Speaking to European Voice, Stuart Eizenstat warned that more “turbulent times” lie ahead if President George W. Bush pays greater attention to Donald Rumsfeld than Colin Powell.

He told this paper a lot depends on whether “the president is willing to break from the tendencies of his neo-conservative supporters” such as Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who are reluctant to “delegate sovereignty to international bodies”.

Should Bush win a second term in office in November 2004, it is “very much an open question” whether he will side with Rumsfeld or be more influenced by Powell.

The US secretary of state has a view “that is still conservative but is one that recognizes the need for coordination and support from our allies”, added Eizenstat.

“The EU-US relationship will depend heavily on which direction the administration takes.”

Eizenstat, a card-carrying Democrat, was Bill Clinton’s envoy to the Union in 1993-96 and was subsequently an undersecretary in the departments of state and commerce in Washington. In Brussels this week for a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of America’s relationship with the Union, dating back to its diplomatic ties with the European Coal and Steel Community, he argued that recent months have seen the “most profound gulf in EU-US relations that we have had since the end of the Second World War”.

“When I was here, relations were almost exclusively focused on a series of trade and commercial issues. What has happened now is that relations have broadened out in ways that the US has not been fully prepared to understand or accept.

“Following the embarrassment of not being able to deal with Bosnia and the Balkan wars, as it proclaimed it wanted to, the EU has begun to develop a maturing political capacity and even a nascent military capacity.

“The US has not fully appreciated that or come to terms with it.

“When I was here, the Cold War had ended only a couple of years before, so the glue that held us together was still there. That glue has now clearly gone. We have to try and replace it with something else.

“We can replace it by trying to develop a common agenda on terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, the spread of democracy and human rights worldwide.”

Eizenstat said there are some “grounds for optimism” as “even the more conservative elements [in the United States administration] recognize we can win the war [in Iraq] ourselves but we can’t necessarily win the peace.

“Europe can play an indispensable part in helping to preserve peace and tends to have more patience than we do with nation building.”

The “second ground for optimism”, he added, is how “Europe has recently taken a more muscular approach to weapons of mass destruction”.

In particular, he commended External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten for stating that an EU trade accord with Iran would not be signed unless fears over its nuclear programme were allayed.

That optimism seems well founded.

Within 48 hours of Eizenstat making his comments on Iran, it was announced that the US had reached agreement with the UK, France and Germany on a UN resolution designed to put controls in place to ensure that Iran does not produce uranium for military use.

This success aside, however, Eizenstat believes there is a lack of comprehension in Europe about changes that have occurred in the United States since the 11 September 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda. He believes the gap in transatlantic thinking was amply illustrated by the recent Eurobarometer opinion poll that found that a majority of EU citizens regard Israel and the US as the two top threats to world peace.

“I think that Europeans have failed to understand the profound changes in American attitudes since 9/11 and the degree to which there is now a genuine fear by the American people of terrorism. In the US, people tend to support anything that is sold to them as dealing with terrorism…whether the evidence was there or not.

“Americans tend to see the Arab-Israeli conflict through the prism of terrorism and suicide bombing.

“And the right sees it as part of a religious battle. There is a real concern in the US about the rise of anti-semitism in Europe.”

However, Eizenstat remarked that he took some hope from the signal given by Bush during his recent visit to London that he will show greater attention to the Middle East conflict. “He should be more vocal about the need for the Palestinians to crack down on violence and on Israel not to build the [security] fence and expand settlements [in the occupied territories] in a way that compromises a two-state solution.”

On defence, Eizenstat said that plans originally hatched by France, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium to develop a European structure independent of NATO “caused great ripples in the United States”.

While he said that Americans could accept UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s word that he does not want such a structure to undermine NATO, he described the intentions of the Franco-German alliance as “less clear”.

“I think, over the next several years, there is going to be a significant debate about how

Europeans can create a separate defence in ways that don’t disrupt NATO. This was never an issue when I was here. But Europe is now flexing its muscles on the political scene and beginning to do that in the military sphere. Transatlantic defence relations are going to cause a lot of unsettled relations.”

Asked to comment on Eizenstat’s remarks, the current US envoy to the EU, Rockwell Schnabel, acknowledged there had been “some pushback” in the early months of this year. This came after Rumsfeld’s characterization of a “new” and “old” Europe, split between countries for and against the war in Iraq.

“Some people took issue with those particular remarks,” Schnabel explained. “But we never used them [in the embassy]. We never played on them.”

Schnabel also agreed that the ‘glue’ of the Cold War has evaporated. But he added that the “current stabilizer” in transatlantic relations is the enduringly robust economic relationship between the two sides.

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