Building a New Atlantic Partnership

The subject of this issue is a new book: America and Europe: A Partnership for a New Era. In it, RAND authors call for transforming the outmoded cold war alliance into an ambitious new compact for promoting the economic and strategic interests of the Atlantic community throughout the world.

With such a partnership, the authors argue, the combined economic, political and military weight of the West could be brought to bear on the most challenging issues of our time--achieving global prosperity through free trade, securing world energy supplies, countering terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and stabilizing the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the former Soviet Union.

The authors caution that, in the absence of a new partnership, a rare opportunity to shape the course of world events in the new era will be lost. The Atlantic democracies will drift apart--"Europe self-absorbed, America unwilling to support the costs and responsibilities of world leadership."

But Europe--for all its achievement of a common market--is still a collection of independent states, each pursuing different priorities and different formulations of its national interests.

If no European political entity exists, why this book? Why now? There are many reasons, say the authors, but several are compelling: The idea of a political Europe is slowly taking hold as the 16 member nations of the European Union (EU) commit themselves to forming an "ever closer union." In addition, the partnership will speed, not hinder, European unification. Also, America and Europe are not starting from scratch--much of the institutional machinery for multinational cooperation is already in place and running smoothly. Finally, the debate about Europe's future, America's purposes and the choice of paths toward those ends is long overdue.

In a preface to the volume, editors David C. Gompert and F. Stephen Larrabee write:

Many Americans will be dismayed that this emphasis on partnership forsakes U.S. unilateral leadership. Many Europeans will find the challenge to be too much too soon for a Europe still searching for its own identity. And many Asians will worry, unnecessarily, that a new Atlantic compact might be directed against them. We [the authors] will not view such reactions as disappointing, but rather as proof that we have triggered the debate we believe is needed.

In this issue:

Reports of research covered in this issue may be purchased from RAND's Distribution Services, 1700 Main Street, P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138. To place credit card orders: Telephone: (310) 451-7002; Fax: (310) 451-6915; Internet: order@rand.org. National Book Network (NBN) carries selected RAND titles. Contact NBN at 800-462-6420 to determine availability. Selected bibliographies of current research are available at no charge. Abstracts of all RAND documents are available for review on the World Wide Web.

Ann Shoben, Editor

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