We need to re-think the transatlantic relationship. Its imbalances (including US preponderance) and its deficiencies (meaning Europe’s insufficiencies), as well as its tensions (who does what?) and separate memberships (who goes where?), are debated with the déjà dit of yesteryear. Whether stated in terms of power (in a post-American or post-Western world) or weaknesses (in NATO no less than with the EU), such questions have not been renewed. Americans and Europeans must adapt to their new realities in an uncertain strategic situation that is neither uni- nor multi-polar but zero-polar.

Looking back on this relationship in awe of what has been achieved over the last 50 years is justified but pointless. A united Europe and a cohesive Euro-Atlantic security space are the durable legacies of the three world wars that defined the twentieth century—including the Cold War. Even embroiled in the most wide-ranging constitutional crisis since the signature of the Rome Treaties in 1957, Europe is a Union which has irreversibly buried its past divisions. Even at a time when the United States is contemplating its future in Asia, it shares affinities with the countries of Europe that, in toto, do not exist anywhere else. Although plagued by their usual mutual suspicions, Americans and Europeans form a community of interests and even of fate. Why, then, wallow in debates and quarrels that seem to discount the West by raising illusory alternatives? What was the President of the European Commission thinking of when, 15 months after the newly elected Barack Obama ‘invited’ Europe to join the United States in the quest for a new international order, he complained of a disappointing and distant America? Who has failed whom?⁽¹⁾

Taking Stock

The end of the Cold War represented a triumph of history over theory, and hence of the generalist over the specialist. History, which some observers claimed to have ended but which has continued to inform our thinking and affect real events, responds to its own logic. Following a rather ‘short century’, which began badly in 1914 with the dehumanizing excesses of the Great War but ended on a higher note in 1989 in a turmoil of democratic revolutions, we have now entered a century that promises to be rather long, beginning with some haste and too much passion on 11 September 2001 and with the conflicts that followed.