In the near term, the most pressing requirement in U.S.-EU relations is to resolve or at least contain the political damage from the growing number of trade disputes. In this regard, the solution of the banana dispute early in the Bush Administration was an important step. In cases where the United States has lost in WTO panels and in the appeals process, the administration should work with Congress to bring U.S. legislation into compliance with WTO obligations. This will place it in a stronger position to insist on EU compliance when that is in U.S. interests. At the same time, Washington needs to address reform of the WTO dispute resolution mechanism, an issue that already has been placed on the agenda in Geneva. If the GATT system in which countries could block the adoption of adverse rulings is simply replaced by a new system in which they can block the implementation of WTO rulings, little will have been gained.

Apart from its interactions with the EU, how the United States positions itself with regard to other countries and regions will have important indirect effects on Europe. A starting point must be a recognition that U.S. policy in the 1990s was too Eurocentric. The first Clinton Administration took office declaring that Western Europe was "no longer the dominant area of the world" and focusing on mechanisms such as NAFTA and APEC that seemed to downplay the importance of Europe. Over the years, however, Clinton gravitated toward a policy that was heavily Eurocentric, as illustrated not only by the focus on NATO enlargement and engagement in the Balkans, but also in the diminution of the U.S.-Japanese relationship and the focus on regulatory convergence with the EU.

Excessive focus on Europe is conducive neither to good relations with the rest of the world nor with Europe itself. While Europeans do not want to be told, as they were in the early 1990s, that they are part of a declining region, soon to be left behind by the dynamic capitalism of Asia and North America, they also do not desire a hyperactive U.S. policy on NATO reform, expansion and out-of-area planning, or excessive concern over the alignment of European and U.S. positions on third areas and global issues. While such activism sometimes is defended as necessary to prevent the dilution of U.S. influence in Europe, it is based on a faulty assessment of the sources of that influence. Institutions and agreements are important, but in the final analysis the United States has influence in Europe because it is a global power, able to confer and deny benefits that Europe cannot secure for itself save at unacceptable costs. A less Eurocentric U.S. policy will bolster rather than undermine U.S. influence.

How the United States positions itself in the globalization debate will also influence U.S.-EU relations. The triumphalist rhetoric that has characterized U.S. pronouncements in recent years has been damaging. Rather than boasting about vague concepts of "soft power" that draw the connection between globalization and Americanization, U.S. officials should avoid rhetoric that equates the inexorable and anonymous forces of globalization with U.S. interests. Despite major differences over climate change and other matters, there is enormous untapped scope for U.S.-EU cooperation on regional and global issues--everything from promoting peace in the Middle East to combating HIV/AIDS in Africa. The United States should work to build such cooperation to the extent that it yields concrete results. But simply drawing up laundry lists of areas in which U.S. and European interests coincide, in hopes that cooperation in these areas will substitute for a core transatlantic agenda centered on trade and security, is illusory.

Above all, the United States should adopt an approach toward Europe that is tougher in pursuit of concrete U.S. interests but less ideological and dismissive of genuine European concerns. The United States needs to take a firmer line on European double standards on trade and the environment. It should question European over-representation in international economic forums and pose hard questions about the external costs of European policies. Instead of reacting with horror when European leaders invoke the specter of multipolarity, it should develop its own strategies for forming issue-by-issue coalitions with other countries against the EU when doing so can advance U.S. interests.

At the same time, the United States should be less ideological when it comes to arguing issues of trade and globalization. It needs to be more open to the possibility that the Europeans may be right about some issues, and that the French are absolutely right in emphasizing that globalization need not mean Europe's homogenization to U.S. norms. U.S. policymakers need to do better at defending interests because they are interests rather than because they are expressions of universal laws that other countries are obliged to accept. Unless the United States becomes more adept at listening and granting validity to European concerns, it will find itself isolated in international forums and undercut by U.S. interest groups that share European rather than official U.S. views on key issues.

For the same reasons, the United States needs to be careful about dismissing out of hand such European shibboleths as multifunctionality in agriculture, diversity in culture or precaution in food safety. The problem is not that these principles are inherently wrong--in fact, they have an appeal around the world and even in the United States. Rather, it is that Europe has an internal decision-making structure that all but guarantees that such principles will be applied selectively, manipulated for commercial ends, and implemented in such a way as to ensure that their benefits accrue to Europe while their costs are imposed on the rest of the world. Only by being open to other countries' ideas and able to embrace its own version of multipolarity will the United States be in a position to engage with and, if necessary counter an EU that enters the 21st century determined to be, if not a superstate, very much a superpower that is prepared to challenge American influence and to assert its economic and political po wer around the globe.

John Van Oudenaren is chief of the European Division, the Library of Congress, and professorial lecturer at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Uniting Europe (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).

Essay Types: Essay