FES Analyse: USA Eastern Europe and perhaps in time Russia. In this emerging American strategy, Europe is of secondary importance to the Middle East – and Eastern Europe and Russia, because of their proximity to the Middle East, are more impor­tant than Western Europe. Europe and the U.S. share a common focus on the zone of Muslim societies from North Africa to Pakistan. Both sides of the Atlantic share a common interest in thwarting al-Qaeda and simi­lar jihadist movements. But in many ways the interests of the U.S. and Europe in the Middle East diverge. Unlike Europe, Russia, China and India, the U.S. neither borders the Muslim world nor con­tains a substantial Muslim population in its own borders. This means that the American leadership is less constrained by Muslim opin­ion, both within and outside of U.S. borders, than are European governments. The relative in­difference of American leaders to Arab and Mus­lim opinion is the necessary condition for Wash­ington's attitude toward the Arab-Israeli conflict – determined chiefly by the U.S. Israel lobby and its Christian Zionist supporters – and the Bush administration's effort to turn Iraq, the world's second largest oil-producing country, into an American client state. The rise of Asia will also affect the U.S. and Europe differently. Asia’s economic growth has the potential to reshape the geopolitical land­scape. In 1750, China and India together were responsible for more than 50 percent of global manufacturing. Their share fell to 5 percent by World War I. The share of world manufacturing accounted for by Europe and North America rose from 18 percent in 1750 to 82 percent in 1913 be­fore declining to slightly more than 50 percent by the 1980s. As the dominant power in East Asia, the U.S. worries about the military implications of the rise of China. This is not a concern for Europe, for which China is a source of economic oppor­tunity. In the event of a Sino-American military rivalry, the U.S. is unlikely to find much support from its former Cold War allies in Europe. 7 Sovereignty versus Multilateralism The divergence of interests between the U.S. and Europe in the Middle East and Asia will continue to be accompanied by disputes over the norms of world order. Here there are deep philosophi­cal differences which will continue, no matter which political party controls Washington. From the time that it broke away from the British empire, the U.S. has jealously guarded its national sovereignty. Americans see the nation­state as the locus of democracy not only for themselves but also for others. Americans en­couraged the dissolution of the Habsburg, Ro­manov, Ottoman and British empires and the formation of new nation-states. The American ideal was a world of independent nation-states which would cooperate without sacrificing their sovereignty. Many, though not all, Europeans can be de­scribed as“post-nationalist.” The success of the EU has encouraged them to think that the nation­state can be transcended in the world as a whole, as it has been transcended, to a degree, in Europe. Today Europeans are the strongest de­fenders of multilateral institutions like the Uni­ted Nations. Democrats are more sympathetic to multilat­eralism than Republicans in the U.S. Never­theless, even a Democratic president would en­gage in a degree of unilateralism. While George W. Bush has made unilateralism the center of his foreign policy, it is an exaggeration to say that the U.S. before Bush was routinely multilater­alist. In fact the U.S. acted unilaterally through­out the Cold War outside of Europe, in Asia, the Middle East, and the Western hemi-sphere. The U.S. did not seek European permission to inter­vene in these areas in the past and it is not likely to do so in the future. For that matter, Britain and France, in their spheres of influence, have often intervened unilaterally in the last half century. The Gulf War, in which the U.S. collaborated with the UN, its NATO allies and most of the Middle Eastern states, was an exception. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait violated the basic norm of the sovereign state system – the pro­hibition against conquest and annexation. All states had an interest in having this norm en­forced. In addition, the threat to the industrial