I’ve been watching the news of President Bush’s European visit with great amusement, as mainstream media do their best to portray it as a “fence-mending” trip, with Bush trying to “patch things up” with the rest of the world. Media elites are still confused by the poker face of the Commander in Chief.

Mark Steyn reveals some of the cards: US can sit back and watch Europe implode.

A week ago, the conventional wisdom was that George W. Bush had seen the error of his unilateral cowboy ways and was setting off to Europe to mend fences with America’s “allies.”

I think not. Lester Pearson, the late Canadian prime minister, used to say that diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. All week long President Bush offered a hilariously parodic reductio of Pearson’s bon mot, wandering from one European Union gabfest to another insisting how much he loves his good buddy Jacques and his good buddy Gerhard and how Europe and America share — what’s the standard formulation? — “common values.” Care to pin down an actual specific value or two that we share? Well, you know, “freedom,” that sort of thing, abstract nouns mostly. Love to list a few more common values, but gotta run.

And at the end what’s changed?

Will the United States sign on to Kyoto?

No.

Will the United States join the International Criminal Court?

No.

Will the United States agree to accept whatever deal the Anglo-Franco-German negotiators cook up with Iran?

No.

Even more remarkably, aside from sticking to his guns in the wider world, the president also found time to cast his eye upon Europe’s internal affairs. As he told his audience in Brussels, in the first speech of his tour, “We must reject anti-Semitism in all forms and we must condemn violence such as that seen in the Netherlands.”

The Euro-bigwigs shuffled their feet and stared coldly into their mistresses’ decolletage. They knew Bush wasn’t talking about anti-Semitism in Nebraska, but about France, where for three years there’s been a sustained campaign of synagogue burning and cemetery desecration, and Germany, where the Berlin police advise Jewish residents not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith.