative. Does he also have the vision thing?