In a metaphor that has become commonplace, Robert Kagan declared that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus”. A really unkind critic of the two books under review might say that more appropriate classical names for much of the US and Europe would be Narcissus and Narcissa. One may appear relatively more masculine than the other, but both are so self-obsessed that they would find it extremely difficult to mate successfully with each other or anyone else.

To their great credit, Tony Blair and his government are working very hard to bring about the coupling of the US and Europe on three critical issues: Iran’s nuclear programme, Israeli-Palestinian peace, and action to limit global warming. On the first, there now seems a real possibility of progress. On the others - despite recent positive developments in the Middle East - there are far fewer grounds for optimism.

Some of the reasons why this is so are explained in Walter Russell Mead’s latest book, Power, Terror, Peace and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk. Mead sets out some very sensible ideas for US-European co-operation. The final effect, however, is to bring out the yawning gap that exists on key issues even between the Blair government and most Americans - including mainstream Democrats as well as on the right.

A senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Mead’s work is the most interesting book on international affairs to have appeared since 9/11 by a writer on the US right. Indeed, the very fact that it is written with such tremendous verve and intelligence makes its failings all the more troubling.

Mead expresses the widespread American belief that the US today is returning to its true nature as a revolutionary power in the world - and that European desires for the US to behave as a conservative, status-quo hegemon are therefore vain. Mead dismisses, surely rightly, the idea that the US and the world can get back to “the calmer and more peaceful atmosphere of the post-historical ‘90s” just by reversing the Bush administration’s policies.

Mead links America’s revolutionary nature to what he calls its embodiment of “millennial capitalism”. Revolutionary in its capacity for creative destruction, this capitalism is overthrowing the “Fordist” economies that dominated the world through most of the 20th century. He dismisses the widespread condemnation of this tendency in the US as well as Europe as the “keen and eloquent wailing” of governing elites who are being stripped of their power over economies and societies.

There is a great deal of truth in this portrayal, but it nonetheless contains critical flaws. Mead notes correctly that a tendency to revolutionary change is inherent in unrestrained capitalism. What he too often fails to remember is that 20th century restraints on capitalism were put in place for a reason: namely, that by its excesses capitalism created social disruption and economic suffering which in turn fuelled political extremism and eventually catastrophic revolutions and wars. Very curious in this context is Mead’s belief that promotion of this kind of capitalism by the US can go hand in hand with US advancement of democracy - since the workings of “millennial capitalism” are so often detested by democratic majorities.

Striking, but also characteristic of the US right, and potentially disastrous for some of Tony Blair’s hopes, is Mead’s absolute indifference to concerns over climate change. He barely mentions it, but it is to be assumed that he would dismiss the issue as only more of the “eloquent wailing” from Fordist elites. It is not just that he displays no willingness for compromise - he obviously regards as unimportant a threat that could bring our civilisation down in ruins, and which is now seen by leading European governments as a vital national interest.

When it comes to the Middle East, Mead’s work contains elements that are both sensible and supported by many Europeans. He points out, for example, that we must be careful to distinguish between fundamentalist Islam as such and its terrorist or extremist offshoots. Most Europeans would also agree with him that the Palestinians must eventually have a viable state - and that Palestinian refugees must receive massive compensation for abandoning their “right of return”.

But many Europeans are likely to feel that he undermines this good sense through two failures. His understanding of al-Qaeda and its allies is deeply flawed by his adoption of the term “Arabian fascism” to describe them. This description is unhistorical and inaccurate - and in policy terms, potentially disastrous. It displays no understanding of the importance of religion in our enemies’ world view, or of how this enables them to gain recruits far beyond the Arab world. In fact, Mead exemplifies a lesson that the US intellectual establishment really should have learned from Vietnam - that even the most intelligent grand strategist may become actively harmful if he has no understanding of another culture and a particular enemy.

Concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mead states that “it is not unreasonable for Palestinian opinion to resist peace proposals that do not clearly outline a viable path to personal security, dignity, and peace for members of the Palestinian people”. But he accompanies this with the statement that if the Palestinians would only make a credible offer of peace on the basis of the 1967 frontiers, then “Israeli public opinion would almost certainly agree to the necessary territorial and political compromises”.

This is not a picture that many people outside the US and Israel would find credible. Hypothetically, it may be true of a majority of Israeli public opinion. But given the actual nature and present divisions of the Israeli political system, and a level of US support which means that Israel is not under really strong pressure to make serious concessions, in practice this statement evades the responsibility of US public intellectuals to confront this issue squarely. That such avoidance is all too common does not make them any more creditable.

Whatever its faults, however, Mead’s latest book certainly provides an excellent foil for some of the writers in Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe. Or at least, it would if it had a worthy opponent on the other side. If a duel were to be arranged between these two books, it would resemble a scene from one of those comic swashbuckling films in which the hero fights off two dozen opponents, who spend most of their time falling over each other and impaling themselves on their own and each other’s swords.

The collection of short writings on Europe grew out of an initiative by the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. On May 31 2003, they published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine and Liberation a joint “plea for a common foreign policy, beginning in core Europe”. This volume contains their original essay and a wide variety of European (and two US) responses.

Habermas and Derrida took as their point of departure February 15 2003, the date of massive demonstrations across much of Europe in protest against the impending US invasion of Iraq. This date, they declared, may in future be seen as “a sign of the birth of a European public sphere”. They point out, accurately, that majority opposition to the Iraq war extended also to those European countries whose governments supported it.

They argue, however, that given the deep differences between the governing elites of different countries and regions of Europe, an effective European foreign policy can only be devised by “core” Europe - in other words, France, Germany, and those west European countries that choose to follow their lead. This is necessary, they say, because it is in the interest of the world that Europe “throw its weight on the scales to counterbalance the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States”. Europe, in their view, “should exert its influence in shaping the design for a coming global domestic policy” - in other words, the extension of the west European way of doing things to the entire globe.

Given the state of that globe - and Europe’s real capabilities - Mead would probably join Rem Koolhaas in dubbing this “weak megalomania”. And he may well be right. However, this vision undoubtedly now has widespread intellectual appeal in western Europe and beyond - as witnessed by the support for it among US internationalists such as Richard Rorty and Michael Lind.

In the view of Derrida, Habermas and their supporters, Europe’s global vision should consist of “a cosmopolitan order based on international law”, the welfare state, respect for the environment, secularism and so forth. This is now a familiar litany in Europe, but the authors went further than most Europeans in arguing that this European identity can and must be built on the basis of overt opposition to the US.

The response from Europeans to Habermas and Derrida has been predictably cacophonous. In this volume, it varies from the fury of Polish respondents at being dictated to by Germans, through concerns at the possibility of a kind of pan-European chauvinism, to a widespread scepticism about Europe’s ability even to keep the peace in Europe without the US. Above all, there is continuous disagreement about how far “Europe” does and should extend. The book’s subtitle says that it is about “transatlantic relations”, but much of it is in fact a complex, confused and agonised set of disagreements about Europe itself.

This disagreement reflects in part the melancholy fact that European nations were largely formed by defining themselves as enemies of other European nations: a German was a German because he was neither a Pole nor a Frenchman, and so on. Can a new European identity be created along these lines, on the basis of hostility to the US? And should it be?

I am afraid that the decision on this, in the short to medium term, may lie with our more extreme enemies. If no further major terrorist attack against the US occurs, then to judge by American history and the latest policies of the Bush administration, the US will gradually return to a basically pragmatic and restrained approach to dealing with the rest of the world. In this case, given Europe’s intense disagreements, most Europeans will grudgingly fall into line behind US hegemony, as long as they are not asked to sacrifice anything much for its sake.

If there is another 9/11, however, things may look very different. Mead has warned that in these circumstances there will once again be an overwhelming US desire to lash out wildly, irrespective of the wisdom of such action. Mead can be criticised for falling in with this tendency instead of opposing it, as is his duty as a foreign policy intellectual; but his analysis is almost certainly correct. And another response like that of the Bush administration would strengthen still further the sense among many Europeans of the US as the main alien power against which a European identity can take shape.

Anatol Lieven is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. His latest book, “America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism”, is published by HarperCollins in the UK and Oxford University Press in the US.

POWER, TERROR, PEACE AND WAR: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk
by Walter Russell Mead
Alfred A. Knopf $19.95, 240 pages

OLD EUROPE, NEW EUROPE, CORE EUROPE: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War
ed by Daniel Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey
Verso £15, 256 pages