Dear Philip. Talk of “friendship” in international relations is always a slippery business, but informed Europeans know you really are a friend of Europe. You take Europe seriously – whereas one of the biggest problems in transatlantic relations at the moment is that most Americans do not. You know what you are talking about. And you propose a new transatlantic deal.
So do we. In my new book, Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of our Time, I argue, as the subtitle suggests, that the crisis which climaxed over Iraq exposes a tremendous opportunity – and a historic imperative – for Europeans and Americans to work together on a new agenda of world politics. I find many other Europeans thinking along similar lines. So this is not just a matter of Europeans “responding” to a magnanimous American offer of co-operation. It is a matter of two old partners sitting down to thrash out a new deal. Two partners drastically unequal in military power, to be sure, but if you consider economic power and what Joseph Nye has called “soft power,” the asymmetry is less acute.
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