The possibility that the USA will go to war with Iraq, either alone or with only the backing of the UK, has pitched European relations with America into an impending crisis. The transatlantic partnership has been one of the constants of life since 1940. But it is now jeopardised by arguments over trade, farm policy, food science, sustainable development and the Middle East. Recently, the Americans have sought outrageously to exclude themselves from prosecution by the nascent International Criminal Court. Taken together, it is clear that the Europe America relationship is being destabilised, and our joint institutions undermined.

The most threatened of our common organisations is NATO, the collective defence pact that successfully weathered several political and military divergences between the Europeans and Americans for over fifty years. Quarrels about nuclear weapons and President Reagan’s ‘star wars’, as well as Europe’s hostility to the US war in Vietnam were containable because of the mutual vested interest in NATO as the lynchpin of liberal democracy and capitalism. The force of its ideology and the unity of its members meant that NATO prevailed with hardly a shot fired in anger. The Soviet Union disintegrated under the weight of its own internal contradictions. Only in the Balkans, as late as 1994, did NATO forces fight, and then to defeat Slobodan Milosevich who was the last, stubborn example of a dictator from Europe’s fascist tradition.

Then, when the Cold War was won, NATO’s problems started. The US, impatient with the slow development of European integration, re-wrote the rule book. From having been Western Europe’s military front line, NATO was given the new task of transforming itself into a pan-European security system. First, observers and then associate members were admitted. Then the US insisted that NATO should ape the European Union and enlarge to the East. Eager and fairly naive newcomers from Central Europe were obliged to increase their military expenditure to conform to NATO’s superior standards precisely when they could least afford to add to the economic burden of their transition from communism. NATO’s eastwards expansionism has provoked Russia, as it was bound to do, without enhancing genuine military security.

In the last fortnight, NATO’s enlargement has been exposed as the charade it is. The Bush Administration and US Congress is insisting that, in order to join NATO, candidate states in Central and Eastern Europe will have to agree to the special US privilege in the International Criminal Court. This demand has, quite rightly, provoked anger. Only Romania, which has small chance of joining the European Union for a generation, has agreed to do as Washington demands. Some of the others, like little Slovenia, have refused the US injunction and have indicated that their attachment to fundamental rights conforms to European norms. They will follow the lead of the EU. All others should do so, and help the European Union develop its autonomy from an overweening and misguided America. Then we should refound the transatlantic partnership on a more equal basis.