America and its allies have always had their differences. But they tended to be geopolitical, stemming partly from the fact that the US is a world power and its allies more regional ones. But recent days have highlighted a growing gap in basic values.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, was forced to spend her week-long swing through Europe rebutting allegations about US mistreatment of terrorist suspects transferred to third countries abroad through the process know as "rendition". She did her able best and indeed appeared to shift policy by promising US personnel would eschew torture on those it holds abroad as well as at home. But her basic message to allies was "trust us". Europe's governments may but public opinion generally does not. Nearer home, the Bush administration found itself in the dock at the Montreal climate change conference. Paul Martin, the Canadian prime minister, said his message to "reticent nations, including the US, is this: there is such a thing as a global conscience and now is the time to listen to it". A lot of fingers have therefore been wagged this week at the US, which usually likes to do the wagging itself. It is likely to take exception to being arraigned in this way before a grand jury of its allies.

Yet some members of this grand jury have also in effect been in the dock this week, too. Britain's top law lords ruled that no evidence obtained by torture abroad could be used in UK courts. This overturned a lower court judgment that such evidence was admissible, provided the UK government did not condone, or connive in, the torture. The ruling's main impact may not be practical - the government claimed it did not rely on torture-based evidence anyway - but rather political, underlining European abhorrence of torture. Yet it also underscored a general tension between governments and their judiciaries in the west's war on terror. The US Supreme Court has taken no view on torture but, to its credit, has overruled the Bush administration to allow its Guantánamo detainees redress through US courts. In the past, too, Britain and Spain have used dirty tactics against domestic terrorists. So the "gap" is not entirely between the US and its allies, but also between their politicians and judges.

Will all this continue to fester between the US and Europe? Probably because it is hard to be sure that Ms Rice's apparent policy shift over torture will survive the next speech by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, who, to put it mildly, takes a utilitarian view of torture. Even if it does, there is the matter of rendition, which Ms Rice pointedly did not deny. This gives Europeans rather more cause to believe in the CIA spiriting captives through their airports at the dead of night than those (admittedly few) Americans who believe the United Nations has black helicopters that scoop up garden furniture, if not people.

On the environment, recrimination will also persist. For if the US complains, sometimes with justice, that its allies "free ride" on its security efforts, so the latter see the former as "free riding" on their efforts to clean up the world's atmosphere. Nor will the likely deadlock at next week's World Trade Organisation meeting in Hong Kong be free of mutual blame by Europe and the US. Not all is lost, however, for not all Americans think like President George W. Bush or his deputy. Take their fellow Republican, Senator John McCain; he is both against torture and for emission controls.