America and Europe: A Partnership for a New Era

The nine authors of this valuable compendium seek a new partnership for the troubled union between Europe and the United States. Their core assumption and insight is that Euro-Atlanticism offers the only viable basis on which to sustain American foreign policy, vastly superior to all the other "isms" -- isolationism, unilateralism, and U.N.-based multilateralism -- that parade as false substitutes. Working from the bottom up in seeking the foundations of a workable world order, the authors, mainly affiliated with RAND, seek a new partnership with Europe that is "more ambitious, more global, and more equal." That is a tall order, because certain inequalities are built into the terms of the relationship, and because Europe and America have been most often at loggerheads when they have encountered one another "out of area." So there is much reason to suspect that the more ambitious projects thoughtfully explored in this volume will go awry, and much reason to believe in the indispensability of seeking common action anyway.