In spite of the rewards of more lucrative careers in business, the foreign services of Europe continue to attract the cream of each generation's youth. With this sure supply of talent at her disposal, Margaret Beckett, the new British foreign secretary, might ask herself why European diplomacy seems to lurch from crisis to unresolved crisis. This is nowhere more marked than in relations with the US, where European policy swings between docile subservience and opportunistic pouting from the sidelines, forever falling short of the happy mean of assured self-confidence.

Docility and name-calling are soft options that fail to bring to bear Europe's vast experience of the most pressing security problems: religiously fuelled separatism and terrorism, insurgency, post-conflict civil society building and regional integration. Just think how the looming catastrophe in Iraq might have been mitigated had these skills, which the Europeans possess in abundance, been available to the US.