Four years later--with the United States mired in a messy and still inconclusive war, and European governments anxious not to repeat the missteps that threatened potentially ruinous rifts on their own, historically fractious, continent--there is much optimistic talk about a revived alliance. Diplomats on both sides say, and many even seem to believe, that the transatlantic partnership has been brought back from the brink, and is once again playing a central role in global security. They speak of progress in transatlantic efforts to defuse Iran's nuclear program, to bring a lasting peace to Lebanon, and to move the Balkans steadily toward a lasting stability.

The Bush administration, which in the pre-Iraq period seemed to go out of its way to poke Europeans in the eye, has in the last few years been whispering sweet nothings into their ears. Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, told the Atlantic Council in Washington last month that all was unity and peace again: "I think I can say with great confidence, and I think most European diplomats would say the same, that [the] alliance is now back together again."

In Europe, the public version is that the two sides have indeed converged, and that areas of agreement now far outweigh in number and importance areas of contention. In private, Europeans will tell you, with undisguised glee, that the reason things are calm again is that they have won all their arguments against the now battered and worn-out Bush administration. They note that a majority of Americans now share their view that the United States should never have gone to war in Iraq. They say that the brutal political realities of Iraq have induced a change of tone and substance from the White House since those rough days of 2002-03.

Events in the last few months give a hint of how much American policy has evolved towards Europe's. The cash-for-nuclear-suspension deal with North Korea is deemed a belated but welcome shift back to U.S. multilateralism. Talks concerning Iraq's future, with Syrians and Iranians participating, are planned for the weekend of March 10 in Baghdad and taken as further proof that the United States has gone all European. E.U. diplomats hear, perhaps strangest and sweetest of all, the gentle music of concern about global warming emanating from the White House.

Many of the personae that dominated the drama four years ago have exited. On the U.S. side the removal of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary last November was, for Europeans, the next best thing after the near-miss of John Kerry's election in 2004. But in Europe, too, Rumsfeld's principal antagonists have largely left the stage. Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, has gone on to pursue more lucrative opportunities with his friends in Moscow, replaced by the profoundly Atlanticist Angela Merkel. In France, Jacques Chirac is entering the final two months of a calamitous presidency, derided and unmourned. The narrow favorite to replace him is Nikolas Sarkozy, a man who, if his past is any guide to his future, is the nearest French politics has to an Americophile. Tony Blair may be exiting to a chorus of Iraq-inspired boos in Britain, but no one thinks Gordon Brown, his anointed successor, will significantly change the U.K.'s commitment in Iraq or its centuries-long alliance with Washington.

It's quite easy, then, to endorse the view that what happened a few years ago was all some terrible aberration, an unwelcome but brief interruption in Atlantic unity. And it's hard to dispute that the Europeans are right that America has indeed discovered the perils of unilateralism and finally come again to sample the pacific balm of European multilateralist wisdom. Yet while no one can seriously doubt that the Bush administration has made some catastrophic errors, it would be unwise to invest too heavily in the European model of statesmanship. The brutal reality is that in the last four years, on what matters most to America, Europe has actually become an even less reliable ally than it seemed back in the tumultuous days before the Iraq war. To get a sense of Europe's priorities, and how they are shifting in the new transatlantic environment, consider the tale of two meetings.

Later this month the German government will host celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the covenant that marked the birth of the institution that became the European Union. Chancellor Merkel and her 26 fellow heads of government will use the occasion to launch the Berlin Declaration, a document intended to serve as the signposts for the future evolution of the E.U. The final details of the declaration are still under negotiation but the outlines are clear.

After the usual self-congratulatory preamble paying stirring tribute to the E.U.'s role in preserving the peace and generating prosperity over the last 50 years, the document will address the challenges of the future. What challenges are these? Terrorism, perhaps, nuclear proliferation, the spread in Europe and the Middle East of Islamist ideology? Wrong on all counts.

On its 50th birthday, the E.U. will commit itself to fighting global warming, the economic dislocations caused by globalization, and, most courageous of all, the institutional shortcomings of the union itself. This last means, by the way, at least in the German view, a resurrection of the European constitution, the blueprint for a nascent federal European state that was, you may remember, roundly rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands two years ago.

Last month in Seville, Spain, there was a rather different sort of meeting. NATO's defense ministers met to discuss an urgent request to commit more troops and equipment to the war in Afghanistan from General Bantz Craddock. The ministers heard a sobering assessment from Gen. Craddock of the stalled progress in Afghanistan and of the probability of a spring offensive against the United States and NATO forces by the Taliban and al Qaeda. The response, according to one official present, was negative.

One by one, European defense ministers explained why they could not or would not contribute significant numbers. Some, like Britain and the Netherlands, are already seriously overstretched. Most others, led by the Germans, the French, and the Belgians, expressed mild sympathy but much skepticism about the entire Afghan operation. "They don't share our view of the scale and nature of the threat that Afghanistan represents," says a U.S. official who was there. This, remember, is not Iraq, which many European governments opposed, but Afghanistan, "the good war," the fight against the people who gave us September 11. This is the struggle that was prefigured when the NATO governments invoked for the first time in the alliance's history Article V, the collective defense clause, pledging to do what was necessary to defend their allies.

The juxtaposition of these two contrasting meetings provides an intriguing insight into the European-based view of the world. The important fights, the struggles for which European governments are willing to commit themselves, are over carbon emissions standards for a climate threat that may be 100 years away, subsidies for well-paid workers threatened by cheap competition from China, and, of course, a plan for moving the E.U. away from a rotating presidency toward a fixed one.

What this demonstrates is, after all the accommodations the United States has made over the last four years, how far apart Europe and America truly are. This gulf applies not just to Afghanistan. Consider European responses to the deteriorating situation in Russia. Last month Vladimir Putin marched into the very cockpit of the transatlantic alliance, the annual Munich Security Conference, and flipped a frosty Moscow finger at the assembled Europeans and Americans.

He attacked the United States as a bullying unilateralist that was tearing up international law. But just as the Europeans in the audience were nodding in approval, the Russian president turned on them too. He denounced NATO's expansion to Russia's borders and even found time to insult the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe, the stately body that has been aiding and promoting democratic reform in the former Soviet bloc, as a "vulgar" institution.

The initial reaction, even from Europeans, was hostile. But on reflection, they seemed to decide that a supportive cringe would be more appropriate. A senior German official told me that there was much in what Putin had said that would resonate in Europe. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, a supposedly sober newspaper, blamed the United States for the new Cold War atmosphere, saying it had created "the opportunity for Putin to set himself up as the powerful voice of the growing number of countries and peoples who are stricken by doubt in the wisdom of Western policies." This, sadly, for all the continent's boastful claims of a new transatlantic partnership, is the true voice of modern Europe: a Europe that refuses to fight a war, to which it has pledged itself, against terrorists in Afghanistan; a Europe that declines to stand up to a Russian president who condemns its efforts to spread democracy even as his KGB friends eliminate their critics in European capitals. The transatlantic partnership may be back together again. Whether it stands for anything is much less clear.

Gerard Baker, U.S. editor of the Times of London, is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.     

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