Balancing America: Europe’s International Duties DAVID P. CALLEO The Postwar Transatlantic Balance T he Bush administration has put a new face on American power. Sud­denly, it seems, the United States is behaving like a traditional Euro­pean hegemon. Europeans are used to a different kind of American lead­ership, one committed to multilateral solutions and therefore solicitous of the views of allies. Something, they think, has gone wrong with the old America. This is particularly distressing for those European states and po­litical groupings grown attached to what they see as a global division of labor – one where the United States is a»military« power and they are »civilian« powers. It is a vision that harkens back to the Middle Ages: America is the state and Europe is the church. The comfort of this ar­rangement depends on a basic similarity of visions and aims. Otherwise, unless the church can translate its moral authority into political and mil­itary power, the state calls the tune. This appears to be what has happened in the Atlantic Alliance. The former identity of transatlantic perspectives seems suddenly to have vanished. Americans now have different goals and norms from Europeans. Since the American government controls the alliance’s military power, it feels free to pursue its own aims, whether Eu­ropean allies approve or not. Europeans, dismayed, want to know how this change came about, and what they should do about it. They search for clues by studying the new habits of»successor generations,« or the growing influence of the non-Europeans in American culture and poli­tics. Perhaps a more reliable analytical tool is the old-fashioned balance of power. The collapse of the Soviet Union was, after all, a geopolitical rev­olution. It was not the end of history, but it was the end of a long period where American military power had been seriously counterbalanced by Soviet military power, above all on the European continent. The exist­ence of the bipolar balance had obvious effects on transatlantic relations. So did its abrupt disappearance. It is difficult to calculate who are the real ipg 1/2003 Calleo, Balancing America 43