ABSTRACT
It has been a decade since the recognised strategic purpose of the Atlantic Alliance disappeared. Hard-nosed realists have been at a loss to explain why the Alliance itself has survived. The East-West confrontation, emerging in stages over the early post-war years, helped to mobilise American resources and to concentrate transatlantic minds. America's multiple roles and multiple personalities in international politics have been laid out with some nuance by Yale law professor Michael Reisman. It is not just that the United States and Britain seem to assess the Iraqi threat rather differently from other permanent members of the Security Council. Transatlantic differences about the United Nations are tied up with transatlantic differences about the use of force. If Yugoslavia was the field where a number of European illusions were indulged, it was also where European governments and societies learned a greater realism about the occasional necessity of defending interests and values with force.
