Concerns Over U.S.-European Rift

Trans-Atlantic relations are at a dangerous low ebb and some prominent Americans and Europeans have concluded that governments on both sides of the ocean are at fault.

The war in Iraq brought the strains to a crisis point, with France and Germany organizing resistance to U.S. war policy and the Bush administration trying to split the alliance, the 26-member task force said in a report released Friday by the Council on Foreign Relations.

The split widened even as the report was being issued.

A new government in Spain moved to pull its troops out of Iraq, reversing the strong support its predecessor had given the Bush administration.

And President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, a staunch ally in the war, said Thursday he may withdraw troops early from Iraq and that Poland was "misled" about the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Kwasniewski took that back Friday, telling President Bush that the troops would remain there, a spokesman for Kwasniewski said.

Many Europeans assumed malign intent on the part of the administration and "the conviction that the United States is a hyperpower to be contained has become fashionable in Europe," while pacifism took hold in some parts of the continent, the report said.

The Bush administration, trying to avoid limitations on its actions, spurned offers of help in retaliating against al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, the report said. Many NATO allies, meanwhile, complained of American unilateralism and questioned the Bush administration's insistence that the security of all nations was at risk.

These divisions carried over to the war in Iraq, worsening trans-Atlantic relations to the crisis point, the report said.

"Europeans and Americans must now work together to ensure that the Iraq crisis becomes an anomaly in their relationship, not a precedent for things to come," the report said.

"America may be the indispensable nation, but its partners in Europe are its indispensable allies," it said. "Virtually every objective that Americans and Europeans seek will be easier to attain if they work together."

Charles A. Kupchan, director of Europe studies at the Council, an 83-year-old nonpartisan private center for scholars, was the project manager. The co-chairs were former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers, now president of Harvard University.

Concluding that the United States and Europe have common interests and face common dangers, even more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the report urged the two sides to try to reach agreement on new "rules of the road" governing the use of force.

Also, the panelists concluded, the United States and its European allies should develop a common policy toward states that possess or seek to possess weapons of mass destruction or that support terrorism in any way.

Although the Soviet Union disintegrated 13 years ago, erasing NATO's main job of protecting Western Europe, the report suggested expanding the reach of the military alliance.

For instance, it should be ready to act beyond Europe to contain and even intervene against threats, the report said without defining which threats would justify a military response.

But the panelists hedged on whether one nation should decide on preventive war, a policy advanced by the Bush administration. A possible solution, the report said, would be the Europeans agreeing not to reject preventive war in principle and the Americans reserving it for special cases and not make it the centerpiece of U.S. strategy.