From the Washington Note: On Afghanistan too, Europe has been reluctant, at best prepared to await the announcement of a new American strategy, at worst appearing to bandwagon on the back of American power when the perception in the US is that Europe’s security interests are at least as threatened by the situation in Afghanistan as are United States’. Some in Europe have come to believe that its interests are more bound up in relations with Russia, whose divide and rule policy towards EU member states over energy policy has to date prevented a policy consensus emerging on that issue, and Turkey, which forms the gateway between the European and Islamic worlds and whose succession to EU member status generates hostility in much of Europe.

Yet the truth remains that if Europe wants to be a major player on the world stage it needs to think of its role more strategically and systemically if the United States is not to regard the relationship with China as its most important bilateral tie.

It is ironic that the President whose election was so lauded throughout Europe may therefore turn out to be the President under whose tenure neorealist predictions of the demise of the Transatlantic Alliance come to pass…

If Obama really is the United States’ first Pacific President, he will surely be its last Transatlantic President.(via the New Atlanticist), (photo: Ju Peng/Xinhua)