Metternich would have understood very well what has been going on in Bonn for the past week. Despite the increasingly dire warnings from scientists about global warming, it is not climate change that has been at stake - but interests - as a spokesman for OPEC candidly conceded at the weekend. OPEC member-states are worried that they will lose oil revenues if the industrialised countries cut back on their consumption of fossil fuels. Canada and Japan want credits for forests as "sinks" for their rising carbon dioxide emissions, while Australia has to look to the future of its vast coal reserves.
The negotiations on this crucial issue have been dragging on for nearly a decade. For it was at the 1992 Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted, with the objective of stabilising the greenhouse gas emissions of industrialised countries at their 1990 levels by the end of last year.
Patently, that didn't happen precisely because it was based on voluntary commitments. New mandatory targets, to be met by 2012, were set in Kyoto and it was the task of the Bonn summit to make them work. But it is now clear that President Bush's disgraceful decision to pull out of the Protocol gave enormous additional leverage to Canada, Australia, Japan and other countries to extract as many concessions as they could. And they had the EU over a barrel for the withdrawal of the world's biggest polluter - the US - meant that their support was critical if the only international treaty on climate change was to survive at all.
The compromise package being discussed endlessly in Bonn last night is far from ideal, but it represents a first, albeit tentative, step to start cutting back on the prodigious emissions blamed for global warming.
It is still questionable whether President Bush can detach himself from the fossil fuel interests that supported his election to produce a credible package of voluntary measures which the US might take - outside the Kyoto process. That will become clear in the coming months, perhaps in advance of the next climate change summit in Marrakesh this November. Ultimately, the increasing evidence of extreme weather events, as well as shifting public opinion in the US, should shame even Mr Bush into rejoining the international effort to deal with it.