British Prime Minister Tony Blair has expressed the hope that U.S. President George W. Bush will adopt a more consensual foreign policy approach in his second term. "Evolution comes from experience", Blair told the Guardian newspaper in an interview published Thursday. He had witnessed this in "successive conversations" with the U.S. President, Blair said. As part of a learning process that began with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. administration had reached the conclusion that "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 said. It was significant that Bush was making the first foreign trip of his second term next month to Europe, Blair added. He hoped that it would be possible to construct an international agenda that is "more consensual, more multilateral than what has gone before." --SP 1330 Local Time 1030 GMT
