World View: NATO, its secretary-general, Lord Ismay, said in 1947, was founded "to keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the US in" Europe. It was a useful piece of geopolitical shorthand to describe the objectives and power system involved in the post-war settlement.
Fifty-six years later Dr Condoleezza Rice, then US national security adviser and now Secretary of State, said after NATO allies refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq, that in retaliation the US should "punish France, ignore Germany, and forgive Russia".
Between those two remarks came a third, from Georgi Arbatov, one of Gorbachev's foreign policy advisers. In 1988 he told a US audience: "We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy." It is one of the cardinal assumptions of the realist school of international relations to which Rice adheres, that alliances do not survive the disappearance of the threat against which they are directed.
Bush's important visit to Europe next week will put such theories to the test and help determine if NATO can survive the post-Cold War era as the principal forum for transatlantic relations, or if they must be reconstructed to take account of new realities. Such a major change deserves close attention, since stable relations between these two blocs set much of the agenda for the rest of the world - Ireland certainly included, as John Bruton, the EU ambassador in Washington, points out in these pages today.
On the concluding page of her excellent 1995 book (written with Philip Zelikow) on German unification and the fall of the Soviet Union, Rice recalled that at the Moscow signing of the final settlement on Germany the East German prime minister, Lothar de Maizière, reminded Gorbachev about his reputed warning to his predecessor, Erich Honecker, that "those who come too late are punished by life". Gorbachev "laughed somewhat bitterly and said with resignation, 'Yes, but do you know whether we have all come much too late?'"
Rice argues that while history is littered with missed chances, Western leaders such as Bush's father, James Baker, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl and Margaret Thatcher acted with "skill, speed, and regard for the dignity of the Soviet Union. As a result, Europe bears scars but no open wounds from German unification. That is a testimony to statecraft."
The choices before the US and EU now are no less historic. Just to list the discussion items for Bush's meetings with NATO and EU leaders in Brussels, and with Gerhard Schröder, Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin, is to rehearse an agenda on which there is considerably more disagreement than agreement, which will be reinforced if it is not skilfully addressed.
The issues are set out in a suggested compact between the US and EU this week written by Charles Grant and Philip Gordon, centre-ground analysts close to Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, and signed by 55 prominent academics, diplomats and ex- security officials from both sides of the Atlantic (www.cer.org.uk).
They call for: a new strategic dialogue on Iraq; US support for EU efforts to get Iran verifiably to end its nuclear programme; EU agreement to soften its arms embargo on China; US agreement not to penalise states supporting the International Criminal Court and to refer the Darfur issue there; agreement to apply the Geneva Conventions to all battlefield fighters captured in the war on terrorism; joint reactivation of the Israeli-Palestinian road map and backing for democratic change in the region; a renewed joint commitment to the Millennium Development Goals on world poverty and to UN reform. Not to mention Kyoto, Russia, Syria or the dollar.
The paper proposes that US-EU summits should become "a genuine forum for strategic dialogue on the full range of issues of concern to transatlantic relations". This should be based on a US commitment to European integration and enlargement and an assurance that any EU defence organisation will only complement NATO. Whatever happens next week, Bush's visit to the EU headquarters, the first by a US president, is of great symbolic importance.
Rice used a new catchphrase during her preparatory tour - "transformational diplomacy". It is intended to combine neo-conservative ends with realist means. Reports from Washington say there is a real opportunity for the Europeans to influence US policy-makers, who realise they need help to achieve their objectives.
A rude reminder of the need for new political structures to shape such a large agenda was delivered by Schröder to the annual Munich security conference. He said NATO is "no longer the primary venue where transatlantic partners discuss and co-ordinate strategies". He called for a high-level panel to propose NATO reforms and new US-EU structures. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal he said "we have to discuss political questions more deeply than in the past before decisions are made", and that his initiative was a response to Rice's call to open a new chapter in the transatlantic relationship.
His speech was frostily received by US and NATO participants and a WSJ editorial, but it crystallised the issues. NATO does not discuss such a broad agenda in public and its relations with the EU are paralysed. Normally it is a vehicle for pre-cooked US policy. The Europeans demand a more equal relationship, which Schröder believes should be through the EU.
This may require a US-EU treaty to create new structures. If Washington does not have the statecraft to recognise this it will be too late to mend the relationship.