Category: US-EU Relations

An editorial from the New York Times – covering a topic oft covered on this blog. The growing thirst in Europe for a greater military power, to rival the United States, is something that seems to have affected the Bush administration. The Bush administration has identified yet another threat abroad. This time it’s the proposal…

The Bush administration has decided to postpone enforcement of new antiterrorism regulations that had threatened to block millions of Western Europeans and citizens of other developed nations from traveling to the United States unless they obtained new, computer-coded passports, according to senior administration officials. The new passport rules, which were supposed to take effect Oct.…

I got this one via Horst, cheers! Bob Kagan with a very lenghty essay on US-EU relations. I don’t have time to read the whole thing now, but it looks great, I will get time tomorrow. It is from June 2002, so was written long before the fallout over the UN resolution. Meanwhile in the…

An interesting poll in the IHT this week: The yawning political divide between Europe and the United States that was opened by the war in Iraq has continued to widen, according to a new survey of trans-Atlantic attitudes. The survey of 8,000 Americans and Europeans, conducted by the German Marshall Fund, found citizens on both…

Nick Fauchald reports on the drop in sales of French wine in the United States. This is an example of the world gone crazy, Americans boycotting French products and Europeans thinking that Americans are all fat couch potatoe morons who live in trailer parks. Grow up! Both of you and start behaving like ordinary people!

John Vinocur is back in the Herald Tribune – with another piece on transatlantic relations. He discusses Joschka Fischers designs on becoming the EU’s first Foreign Minister, and his declaration that Germany for its own purposes does not want the EU to become a rival to the United States. Germany is instead seeking the “primacy…

The eminent British historian Paul Johnson writes something of a polemic in Forbes magazine. In it he attempts to show that anti-Americanism is in fact latent racism. He also argues that there is no real democracy in Europe, that “European elites tend to look at Americans as a subcivilized mass, whose function is to be…

So why is it deemed by the right to be patriotic both to oppose the EU and to appease the US? Why has the old reactionary motto “my country, right or wrong” been so smoothly replaced with another one: “their country, right or wrong”? Why does the British right now believe it has a God-given…

William Pfaff with another excellent contribution to the transatlantic debate. Well worth the read. France is systematically denigrated, as to a lesser extent is Germany – Germany is thought salvageable, or open to intimidation, once Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is gone. France is portrayed as suffering from “a profound pathology,” and America’s enemy. In Washington power-corridor…

Philip Bobbit, author of the excellent Shield of Achilles writes a thought provoking piece in todays Guardian. He talks about WMD, the media and the intelligence services. He is really siding with Tony Blair on this one, is he not? I venture no opinion on the merits of this matter. I have complete confidence in…