Why, despite their professed similarity of goals, do the policy preferences of the European Union and the United States diverge on so many multilateral issues? This puzzling central question, posed by David Hannay, a former UK Ambassador to the United Nations, caught the attention of Thomas Mowle. These words became the guiding line for this trendsetting book, brilliantly and objectively written, and extremely well-organized. Allies at Odds? The United States and the European Union will certainly become a milestone and a necessary point of reference for any other venture in the ever expanding bibliography of EU-US relations.

The fact that the British diplomat’s question was issued in March 2001, before the terrorist attacks of September 11, should send a serious warning to observers and scholars. Mowle reminds us that the most scandalously obvious clash between Washington and Brussels happened when the United States lost its seat on the UN Human Rights Commission in May of that year. The gap and the rift (to use some of the words employed since the terrorists attacks) between Europe and the United States had a solid history of precedents, only exacerbated by further disagreements over the handling of the terrorist crisis and the involvement in Iraq.

Mowle meets the expectations of readers looking for bold predictions in a book that is rigorously anchored in objective analysis, and he resists offering policy recommendations. He considers the possibility that the European Union would someday develop “enough unity to act as a single power,” at which point the European Union and the United States would “cease to be allies in the way they have been since mid-century—although a new form of cooperation could not be ruled out.” However, taking into account the account that the necessary changes will occur in the international setting and in the EU structure, the European Union and the United States “will remain allied at odds.”

This conclusion, backed by a reasonable review of the current situation and recent events, is paradoxical to casual observers and scholars, because an assessment of the historical and contemporary linkage shows that the two leaderships profess to share many of the same values and interests: democracy, human rights, peace, and stability. To arrive at this conclusion, the author studies four primary groupings of conflictive cases, and employs three theoretical approaches mapped out in an elucidating second chapter.

Areas where the United States and the European Union show contrasting and cooperating approaches are addressed in chapters dedicated to arms control, the environment, human rights, and military cooperation. Mowle reminds readers that the clash over Iraq was preceded by disagreements over the Kyoto Protocol, the Mine Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, NATO, and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. While the United States and the European Union had differing attitudes toward these issues when Bill Clinton was President of the United States, dismissing the notion that the bad relationship was caused by the current administration, the presidency of George W. Bush expanded the sphere of confrontation to include the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, a Small Arms Program of Action, and, of course, the overall policy toward Iraq.

To assess the behavior of the two main partners in these primary areas of dispute, Mowle uses an ambitious three-avenue approach to international politics: realism, liberalism, and an “epistemic” approach emphasizing the role of ideas in policymaking. The result is that the actions of the United States are—not surprisingly—best explained by realism, and the divergence with the European Union is attributable to the dominant US position in the world. The liberal approach, which “stresses the role of international institutions, norms, and information” and believes that formal agreements can transform the relationships between states, is best applied to explain how the European Union tries to operate, but at the end of the day its operation may also be consistent with the realist expectations. The epistemic approach, while successful when applied to other states or blocs, does not seem to be as helpful as the combination of the other two. In other words, “culture” and domestic issues do not explain why the European Union as a whole acts in a specific way when dealing with the United States in a world setting. The author thus dismisses the notions that the disagreements should be identified with the current Bush administration and that they reflect animosity between the political left and right.

While Mowle denies that the relationship is in crisis, he recognizes a “slow erosion of trust in the United States on the European side, a cumulative dysfunctional spillover of non-cooperation.” The real danger, he argues, is not that the European Union will try to oppose the United States, but that “it will stand aside when asked to cooperate.” In a sequel to Henry Kissinger’s famous complaint about his inability to telephone a unified European voice, Mowle writes that a US Secretary of State may know “what number to dial [as a result of a deepening of its foreign policy] to reach Europe—but Europe may not answer the phone.”