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Past Event

Brookings Institution/Hoover Institution Briefing

Troubled Partnership: What's Next for the United States and Europe?

Global Governance, Europe, Diplomacy


Event Summary

A key challenge for the Bush administration in its second term is to rebuild relations with European allies in the wake of the breakdown over Iraq. How much damage has been done? Is it reversible? What kind of accommodation will it take on each side of the Atlantic to get the relation back on track? Finally, is the problem essentially one of personalities and policy choices—or does the emerging divide reflect a long-term strategic divergence which will continue to complicate transatlantic relations for the foreseeable future?

Event Information

When

Wednesday, November 10, 2004
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Where

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036
Map

Contact: Office of Communications

E-mail: communications@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6105

The Brookings Institution and Stanford University's Hoover Institution will convene four foreign policy experts who have contributed to a new volume, Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (Routledge, 2004) to discuss the prospects for transatlantic relations in the wake of the U.S. presidential election. Panelists will take questions from the audience.

Transcript

IVO DAALDER: Let me talk about what I think is the future of U.S.-European relations and divide the short term from the long term.

In the short term, I'm a pessimist, and I think it's very difficult to be anything else besides a pessimist about U.S.-European relations in the short term. But in the long term, I'm an optimist. I was just in Europe earlier this week, in which the notion of being optimistic is, almost by definition, excluded and makes me an American, even though I was born and raised in Europe, but I am optimistic for reasons that, in fact, have very much to do with the short term.

So let me explain that. Why am I pessimistic in the short term? Well, there are really three reasons:

One is that, for all the rhetoric we are hearing, even emanating from Republican circles, I think American foreign policy in the next four years is going to be exactly what John Kerry said it would be—more of the same; that is, we're not going to see a grand strategic change. We're not even going to see a grand tactical change. Frankly, I don't think we're even going to see a grand rhetorical change in American foreign policy in the next four years.

Read the complete event transcript (PDF—111KB)

Participants

Moderators

Tod Lindberg

Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Editor, Policy Review

Panelists

Francis Fukuyama

Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Ivo H. Daalder

Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy

Walter Russell Mead

Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations