ABSTRACT
The traffic in ideas, the ties of culture, the products of the creative arts, the shared memories of great things done, and the intimacy of countless interpersonal relationships are far more important. These are the living stuff of the American-European connection. These are the reason that, in both World Wars, the primacy of Europe in American foreign policy and American strategy was axiomatic. If the primacy of Europe in American foreign policy were merely a matter of geopolitics and trade it would prove as perishable as all the works of pragmatic statesmanship from the Treaty of Westphalia to the Treaty of Versailles to the Pact of Yalta. The idea of the supranational European market has a supranational constituency, namely, Europe's consumer society. Such a consumer society is outward looking: it will shop wherever desirable goods are on offer at the lowest cost. Fortunately, the tree of American-European concord is today as sturdy as ever.
