Worldview:Gordon Brown gave a skilled performance in Washington this week at his first meeting with George Bush, emphasising UK-US mutual interests rather than the personal relationship that characterised Tony Blair's association with the Bush White House.
It was a necessary shift, part of the wider recalibration in the choreography of power on which Brown has been engaged for the last month. His visit had a good press on both sides of the Atlantic - an important fact for Brown that further boosted the polling bounce he has enjoyed over the Conservatives since taking office.
Into this admiring consensus there dropped an odd dissenting ball on Wednesday - an article by John Bolton, the former neoconservative US ambassador to the United Nations. Writing in the Financial Times, he said Britain must choose between its special relationship with the US and its deepening involvement with the European Union. The "magnitude of changes in the status of the formerly Westphalian nation-state members can no longer be blinked away", he says, now that the EU will have a common foreign and security policy and a real "foreign minister" assuming the new treaty is endorsed - "the long slow slide into the European porridge".
Does Britain still have sovereignty over its foreign policy, he asks. Why should members of a European "union" still have two permanent seats on the Security Council? Can Washington any longer trust Britain not to share US intelligence with its EU partners when it advocates policies based upon it which they do not have.
And while the US can survive differences over climate change or even Iraq with London, if Bush decides the only way to stop Iran pursuing nuclear weapons is to use military force rather than rely on the EU's failed diplomatic effort to dissuade it, "where will Mr Brown come down? Supporting the US or allowing Iran to goose-step towards nuclear weapons?" A lively flow of letters to the paper greeted Bolton's missive. Many were highly uncomplimentary - criticising this bullying and discredited "loathsome individual" who is now out of office, but who was responsible with his follow-neoconservatives for getting the US into the Iraq quagmire.
Most Americans as well as most Britons and Europeans now reject that adventure. Besides, the US needs a strong Europe to get its way in the world, several correspondents argued, even to the point where one of them said better relations with Brussels should if necessary be at the expense of special ones with Britain.
And yet Bolton's questions, if not his belligerent style, raise concerns that are probably shared beyond his own particular circle in US policy-making. Brown's visit to Washington came after a flurry of reports about high-level fears there that his policies would be less accommodating than Blair's, following the appointment of several ministers who criticised Blair's approach. Mark Malloch Brown, a scornful opponent of Bolton when he was a deputy to Kofi Annan at the UN, becomes a Foreign Office minister, while another said the UK would no longer be "joined at the hip" with the US. Bush clearly is reassured after his encounter, and said so volubly and revealingly.
How typical is Bolton's Euroscepticism of Washington policy-makers? He is distinctive among them for his hostility to international law, which he reduces to international relations. That made his appointment to the UN bizarre; but his message of hostility to that institution and its presumed ambitions for world government is widely shared by conservative realists and nationalists as well as neoconservatives. Focusing on the EU in this way takes up the themes set out several years ago by Robert Kagan in his celebrated essay on Paradise and Power, which defined a postmodern Europe as a Venus relying on soft power, compared to the still modernist US Mars - relying on its global military dominance.
US foreign policy is now polarised on a bipartisan basis in a way not seen for many decades. Most Republicans believe US security relies on military force rather than international co-operation, while Democrats define themselves as supporting multilateral diplomacy rather than coercion. From the Martian perspective there is a zero-sum aspect to security which imposes limits on how much hard power can be shared. That may allow for varying combinations of soft and hard power between the US and the EU - but Bolton's reservations are probably shared well beyond his immediate circle among those who say it is not in the US interest to have the EU emerge as a competing power in a multipolar world. Such a view would also be held by an incoming Democratic administration.
On the right-wing fringes of the Bush administration, enthusiasm for a deeper special relationship with the UK has been associated with the idea of an Anglosphere bringing together the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and an emerging English-speaking open global marketplace based on neoliberal values and deregulation. It is pitched against continental statism and corporatism in the writings of James Bennett and John O'Sullivan, for example - and was actively backed by Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch. This convergence of conservative and media power during the Bush era should not be underestimated, but it has had its day because this remains an unrealistic configuration at the international level.
The Atlanticist in Brown makes him a willing partner of the US in many economic and security projects. But he must choose his preferred European role for Britain between three available options: an awkward partner as per Thatcher, a pragmatic player as was Blair, or a leadership role, which Blair failed to achieve. Brown needs the EU to project his desired British policies on climate change, international development and world trade reform, where he cannot rely on Washington to share his values.
On economic policies he would hope to see an EU evolution towards his neoliberal position. And he has an opportunity to create a new relationship with France and Germany under Sarkozy and Merkel.
Whether this can all be done in transatlantic harmony is likely to be determined, as Bolton points out, by how the Iran question is handled over the coming year. It could test Brown just as Iraq tested Blair.