It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Europe’s anti-American vocation asserted itself from the start of the European Union. Had it done so, America would presumably have noticed. Instead of indulging the European infant, it might consequently have smothered it. But if hostility to U.S. interests and policies did not assert itself immediately, it was inevitable that it would do so at a later date. The nature of the European project and the ideology of liberal internationalism that underlies it ensured that this would be so. Opposition to U.S. goals and interests is likely to continue, and indeed to become more pronounced, unless the European Union is rebuilt on different assumptions or simply collapses.

Britain’s foremost Atlanticist, the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was as slow as most Americans in grasping the inevitability of the E.U.’s anti-Americanism. Once having done so, however, she described its possible implications with customary clarity at a conference in 1996 whose purpose, ironically, was to prevent Europe and America from drifting further apart:

The overarching European project, which was envisaged by some from the start but which has only in recent years come out into the open, is in truth a nightmare… . Were it [a European superstate] to come about, another great power would have been born—equal or nearly equal in economic strength to the United States. Does anyone suppose that such a power would not soon become a rival to America? That it would not gradually discover different