Ever since Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld drew the invidious distinction between old and new Europe, Europeans have been alert for signs of a new American strategy to dominate their continent through a policy of divide and rule. President George W. Bush has declared that the United States "welcomes the growing unity of Europe" and has taken a number of symbolic steps to indicate U.S. support for European integration, notably his visit to EU headquarters during his stop in Brussels in February. Nevertheless, suspicions persist that the real U.S. policy is reflected in articles advocating "disaggregation", "cherry-picking" and other approaches aimed at challenging Europe's progress toward union.

European reactions to Rumsfeld's remarks and the anti-EU strain in the U.S. policy debate have led in turn to calls by U.S. commentators for efforts to reassure Europe that Washington's commitment to supporting integration remains intact. Bush's remarks were a partial response to such calls, but administration critics argue that more should be done. Some even claim to have discerned a battle within the EU between "Atlanticist allies" of the United States and those who would turn the EU into a counterweight to U.S. power. Only renewed U.S. commitment to partnership with a co-equal--and necessarily unified--Europe can assure victory for the Atlanticists.

The emerging debate in the United States between the "disaggregators" and the "reassurers" risks obscuring the real choices that U.S. policymakers are likely to face as they deal with a more assertive EU against the background of an increasingly complex world. Neither the pursuit of disaggregation nor the unconditional embrace of the EU as a partner is likely to serve long-term U.S. interests. Rather, the United States needs to steer a course between, on the one hand, an unseemly and in the end probably futile attempt to weaken the EU and, on the other, accepting a partnership on terms essentially set in Brussels, Paris and Berlin.

Such a policy must address the key challenge facing the United States in relations with the EU: the deepening transatlantic divide over how multilateralism is defined and the objectives it should serve. For the EU, "effective multilateralism" includes promoting an international order characterized by preferential economic and political ties between the EU and various partners, all of which can be seen as aimed, at least in part, at creating a more "multipolar" order in which U.S. power will be constrained. The United States, in contrast, remains committed to an older version of multilateralism aimed at fostering a liberal international order whose fundamental tenets have always been economic non-discrimination and the sovereign equality of (preferably democratic) states. A key objective of U.S. policy should be to bridge the transatlantic divide over multilateralism or, at a minimum, to limit the damage to U.S. interests likely to be caused by EU efforts to promote a global order based on a competing version of multilateralism.

The U.S. Interest

Disaggregation is easily dismissed as a U.S. strategy for Europe. It flies in the face of U.S. diplomatic tradition and is unlikely to appeal to top-level policymakers. For reasons of style alone, it is hard to imagine leaders of the stature of Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles or Dean Rusk trying to advance U.S. interests by fanning differences between Denmark and Germany or favoring Estonia over France. No American secretary of state will want to be seen as trying to sustain U.S. economic and political pre-eminence through the essentially petty exercise of trying to disrupt European unity. There always will be occasions, to be sure, when the United States will look to individual EU member states for support on various issues and seek to build understanding for its views in national capitals. But this is consistent with the traditional pattern of U.S. policy toward Europe and must be distinguished from a strategic attempt to weaken the EU for its own sake, which would be a sharp reversal of policy.

Whether disaggregation would work is in any case doubtful. Europeans are increasingly bound by political, legal, economic and human ties. Any attempt to sever such ties or to exploit areas where intra-European links are frayed will almost certainly fail. America has no seat at the table when decisions are made about the EU budget, the passage of EU legislation or the apportionment of leadership posts. It thus has fewer carrots and sticks with which to influence European governments than these governments have to influence each other. If anything, a disaggregation strategy could have the opposite of its intended effect, as real or feigned fear of U.S. interference could bolster efforts to centralize power in Brussels, discredit leaders seeking to maintain strong ties to the United States, or increase pressures on more supportive member states to prove their European loyalties by distancing themselves from Washington.

Finally, even if disaggregation were feasible, it is not clear that its long-term effects would be positive for U.S. interests. In a world of emerging economic and geopolitical giants, and with the traditional great powers of Europe all in demographic and, in relative terms, economic decline, the only way to prevent total marginalization is through some form of unity. A tightly integrated Brussels-run counterweight would not serve U.S. interests, but neither would a weak agglomeration of states vulnerable to pressures from the east and south. Such a Europe would lack the self-confidence to deal with instability along its periphery, raising the prospect that the United States could be drawn into further conflicts in the Balkans or other potential trouble spots. Over the very long term, a fragmented Europe would be more vulnerable to "Eurabization" or other nightmare scenarios raised by some commentators.

The Perils of Partnership

Forming a partnership that would satisfy both sides is also likely to be difficult, if not impossible. Stable partnership between an established Number One and a second power that sees itself as on the rise is inherently difficult. The rising power is sensitive to signs that the hegemon will use partnership to lock it into a position of extended inferiority. For its part, the established leader invariably worries that momentum will carry the ascending power a little past equality and into a reversed position of dominance. To the extent that the two powers bring different and hard-to-measure strengths to the putative partnership, managing these insecurities is all the more difficult.

On the EU side, fears persist that any U.S. offer of partnership risks trapping Europe in a secondary position. This explains why the EU tends to deflect U.S. proposals, often to the frustration of well-intentioned advocates of closer transatlantic cooperation. Partnership is pushed into the future--to when the EU has achieved the legal competence, political cohesion and bureaucratic structures to realize what earlier in the postwar period was referred to as the "dumbbell" model of transatlantic cooperation. The European Security Strategy, for example, calls for the EU to develop "strategic partnerships" with five powers--Russia, Japan, China, Canada and India--but notes that with the United States it should aim to establish "an effective and balanced partnership", which will require it to "build up further its capabilities and increase its coherence." European leaders such as French President Jacques Chirac are also careful to avoid any implication that partnership with the United States will be exclusive or even privileged. When Europe is ready, bilateral U.S.-EU agreements may well replace older agreements such as the North Atlantic Treaty. But even then, such agreements will be only one of a set of such arrangements with other key actors such as China, Russia, India, and regional groupings in Africa and Latin America.

Furthermore, an institutionalized partnership acceptable to Brussels and the member states probably would have to be a kind of "partnership plus" in which the United States would cede a great deal more influence than U.S. policymakers are likely to regard as reasonable. It would mean more than improved consultation and a reining-in of what Europeans see as U.S. unilateralism. From the EU perspective, a satisfactory partnership that would qualify as "equal" and "balanced" would be an acknowledgment of a new order in which the EU would play an increased--and the United States a correspondingly decreased--role in setting the global "rules of the game." The EU would expect to call the tune in multilateral settings, much the way it already does in forums such as the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court (ICC). In the trade area, such EU-pioneered concepts as the precautionary principle, the cultural exception and the multifunctional role of agriculture would have to be accommodated in some form.

A partnership on terms likely to be acceptable to the EU would have significant economic disadvantages for the United States and would complicate the ability of the United States to meet its global commitments. The United States would remain the target of revisionist forces elsewhere in the world--whether Islamic radicalism or a rising China--but it would be forced to defer to a greater extent to European views and interests with regard to these areas. While those who favor partnership argue that one of its main advantages would be to provide the United States with added resources to deal with precisely these challenges, it is not clear that the phasing-in of European contributions would keep pace with the decreased freedom of action that partnership on European terms might entail.

Finding a New Strategy

An alternative U.S. approach is required. Such an approach will need to combine pragmatic, unsentimental engagement with the EU with something like a containment strategy aimed at checking negative tendencies in the development of the EU and its external policies. The starting point should be a recognition that European integration will continue in some form and that Europe will seek increased autonomy from the United States. The goals of U.S. policy therefore should be to ensure the survival, within Europe, of a plural order open to U.S. influence and to increase the likelihood that an autonomous EU has neither the incentive nor the means to join or lead global coalitions aimed at checking U.S. power. The key to "containing" the EU is not bilateral undertakings between Washington and Brussels, but renewed efforts by the United States to embed the EU in a liberal, multilateral system in which America plays a leading role.

Multilateralism has been the source of much confusion in the U.S. foreign policy debate, particularly as it relates to transatlantic relations. For a long time, integrating Europe was the problem-child of the U.S.-led international multilateral system--wedded to economic discrimination, resistant to U.S. calls to broaden the circle of Atlantic cooperation to include Japan, Latin America and other regions, and a laggard rather than a leader in efforts to tackle nuclear proliferation, environmental problems and other global issues. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the EU has managed to transform itself from probationer to, in effect, leading judge and jury of what constitutes proper multilateral behavior. European claims in this regard, initially largely self-asserted, increasingly have come to be accepted outside Europe, including in the United States, both by liberals attracted to the EU governance model and by conservatives who tend to equate multilateralism with weakness, and unilateralism with strength. With increased acceptance of the EU's multilateralist credentials has come a growing reverence among many U.S. observers for Europe's "soft power."

Historians will puzzle out how this turnabout occurred. Some combination of factors no doubt was at work: genuine improvement by the EU and its member states in meeting multilateral obligations, declining performance by the United States as a multilateral actor, and a change in how multilateralism itself is defined. However the change came about, the key question for the United States is how multilateralism should be defined and whether it can be reshaped to serve U.S. interests.

If the EU's approach to multilateralism is contrasted with the views of those who argue that any multilateral order is a sham--that the strong do what they like while the weak talk and establish institutions--then clearly the EU has impressive multilateralist credentials. To the degree that the United States eschews or is seen to be eschewing multilateral cooperation, the EU will assume by default the mantle of multilateralism and define its content for the rest of the world.

If, however, EU and U.S. actions are judged against the norms of the postwar liberal order, a different picture emerges. Neither the United States nor the EU has ever conformed perfectly to the ideal. But European multilateralism relies particularly heavily on an array of instruments with a distinctly illiberal thrust: preferential trade agreements, bilateral aid programs with a large element of bilateral conditionality, unequal political dialogue, readmission agreements that push immigration problems onto partner countries, and increased use of strategic linkage whereby, for example, EU trade partners and aid recipients are pressured to support EU foreign policy goals. This is especially true at the regional level: The EU's New Neighborhood Policy, for example, which has attracted considerable attention among soft-power advocates in the United States, is especially redolent of the kind of unequal bilateralism that the founders of the postwar multilateral system so abhorred.

The situation at the global level is more ambiguous, but there as well Europe's claims to multilateral leadership are by no means uncontested. Developing countries are deeply worried about the EU linking trade to issues such as the environment and animal rights. Many large countries with serious security concerns have no intention of joining the ICC or the EU-promoted landmine ban. Even with regard to Kyoto, one of the effects of the U.S. walkout was to obscure the fact that in the negotiations among the industrial countries, it was the EU rather than the United States that was isolated, as Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and others all sought to modify an arrangement seen as unfairly tilted to Europe's advantage.

This is not to say that other countries always prefer American to EU policies. Washington can be as guilty as Brussels of one-sided and protectionist behavior toward the outside world. It is to say, rather, that a facile identification of EU policy and practice with multilateral order is erroneous and not a basis on which to construct U.S. policy. If other countries are forced to chose between an overtly neo-imperialist order that disparages all dialogue and an approach that allows for still-unequal but at least partial dialogue, most will hold their noses and opt for the latter. But these are not the only options. By reaffirming its own historic commitment to a liberal multilateral order, the United States can build bridges to third countries and help to shape international (including European) understandings of multilateralism in directions that better serve its interests.

Those in the United States who argue that the key to dealing with Europe is a revived commitment to multilateralism thus are correct, but for reasons precisely the opposite of the one they usually give. Stronger multilateral engagement by the United States in all likelihood will not create a basis for partnership with the EU. It will, however, stop the slide toward an international order characterized by a bipolar rivalry between a United States that is increasingly excluded or self-excluded from European-dominated initiatives and an EU determined to use those initiatives to check U.S. power and promote its own interests.

Such an order is arguably already starting to emerge, with its alignments visible. Small and relatively weak countries, particularly those on the periphery of the EU, generally side with the Union. Larger and more distant countries--Japan, India, Australia and to an extent Russia--are more likely to keep the EU at a distance. Canada and Latin America split their votes, effectively siding with the United States in their resistance to aspects of EU economic governance, but casting their lot with Brussels on world order issues (landmines, the ICC, use of force) that are domestically popular and cost nothing in economic and political terms. China, the one actor too large to have to define itself with regard to this polarization, carefully hedges its bets, not compromising its autonomy but leaning more toward the EU in a relationship whose underlying basis is a shared commitment to curtailing U.S. power.

A revitalized liberal multilateralism would mitigate this emerging split by bringing the United States back into the center of the international multilateral order. There are a number of ways this might be achieved. First, global trade liberalization through the World Trade Organization by definition blunts the effects of preferential regional and bilateral trade arrangements. Second, the establishment of common regulatory standards in global bodies neutralizes the discriminatory effects of forced convergence to the EU acquis. Third, large, multilateral aid funds lower the relative importance of bilateral aid schemes run from Brussels. These are just a few examples.

Admittedly, effecting such a shift is easier said than done. To be fair, Washington's own commitment to a liberal order arguably has waned over the years. The United States has increasingly bilateralized its trade and aid policies in order to compete with the EU and to exercise greater direct control over and thereby ensure the effectiveness of U.S. assistance policies. Many of the instruments available to implement multilateral policies are problematic, either because of corruption and incompetence, or because they themselves are subject to capture by European interests that pay their bills and pack their governance structures. Global non-governmental organizations also tend to support the EU's version of multilateralism in such forums, which further undermines U.S. leverage. These difficulties do not, however, invalidate the central argument that a revitalized commitment to a liberal international order is the best way to deal with a potentially illiberal multilateralism spearheaded by the EU.

Two elements are important for a new U.S. strategy. First, a renewed attention to liberal multilateralism should make clear the direction that U.S. policy should not take. The United States should not pursue with the EU the kinds of charters, compacts, partnerships and other bilateral arrangements currently being promoted in Atlanticist circles. However well intentioned, this kind of U.S.-EU bilateralism moves away from a more plural and open international order. Within Europe, it cannot help but promote the further centralization of policymaking in and through Brussels that shifts power to the European Commission and member states such as France and Germany, even as it helps to marginalize the contributions of more liberal outliers such as the UK, the Scandinavian countries and the new member states to the east. In the wider world, it increases the likelihood that U.S.-EU understandings will be imposed worldwide, thereby marginalizing the influence of third countries that tend to be closer to U.S. positions. The result is a double loss for international pluralism, both within Europe and at the global level.

For the United States, such a loss might be worth paying if it meant "pinning the EU down", both with regard to substantive principles (concerning regulation, global governance and so forth) and procedural norms to ensure that these principles would be universalized in a cooperative rather than competitive manner. This is unlikely to happen, however. Any bilateral U.S.-EU understanding is certain to be ambiguous enough to preserve both the EU's internal autonomy and external freedom of action, even as it diminishes the importance of other mechanisms (such as NATO or the U.S.-Japanese relationship) that are valuable in their own right and that give the United States levers of influence over the EU.

The second element of a U.S. containment strategy must be a long-term effort to influence what might be called the "ideology" of European integration. Unlike the Soviet Union, the EU obviously does not represent a military or security threat. Nonetheless, there are parallels between the post-1945 struggle between East and West and what is fast becoming a defining split within the West. Both the Soviet Union of the 1940s and the EU of today can be regarded as revisionist powers, albeit ones with deep insecurities about their internal dynamism and legitimacy. Both began as elite-driven political-bureaucratic projects with a tendency to see themselves as entitled to increased influence in world affairs. Soviet propaganda claims need not be recalled, but some fairly representative European aspirations are worth noting: The EU must "become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world"; "Europe must have faith in the prospect of becoming the most important global power in twenty years"; "The building of Europe has become the precondition for securing prosperity, peace and justice not only in Europe, but across the globe"; The EU "is forging a European Dream that promises to endow humanity with a global consciousness. . . . In doing so, the European Union might become the real superpower of the post-modern world in the 21st century." And so on.

These extravagant claims co-exist, however, alongside enormous insecurities--nowhere more evident than in the overwrought reactions to remarks such as Rumsfeld's or the even less consequential pronouncements of analysts and pundits. As in the Soviet case, this combination of overarching ambition and crippling self-doubt leads to an unhealthy preoccupation with the United States and thus to a drive to polarize and bilateralize a relationship that, whether one of rivalry, partnership or some combination of both, is seen as validating the European project.

This is fundamentally a matter for Europeans themselves to resolve, but how the United States acts toward and talks about the EU can play a role in placing, as it were, both a floor under Europe's insecurities and a ceiling on its ambitions. Talk of disaggregation is obviously harmful, in that it both fuels anxieties and stokes ambitions when U.S. efforts (largely imagined) to thwart Europe's aspirations are defeated. Talk of partnership is less damaging but also problematic. It raises fears of being locked in an unequal embrace, even as it reinforces the impression of a rising Europe moving to a position of equality or--who knows--perhaps a bit more than equality. Instead of endlessly debating the merits of a more or less unified EU, or the conditions under which a satisfactory partnership finally might emerge, the United States should take a pragmatic approach that emphasizes solving concrete economic and political problems to the extent possible in broader multilateral forums where the views of third countries can be brought to bear as well.

Such an approach does not preclude direct engagement with, and the further development of, bilateral relations with the EU. Indeed, the opposite is likely to be the case. Freed from concerns about nailing down the terms of a future partnership, Washington would be able to take a more relaxed attitude toward issues such as membership for Turkey and Ukraine, thereby removing one irritant in the relationship. Saving NATO would remain a U.S. objective, but less energy and emotion could be expended on defining the terms of EU-NATO cooperation (terms that the EU is certain to demand be revised as the common European security policy reaches new stages of development) and on correcting deficiencies in European forces (unlikely to be addressed in any case) and more on using NATO as a forum for political consultations.

The pursuit of a more plural European order also would provide incentives on the U.S. side to defuse bilateral conflicts with the EU. Clearly, the United States needs to fight to protect its national interests in some cases. But U.S.-EU conflict tends to be asymmetrical in its political effects. Those in Europe most interested in building up the EU as a counterweight to the United States arguably have a vested interest in a certain level of tension with Washington--one that encourages them to pick fights on various issues. If Europe "wins" in any given dispute, the value of European unity is demonstrated for all to see. If Europe loses, the familiar arguments for a stronger Europe are trotted out. Either way, there is little downside to conflict. For the United States, a different logic applies. Wins, while sometimes necessary to protect concrete interests or to uphold legal positions, garner nothing in the way of good will, even as they spur the same calls for efforts to counterbalance U.S. power. And losses, well, are losses. Conflict avoidance thus would be a key element of a pluralistic strategy toward Europe.

Finally, a strategy to preserve an open, plural environment in Europe should provide both added incentives and opportunities for increased consultation with a range of European political actors. Calls for partnership from the U.S. side inevitably reinforce centralizing tendencies in the EU, providing the European Commission, the European Parliament and the more ambitious member states ready-made arguments that "more Europe" is needed to meet the demands of co-equal cooperation with the United States. Disaggregation, ironically, contributes to the same result, as European leaders feel a need to increase solidarity to counter U.S. tactics.

Fostering a plural order entails avoiding either extreme. Washington thus should welcome expanded consultation with Brussels, using the mechanisms established under the 1990 and 1995 U.S.-EU agreements, covering both matters of bilateral concern and matters relating to regions and issue areas where U.S. and EU interests intersect. But the United States also should cultivate bilateral ties with the EU member states as well as use other multilateral forums--NATO, the G-8 and the OECD--to expand consultation. Without overtly challenging EU prerogatives, such consultations quietly reinforce the existing reluctance in national capitals to relinquish bilateral ties to third countries and to channel the pursuit of national interests exclusively through Brussels.

The U.S. debate on Europe has gone badly off the rails. As U.S.-European relations have deteriorated, most participants in this debate have stepped up the familiar calls for partnership, without seriously considering how difficult achieving a real partnership is likely to be, the ambivalence that exists in Europe about the concept, and the terms on which the EU would want to establish such a relationship. A small but growing minority of commentators has sensed that the problems in the U.S.-European relationship go deeper and are at least partly rooted in the internal development of the European Union. They cannot, therefore, be wished away by calls for partnership. But these commentators have not proposed policy alternatives that go beyond frontally assaulting the EU in ways that are bound to fail and that belie the best traditions of American diplomacy. A new approach is needed.