BRUSSELS, Belgium – Many European leaders will be saddened to see George W. Bush leave the White House next year.

No, they won’t miss his soaring inspirational rhetoric, collegial foreign policy or sophisticated knowledge of the world. What worries many Europeans is that their free pass is about to expire.

Not since Richard Nixon’s final year in office have foreign leaders been so free to say no to Washington with few if any political repercussions. In fact, for the last few years, agreeing with the White House has held greater political risks than snubbing Bush and his aides.

The next president, lamented Reinhard Butikofer, chairman of the Green Party in Germany, “will push us to send more troops to Afghanistan.”

But haven’t Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates ganged up on Berlin in recent weeks, positively demanding more from Germany? In fact Gates was withering in his implicit criticism of Germany – at least by the standards of diplomatic speech – when he spoke last month of “some allies willing to fight and die to protect people’s security, and others who are not.”

Yes, Butikofer told me with a shrug, “but we are so used to saying no to Washington now.” That is not likely to be so easy a year from now, no matter who wins the election in November.

Concerned as they may be about that problem, Europeans will have even more to lament when Bush takes his final flight to Crawford next January.

Whether Obama, Clinton or McCain wins the election, the next president could not possibly present such a ripe target for ridicule for a population already predisposed to disdain the United States and its leaders.

Anti-Americanism is a longtime, common theme of European discourse. But a survey last year by the German Marshall Fund of the United States showed that almost sixty percent of Europeans held an unfavorable view of American “leadership in world affairs” – a fifty percent increase in five years. The survey showed that the Iraq war and President Bush himself were the largest areas of disapproval.

Following from that, many Europeans enjoy opining that American dominance of world affairs is waning, even though “talk of the decline of the West is as old as the West itself,” noted Radoslaw Sikorski, the foreign minister of Poland. He was speaking at the Brussels Forum, a conference here last weekend put on by the German Marshall Fund. One conference debate was not-so-subtlety entitled “The West Under Challenge.”

Nik Gowing, an orotund, white-haired BBC anchorman, moderated that debate and doggedly pushed the view that “America is losing power and influence, that other non-Western forces are successfully beginning to eclipse the United States.” He obviously relished the thought and would not let it go even when his panelists – Sikorski and other senior officials from France, Russia and the United States – declined to embrace it.

Gowing asked Bernard Kouchner the French foreign minister, about a remark he had made to Roger Cohen, an International Herald Tribune columnist a few days earlier, that “the magic is over” for the United States. Kouchner insisted, somewhat disingenuously, that his remark related only to Iraq, though it is hard to see how anyone could consider the American experience in Iraq ever to have been “magical.”

In this case, Kouchner said had been talking about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, and his visit to Baghdad last month. Iraqis welcomed him with red-carpet pomp, while

President Bush, visiting a few days earlier, had snuck into Baghdad in the dead of night.

Gowing was undeterred. With a tone of grave import, he asked Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Russian State Duma’s international affairs committee, “are you suggesting now that really, in many ways, the Western model when it comes to Russia is spent, is broken?” Kosachev dodged the question.

Long past the point when Gowing’s relentless pursuit of his phantom had grown embarrassing, Richard Holbrooke, who was United Nations ambassador under President Clinton, declared the entire exercise “journalistic gibberish.”

In truth, after three days of discussing “trans-Atlantic issues,” as Europeans like to call their dealings with the United States, the unsurprising conclusion is that Europe and the United States, like it or not, remain deeply dependent on each other – no matter the issue, no matter who is president.

Speaking about global warning, for example, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minster, plaintively declared: “It’s my strong belief that we need strong cross-Atlantic cooperation to face these challenges appropriately and effectively.”

No one winced. Nobody shook his head.

Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. Readers may send him e-mail at: [email protected]