Yet Mr Bush's message was an important one in an important place: Brussels may be something of a term of abuse in this country, but it is the home of the European Union, which now comprises 25 member states and 450 million people, as well as the headquarters of the Nato alliance, still, despite knocks, the institutional embodiment of transatlantic ties and proof, long past the end of the cold war, that there is more to links between the old and new continents than a distant past fighting fascism together.

Many Europeans will take comfort in the fact that the president went out of his way to treat the EU so seriously. Gone was the sense, such a damaging element of the Iraq crisis, that the US would cherry-pick "willing allies" among compliant "new" Europeans. Now he favours "a strong Europe", not for its own sake, which may be fair enough, but "because we need a strong partner in the hard work of advancing freedom in the world".

It was only to be expected that Mr Bush would appeal to emotions and shared values, but at times he stretched credibility. To say that "no power on earth will ever divide us", has the sort of mock-biblical resonance that often appears in his speeches but sounds hollow in the light of substantial differences about how to "advance freedom" and other big issues. Even if it's fair to describe most EU governments as wanting to move on; even if they acknowledge that the Iraqi elections show that good things can happen for bad reasons; the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction still constitute a sizeable elephant in the transatlantic room. Notwithstanding Mr Bush's "diner á deux" with Jacques Chirac last night, and tomorrow's meeting with Gerhard Schröder in Mainz, the refusal of France and Germany to put any "boots on the ground" in Baghdad or Basra reflects the fact that millions of ordinary Europeans, a fraction of them protesting on the heavily policed streets of central Brussels, still believe the war was wrong, even if it has produced what the president called "the world's newest democracy".

Mr Bush's flattering tone could not conceal key areas of US-European disagreement: tackling Iran's nuclear ambitions, terrorism, plans to lift the EU arms embargo on China, and American pressure on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon are all neuralgic points. Europeans will have to address some of these more carefully than they have so far. There was disappointment that the president failed to deliver on hints - too much advance spin? - that he might say something new about dealing with global warming. His comments, sniped one disgruntled green activist, were "as groundbreaking as saying that Brussels has bad weather and good chocolate".

The most impressive part of the speech, with a silent nod to Tony Blair, was Mr Bush's commitment to work for a "viable" Palestinian state, an area where energetic US involvement would go a long way to boosting transatlantic unity. For the moment, to adapt Mahatma Gandhi's acerbic opinion about western civilisation, one can only say that such unity would be a fine thing.