Europe and America in a New Century

摘要

For most of modern history, Europe has been America's Significant Other. For the past half century in particular, an alliance between the two has dominated world politics. But how long can this alliance be expected to last, and in what form? How well does it fit the world likely to evolve in the twenty-first century?The present close relationship was not inevitable, as a study of its history indicates. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the transatlantic relationship was governed by American isolationism. This amounted to a diplomatic trade-off where the United States refrained from being drawn into European power politics and European states refrained from intervening in the Western Hemisphere. The trade-off held until the world wars of the twentieth century.