The Marriage Counselor : British Prime Minister Tony Blair prides himself on (re)building bridges between Europe and the United States.(Brief Article)

America and Europe at odds? You'd be hard-pressed to find an odder couple than George Bush and Tony Blair. Lifestyles? It's Texas oil patch and Rangers baseball versus deep-think political chats in the Georgian salons of North London intellectuals. Politics?

Conservative Republican versus European social democrat. Foreign policy? The emptiest passport in the modern American presidency versus a multilingual, globe-trotting, communitarian reader of the Qur'an.

As different as these two may be, however, their story is in many ways a reality check on the loose talk of "unraveling" transatlantic relations. For when push comes to shove, as go Britain and the United States, so go Europe and the United States. That's not just a matter of Blair's playing the role of bridge builder between America and Europe at a time of serious strain. It's more that the evolution of Britain's relations with the United States, and the Bush administration, in particular, is likely to foreshadow that of the rest of Europe.

Britain and the United States have long enjoyed a "special relationship," historically surmounting personal differences between leaders. Yet the real cement in the relationship is the fact that, disparate as these men may be in background and temperament, they have never been as far apart as their caricatures suggest. Both are political pragmatists adept at finding common ground.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 put them to the test. That day Blair and his inner circle were worried as Bush hopscotched across the United States in Air Force One. Was he running away from the crisis? Would he overreact? "Oh, my God," one senior British official remembers thinking to himself. "He can't handle this." By Sept. 20, when Blair flew to Washington to see Bush, most of those fears had been allayed. It was time ...