ABSTRACT
There is an ocean between US views of Europe after independence, the war against Britain of 1812, President Monroe’s 1823 warning to Europe to stay out of the Western Hemisphere and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott’s suggestion at end of the twentieth century, that ‘in the twenty-first century, as in the twentieth, the well-being of the United States will depend in large measure on what happens in Europe. In other words, the EuroAtlantic community is indivisible, and the security link across the ocean is unbreakable’ (Talbott, 1999). The shift in the centre of power over the two centuries has been remarkable and to some extent West European integration after the Second World War was carried out to offset US power and influence. It is an irony too that the American colonies broke away from Britain because, among other reasons, their self-determination was being undermined and that by the 1980s prominent Europeans, from Germany, Britain, Greece and the Netherlands, including Willy Brandt, complained that Washington treated them ‘like a colony’ (Kaplan, 1982: 111).
