Bush's key role as a summiteer

The outcome of this week's Middle East summitry may hinge on the answer to this question: How hard does President Bush intend to push Israelis and Palestinians towards peace?

Drawing up a road map for such a settlement, as the US has done, is the easier part of the equation. Getting willing, continued participation from bitter adversaries will be far more difficult.

Mr. Bush has already made an abrupt turnabout by engaging in intensive Mideast diplomacy at all. When he took office, he and high officials in his administration insisted that such effort was fruitless, and a waste of energy and prestige.

Now he is following in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Virtually every US president since Nixon has come to believe that in this area of the world it is important to press forward in some sort of a process, no matter how "peaceless" the situation seems to be. "Without the involvement of the president of the United States nothing good happens" in the region, says M.J. Rosenberg, director of the Washington office of the Israel Policy Forum.

The overseas trip by Bush that began in Poland and Russia over the weekend and continued Sunday at the G-8 meetings in Évian, France, has already seemed to carry this theme: The US will continue to push its ideas for the future of the rest of the world, no matter what others think.

While Bush was not overtly dismissive of France, Germany, and other critics of the US action in Iraq in his early meetings and speeches, neither was he conciliatory. In Poland on Saturday, Bush noted that in recent months the US and its Atlantic allies "have seen unity and common purpose. We have also seen debate - some of it healthy, some of it divisive.

At the Group of Eight summit, Bush is scheduled to have a separate meeting with French leaders, among the most caustic critics of the US action in Iraq, that will provide a further reading on how convivial or muscular the US is at the moment.

Then it is on to the Mideast, which may offer the most telling assessment of the US approach to the world post-Iraq. Unless an eruption of violence or some other dire problem disrupts his plans, President Bush on Tuesday is set to meet in Egypt with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Bahrain, along with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.

On Wednesday he will move to Jordan and huddle with Mr. Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, both separately and together.

Administration officials insist that they are now diving into a style of diplomacy they once eschewed because the situation, not their own policies, has changed. In the wake of the Iraq war, the White House now feels it can give a little impetus to what is going to be a long and difficult process.

The rise of Abbas has given the US a new Palestinian political leader with whom it believes it can make progress. Mr. Sharon's acceptance of the US road map - however conditional - has given all parties the chance for a fresh start in negotiations.

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