THE US AND EUROPE A Case Of Mars And Venus?

(From The Statesman (India))

By Harsh V Pant The US decision to attack Iraq and change the regime of Saddam Hussein is producing grave convulsions in the international political environment. It has produced new alignments and threatens to reshape the old ones. A combined "no" by France, Germany, and Russia to the US plans on Iraq is perhaps the single most significant obstruction in the attainment of US foreign policy goals in the post-Cold War period. And this inevitably is going to have grave implications for the future of the Trans-Atlantic alliance. Since the end of the Cold War the Trans-Atlantic relationship has assumed a dynamic that is far more difficult to characterise than its relatively stable nature during the Cold War. But the current crisis over Iraq is set to define the nature of this relationship for years to come. However, though the present impasse might appear to be a result of different perceptions over the problem of Iraq, the crisis in the Trans-Atlantic relationship is actually structural in nature, and more enduring than many realise. After Cold War While the US is, today, the only power in the international system that enjoys enormous lead in all domains of power, other entities like the EU and China have enormous potential to challenge it in some domains in the near future. In the case of EU this is probably already happening as the EU has emerged as the largest economic entity on the globe and with the introduction of Euro has …