George W. Bush has learned from his first term in office and will adopt a more "consensual" foreign policy, his closest international ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said in an interview published on Thursday. "Evolution comes from experience," Blair told the historian Timothy Garton Ash in an interview in the Guardian newspaper. "It is possible to construct an international agenda that is more consensual, more multilateral than what has gone before."
Blair said that a process of learning, beginning with war in Afghanistan, had taught Bush - who takes the oath of office for a second term later on Thursday - the importance of using other measures, besides military force, to make the world safe.
"In the end, we can take security and military measures against terrorism but ... the best prospect of peaceful coexistence lies in the spread of democracy and human rights."
Blair, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Bush over Afghanistan and Iraq, has been criticised at home for failing to win American support for his own foreign policy goals.
Britain leads the Group of Eight industrial countries this year, and Blair wants progress on cutting African debt and fighting emissions believed to cause global climate change. He said he does not expect Bush to reverse his opposition to the Kyoto protocol aimed at reducing global warming. But Washington could take other steps to curb emissions.
He also appeared to play down the threat of a confrontation with Iran. Britain, France and Germany are trying to persuade Iran to abandon nuclear programmes, which Washington says are aimed at producing a bomb and Tehran says are for nuclear power.