Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has committed the Obama administration firmly to closer civil-military cooperation on development and humanitarian aid as a key component of the new U.S.-led “surge” in Afghanistan. (Watch her press conference in Kabul here.) In this initiative, she has outspoken support from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has voiced his conviction the Pentagon needs to operate in tandem with “soft power.” The two cabinet secretaries’ ability to see eye-to-eye is a change from recent eras in Washington when inter-agency conflict over policy dogged U.S. operations in combat theaters, including Iraq.
By Jean-Claude Casanova
(This article appeared in Le Monde newspaper in its edition dated Nov. 16, 2009.)
At the end of President George W. Bush’s second term in office, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the distinguished analyst, put forward the idea that two conditions had to be met in order to advance transatlantic relations: America had to go through “regime change,” and another “regime” had to emerge in Europe. He meant that the United States had to have a presidency with a less unilateral vision of the world, and that Europe had to achieve a higher degree of political unity. Now Barack Obama has been elected and the Lisbon Treaty has been ratified. Have these conditions been met?
The European competition authority is challenging U.S. high-tech companies’ business practices, including some already approved by the anti-trust regulators in Washington.
A leading American anti-trust attorney probes the divergences between U.S. and EU legal philosophies and explains why the EU approach seems to be gaining ground as a global model. Can the outlook for trans-atlantic convergence improve?
Will it succeed in giving the EU a stronger voice on the world stage?
The European Union breathed a sigh of relief with the entry into force of the long-awaited, long-debated Lisbon Treaty. One of its most important innovations, potentially, is the creation of a multi-national “diplomatic corps” to work under the EU’s new “foreign minister.”Following its financial meltdown in October 2008, Iceland hoped that EU membership would protect the country from a similar economic crisis in the future, and six months later, in July 2009, Reykjavik applied to become a member state. The European Commission responded positively – in less than a week, a very rapid timeframe when compared to countries in the Balkans which have sometimes had to wait years before their applications were even considered.
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