After the dinner, at the home of native Utahn Tom Korologos, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, a senior Bush administration official said Chirac and the president had discussed Iraq, Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian situation and U.S. opposition to the European Union's plans to lift an arms embargo on China. The official said that "there will be more discussion" on the arms embargo, but neither side appeared to have budged on that issue, or any other.

Overall, the official said, the dinner was positive. "If I say 'frank,' that's the wrong word, because it's usually the euphemism for bad," the official said. "I would use the word 'productive.' "

In his speech at Concert Noble, Bush offered an elaboration of U.S. policy on Israel and the Palestinians, emphasizing that a new nation of Palestine must be made up of "contiguous territory" on the West Bank.

He emphatically said that Syria must withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

On Iran, he said that the government must end its support of terrorism and not develop nuclear weapons, and that in American dealings with the country, "no option can be taken permanently off the table." But in the next sentence he stepped back from the threat of military force and said that Iran was different from Iraq and that "we're in the early stages of diplomacy."

White House officials had promoted Bush's speech as a major embrace of European unity, and had released excerpts on Sunday night suggesting that the president would extensively support the idea of the 25-member European Union as a partner rather as a rival to the United States.

But he did not devote more than a few sentences to those ideas, and cast his support for a new European unity in the context of his goal of advancing liberty.

"America supports Europe's democratic unity for the same reason we support the spread of democracy in the Middle East — because freedom leads to peace," Bush said. "And America supports a strong Europe because we need a strong partner in the hard work of advancing freedom in the world."

On the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, which the Europeans support and the Bush administration opposes, he said that each side had expressed its views and that "now we must work together on the way forward." He said all countries could develop technologies like hydrogen-powered cars and clean-coal programs to slow the growth of greenhouse gases.

Although Bush delivered his speech in the heart of the new Europe, Brussels, the headquarters of NATO and the European Union, the setting chosen by the White House was very much old Europe. He spoke to an audience of some 300 European officials, business leaders and academics under five enormous crystal chandeliers and a domed ceiling, and was framed by a gilt-edged doorway draped with luxurious folds of crimson silk. Before the president's arrival, the sounds of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony filled the room.