"Simon Serfaty has long been at the cutting edge of thinking about the future of the Euro-Atlantic community. In A Recast Partnership? the essays he has compiled add up to a convincing and provoking argument that we are at another historical turning point, one little recognized by any of our presidential candidates. One walks away convinced that if we don't understand the complex dynamics involved in redefining and relaunching the relationship, we will pay huge consequences globally as reduced players in our newly multipolar world."—Fred Kempe, President and CEO, Atlantic Council of the United States

"This timely book . . . argues with intelligence and verve that, with a new American administration and a new European Treaty on the horizon, 2009 provides a unique opportunity to give direction to the troubled transatlantic partnership. Hopefully, U.S. and EU leaders will act on the sound advice offered throughout this volume."—Alvaro de Vasconcelos, Director, Institute for Security Studies of the European Union

Forty years ago, at the peak of the Cold War, Henry Kissinger noted the "troubled" state of the transatlantic partnership, which he called "the most constructive American foreign policy since the end of World War II." A few years later, Kissinger called for new initiatives—"a fresh act of creation"—that would respond to "new problems and new opportunities" in ways equal to those undertaken by the postwar generation of leaders of Europe and America after 1945. The essays in this new CSIS volume do just that. Each of the authors—leading authorities on the Euro-Atlantic community—assesses the current state of transatlantic relations, questions where we are heading, and reflects on how best to proceed.

The goal of the volume is not to reinvent either the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union, the two main institutional dimensions of the transatlantic partnership. Rather, it is to renew them and recast them in ways that can make each better suited to the other and make both more effectively prepared to help their 32 members address the security, economic, political, and societal issues they face in common.

With new leaders in place in Germany, France, and Britain and with elections in Russia, Spain, Italy, and the United States in 2008, the stage is set for change and a new transatlantic beginning in 2009. The contributors to this volume offer an agenda for action that aims at the ever-closer Euro-Atlantic partnership needed for the emerging multipolar system of the twenty-first century.

Simon Serfaty holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at CSIS, where he is also a senior adviser to the CSIS Europe Program. In addition, he is a senior professor of U.S. foreign policy at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. His many publications include Architects of Delusion: Europe, America, and the Iraq War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) and The Vital Partnership: Power and Order (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Contributors: Hans Binnendijk; Michael Brenner; Benoit d'Aboville; Jolyon Howorth; Franklin D. Kramer; Ivan Krastev; Richard L. Kugler; Julian Lindley-French; Vivien A. Schmidt; Simon Serfaty

CSIS Significant Issues Series
240 pp.
6" x 9"
March 2008
ISBN 978-0-89206-518-9 (pb)