The war in Iraq has gravely damaged Blair’s standing. But the war in Afghanistan is also increasingly unpopular, as British casualties mount: 14 British servicemen were killed in a plane crash over the weekend and the fighting with the Taliban is fierce and increasingly deadly. Many of the criticisms made about Iraq are now being echoed about the Afghan war: that British troops are over-stretched and ill-equipped and that the mission is ill-considered and apparently open-ended. The veteran defence correspondent, Robert Fox, made a particularly swingeing criticism this week. Disillusionment with the Afghan venture is by no means confined to Britain. Canada has suffered heavy losses and the leader of the leftwing NDP party has already called for Canadian withdrawal. The Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is under growing political pressure, as the Toronto Globe and Mail makes clear.

It can sometimes feel like the United States and western Europe are on different political planets. In America the most emotive debates usually seem to be about “values issues”: abortion, prayer-in-school, stem cell research and the like. In western Europe the most heated political arguments are usually about the economy or reform of the welfare state - or, indeed, the United States. But there is one issue that is currently uniting both sides of the Atlantic in angst, and that is immigration. My column in the FT this week, is about this very subject. But to read it, you will have to either buy the paper or subscribe online. Go on - you know you want to! I’m off to Brussels today, and will report back from that scintillating city on Wednesday.

There is no shortage of commentary on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, so I will not detain you long today. However, it does strike me that the plethora of comment offers an opportunity for the sort of meta-analysis that blogs specialise in. Meta-analysis is otherwise known as commenting on other people’s work, without doing any original research yourself. So here goes: (more…)

Every year the annual “Transatlantic Trends” opinion survey provides a fascinating, if often alarming, insight into the state of transatlantic relations. The latest report, organised by the German Marshall Fund, has just been released. It deserves particular attention given the impending fifth anniversary of 9/11. It will not make for happy reading in Washington. But it is unlikely to cheer up the leaders of Iran either - there is surprisingly strong European support for the idea of military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. The big picture is that European sympathy for the United States and support for US global leadership fell precipitately in the wake of the invasion of Iraq - and is still in the doldrums. In 2002, 64 per cent of Europeans saw American leadership in world affairs as “desirable”; by 2004 that had fallen to 36 per cent, and this year the figure is 37 per cent. Mention George W.Bush explicitly and approval ratings fall even further. Just 18 per cent of Europeans approve of his handling of world affairs. Behind the big picture there is a wealth of fascinating detail. There are four points that strike me as particularly interesting: 1) The sharpest decline in support for America has come in the most traditionally Atlanticist countries such as the Netherlands, Britain and Portugal. At a popular level, the traditional distinction between the pro-American British and the anti-American French no longer really holds. A chart of “Who supports the US most” shows the Romanians as the most pro-American country polled and the Turks as easily the most anti-American. The UK and France are grouped next to each other in the middle, with the British only marginally more supportive than the French. 2) Perhaps the most surprising and counter-intuitive trend is that all this European suspicion of American global leadership will not necessarily translate into opposition to military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Both Americans and Europeans regards military strikes as the worst option available. But on both sides of the Atlantic, lots of people are prepared to contemplate military strikes as a last resort, “if diplomacy fails”: 53 per cent of Americans support military action under those circumstances, as do 45 per cent of Europeans. The French are actually marginally more bellicose than the Americans: 54 per cent of French people would support military strikes as a last resort. 3) Something strange and disturbing is happening in Turkey. For the first time ever less than 50 per cent of Turks (44 per cent to be precise) are prepared to accept the idea that “Nato is still essential”. Turkish support for joining the EU is still above 50 per cent - but only just. It stands at 54 per cent compared with 73 per cent two years ago. And Turks are dramatically out of sympathy with America. Asked to rate their feelings for other nations and groups of people out of 100, the most popular group are the Palestinians (47), followed by the EU (45), Germany (44) and Iran (43). America is down at 20, beaten in the unpopularity stakes only by Israel on 12. 4) Finally, although anti-Americanism in Europe is often dismissed as an elite phenomenon, a separate “European elites survey” suggests that exactly the opposite is true. GMF polled a large group of members of the European parliament and officials working for the European Commission. They found that 73 per cent of parliamentarians and 75 per cent of Commission officials were prepared to say that US leadership is “somewhat desirable”, compared with less than 40 per cent of the general public. Mind you, only one out of 50 Commission officials polled had a positive view of George W. Bush. Presumably that individual will now have to be found and sacked.

Britain woke up this morning to a blizzard of headlines claiming that Tony Blair will step down in the middle of next year, making way for Gordon Brown, the chancellor, to take over as prime minister. The media has been so obsessed for so long by the date of Blair’s departure and the Brown-Blair duel, that it is has been tempting to tune out much of the coverage. My own attitude has been “wake me up when something actually happens.” Well, something seems to have happened now. Labour MPs are signing letters demanding that Blair “set a date”; and the Sun newspaper (which despite specialising in photos of semi-naked women has a good record of political scoops) claims that the date is now set at May 31st next year. The atmosphere of impending crisis is being fed by the fact that the Labour Party conference is due later this month. The whole thing is strongly reminiscent of the frenzy that preceded the downfall of Margaret Thatcher. Blair - like Thatcher at the end of her time in office - is now much more popular in the United States then at home. For Blair in particular, however, closeness with the US and Britain’s participation in an unpopular war in Iraq has been enormously damaging domestically. It may be irrational but many Brits feel obscurely humiliated by what they regard as a subservient relationship between the prime minister and President George W. Bush. The “yo Blair” incident at the last G8 summit - in which Bush lounged in his chair, while Blair whispered courtier-like in his ear - was particularly damaging. (more…)

Mohammad Khatami, the former president of Iran, will not be meeting any important officials during his visit to the United States. But he will be performing a service to his country, simply by reminding Americans that there are Iranian leaders other than the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad. As Khatami’s interview in today’s FT makes clear, he is capable of presenting a much more conciliatory face to the world than Ahamdi-Nejad. American hawks are likely to be more impressed by what the current president of Iran is saying, rather than the views of his predecessor. Ahmadi-Nejad’s denial of the Holocaust and his vision of an Israel-free world have strengthened the hand of those in the US and elsewhere who argue that it would be intolerably dangerous to allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. I got a taste of this last week, when talking to a senior Bush administration official. I asked him how seriously the Americans were taking Ahmadi-Nejad’s rhetoric. Do they really think it possible that he might be aiming to wipe Israel off the map? The official replied: “We have to assume that if people say things, they mean them,” adding that while the Iranian president’s remarks about Israel made the headlines, the Americans had also noted that Mr Ahmadi-Nejad had talked of imagining a world without the United States. The official also said that the Americans were worried that classical nuclear deterrence might not work when dealing with Islamic fundamentalists, who might believe that a nuclear exchange was a swift route to paradise. “At least,” he joked, “the Soviets were atheists.” (more…)

The reaction of most current members of the European Union to the news that they will almost inevitably “welcome” Bulgaria and Romania into the EU next January is - putting aside all the diplomatic niceties - “Oh no, do we have to”. The Bulgarians and the Romanians are understandably upset about this. The Bulgarian prime minister gave a tetchy interview to the FT this morning. Most EU anxiety focuses on the fear of mass-emigration from Bulgaria and Romania to the richer pastures of western Europe. As John Kay pointed out in Monday’s FT, the credibility of the Brussels authorities has been shredded by their utterly inaccurate predictions that there would be very little westward emigration from 10 central European countries that joined the EU in 2004. (more…)

Turkey’s relationship with the EU and the US seems to be getting more and more agonised. Turkey approved the deployment of troops to take part in peacekeeping in Lebanon only after an agonised debate, reminiscent of the the Turkish parliament’s even more heated debate over whether to allow American troops to invade Iraq from Turkish soil. The Turkish government clearly sees the deployment to Lebanon as a means of reasserting its bona fides as a reliable member of the western alliance, and bolstering a troubled bid to join the EU. But Turkish protesters are worried that the deployment could lead to clashes with Hizbollah. The government would like to take part, in order to reaffirm its bona fides as a reliable member of the western alliance and so bolster Turkey’s bid to join the EU. But many Turks seem very troubled by the idea that their army could end up clashing with Hizbollah. The parliamentary debate is reminiscent, on a smaller scale, of Turkey’s discussion - and ultimate rejection - of whether to allow US troops to invade Iraq from Turkish soil. Meanwhile, the atmosphere from the EU side is not getting any more hospitable. Over the weekend Nicolas Sarkozy, the frontrunner for next year’s French presidential elections, gave an interview to Le Figaro magazine, in which he bluntly asserted: “I maintain that Turkey does not belong to the old continent.” If Sarko is elected, that will mean that the leaders of both France and Germany are explicitly opposed to Turkish membership.

In my column in Tuesday’s Financial Times, I suggested that the Bush administration used to be sincere about the “freedom agenda”, but has now quietly ditched the idea. Reading Craig Murray, Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan, in The Washington Post on Sunday, I now wonder if I wasn’t a bit too generous. By Murray’s compellingly-written account, the whole thing was always a bit of a sham. Murray himself is hardly uncontroversial. He argues that he has been the victim of a smear campaign by the Foreign Office, while admitting that he has led a colourful private life. Reading his article, I would suggest that if Murray is to win the propaganda war, he must learn to tailor his language for the politically-correct American market. His admission to having had several “mistresses” is indelicately phrased - surely he means “partners”. Meanwhile, the European Commission has made an unusually blunt admission that the European parliament’s monthly commute to Strasbourg is a huge waste of money.

Two countries that do now seem to be assured of joining the European Union at the beginning of next year are Bulgaria and Rumania. But as the FT reported this morning, the mood in Brussels is hardly celebratory - grudging and embittered might be a better description. Many of the concerns centre on the issue of corruption. David Rennie in The Daily Telegraph reports on a bizarre sounding effort to root out corruption in Bulgaria by psychological profiling of policemen. The idea is to establish which coppers might be susceptible to bribery. My assumption is that most Bulgarian policemen “like most people” might be willing to take a backhander, depending on its size and the risk involved.