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Europe and America: A Return to History

Miles Kahler and Werner Link
Reviewed by By Stanley Hoffmann
September/October 1996
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Miles Kahler and Werner Link
Council on Foreign Relations Press
1996
135 pp.
$15.95

A versatile American political scientist and a German expert on the history and politics of the Cold War have written two (respectively short and long) essays that try to discern the future of transatlantic relations in light of past patterns of conflict and cooperation between the United States and Western Europe. Both authors emphasize continuity and regularities. But Kahler warns about the present "tug of domestic political demands" and about the gradual erosion of internationalism in the United States. Link pleads for a "stepwise restructuration of transatlantic relations on the lines of a symmetrical and balanced alliance."

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