No 9/11 And A Different US President

Read the transcript I edited in. That is a good relationship. That is not a strained relationship. It was not a strained relationship.
Perhaps strained isn't the best word because of the connotations. What would be a better word for "differing views, strategic interests, opinions, and objectives, slowly piling up over time"?

Funny - I can't remember anyone talking about (I mean seriously talking, not just academic flim-flam in International Relations periodicals and the left-wing press) Europe as a counter-balance to America until the time of Iraq.
If you dig, you can find it in foreign policy analysis and such. The division over Iraq was as much a symptom of a larger problem as the issue itself: the US has an intention to deal with a pest, said pest has ties with some powerful European states, and parts of Europe don't want to go along. You could find a number of countries like that across the world, from South America to Africa to the Middle East to Asia.
There is no inevitability about Europe and America diverging, unless people delude themselves into thinking that it must be so. The Post-Cold War divergence theory is twaddle, IMO.
There is no inevitability about Europe and America staying together. But Europe has its own energy security which is highly influenced by Russia, and the US has its own interests and commitments in Asia that could come into conflict with European economic interests, and after a point there will be a re-evaluation of what's most important to each party.
Incidentally, I don't see the idea of Gore-in-Iraq as particularly credible (Iraq wasn't an arbitrary target - it was a bogeyman for the people behind Bush, like Wolfowitz, before he even became President) but if he had done, is anyone seriously suggesting he would have done it worse, diplomatically-speaking, or had less political capital to spend with Europe, than Bush et al did? C'mon.
I wasn't talking about Iraq, though Gore would have faced the problem of what to do with an increasingly unrestrained dictator with proven WMD ambitions and usage. A peaceful non-offender during the Clinton years Iraq was not. My point was that there is an entirely unwarranted assumption that just because someone wouldn't be Bush, that Europe would hail and go along with the US.
 
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