According to a number of scholars of international relations, the transatlantic relationship is going through a very significant and possibly irreversible crisis. It is claimed that the different reactions of the United States and the European Union to bothIn a recent article on the state of the transatlantic relationship, Asmus (2003) forcefully argued that the EU-US alliance had finally collapsed and that the two now former partners were headed for confrontation on a number of international issues.While other scholars do not share this extreme view, they agree with Asmus that the rift between the two is indeed very significant (Neuhold, 2003) and the current literature on transatlantic studies gives increasing prominence to this issue (Forsberg and Herde, 2006). The preoccupation with the state of the Atlantic Alliance has always been a constant feature in the literature on transatlantic studies, but recent policy differences and misunderstandings ranging from environmental politics (the Kyoto protocol and subsequent negotiations) to hard security matters (Iraq and Iran) to the substance of liberal values (the death penalty) have been interpreted as being qualitatively different from past ones and indicative of a serious and possibly irreparable split. In the past, rifts were short-lived and quickly mended for a number of reasons. First of all, the US was perceived to be a more accommodating actor, ready to listen to its partners and willing to pursue multilateral strategies, while the European Union was internally divided, unable to sustain common positions and therefore more readily influenced by the United States positions. In addition, the common threat of communism and the existence of shared liberal democratic values made the alliance both inevitable and strong. Today, it is argued that the situation is very different. The European Union has acquired much stronger internal coherence in
