The Russia we face today is a different one than what we hoped for. EU and NATO policy toward an enlarged Europe's new neighborhood needs to be rethought. And the United States and Europe need to get their act together on energy policy. With leadership changes coming up in Paris, London and Washington, the time is ripe to get out our laptops and debate the framework for a new policy.
Historically, there is no area where the United States and Europe have worked more closely and accomplished more historically - both during the Cold War as well as in the 1990s. Americans and Germans do often have different policy impulses. Americans have traditionally been more committed to democratic transformation -- in part because we are more powerful, more distant and have a different foreign policy ethos. Germany - weaker, closer, more dependent on Russian energy and burdened by history - errs on the side of stability. But if we can't bridge differences like these, what can we do together?

The end of the Cold War made the doctrine of mutual Soviet-American deterrence obsolete. Deterrence continues to be a relevant consideration for many states with regard to threats from other states. But reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.

For more than four decades, high-ranking representatives from very different countries have discussed military issues at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy. No other forum brings together crucial policy makers like US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Ali Larijani, the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran and its nuclear chief negotiator. Both gave their speeches within 90 minutes on February 11, 2007.
Other participants include NATO Secretary General Scheffer, Pakistan's Minister of Foreign Affairs Kasuri, the EU's Solana, Israel's Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Livni, Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs Downer and both Russia's President Putin and Ukraine's President Yuschenko.
Putin's speech got the most press coverage for his accusations against the US and NATO:

The world, he said, is now unipolar: “One single center of power. One single center of force. One single center of decision making. This is the world of one master, one sovereign.” With the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the American defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, and a Congressional delegation sitting stone-faced, Mr. Putin warned that the power amassed by any nation that assumes this ultimate global role “destroys it from within. “It has nothing in common with democracy, of course,” he added. “Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations — military force.”  
“Primarily the United States has overstepped its national borders, and in every area,” said Mr. Putin, who increasingly has tried to re-establish Russia’s once broad Soviet-era influence, using Russia’s natural resources as leverage and defending nations at odds with the United States, including Iran. American military actions, which he termed “unilateral” and “illegitimate,” also “have not been able to resolve any matters at all,” and, he said, have created only more instability and danger. “They bring us to the abyss of one conflict after another,” he said. “Political solutions are becoming impossible.”

In the conference hall and back rooms of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, the 43rd  has once again justified its motto "Peace Through Dialogue". The Russian President’s speech, in particular, emphasized the very importance of articulating different interests in an open and non-governmental debate. (...)  The conference has again underlined its character as a venue for an unrestrained and clear exchange of ideas. As Kurt Beck, Minister President of Rhineland-Palatinate and leader of the German Social Democrats, said: "We have seen openness; an openness that allows us to really talk to each other about problems,to be honest about the interests we have, and, based on this, to develop a stable cooperation."

The graphic below is from Transatlantic Trends Survey of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. The perception of various threats does not seem to be very different in the United States and Europe.  Certainly the differences are not so big to suggest that Europeans and Americans do not share many common interests anymore, as more and more bloggers claim these days.

In detailing the patterns and gaps between the American public and others, these books nicely complement and occasionally contradict each other. Both The Foreign Policy Disconnect and America Against the World will add grist to the mill for those who profess faith in the wisdom of crowds and doubts about the judgment of foreign policy experts. After cogitating on both books, it would be difficult for the informed reader to believe that Americans hold irrational or flighty views about foreign policy. Most Americans, on most issues, articulate what George W. Bush characterized as a "humble" foreign policy during the 2000 campaign. They want a prudent foreign policy based on security against attacks and threats to domestic well-being—though American attitudes about multilateralism remain an open question. The gaps between American attitudes and the rest of the world are overstated; the gaps between Americans and their policymakers might be understated. The biggest question—which neither of these books answers satisfactorily—is to what extent these views, and gaps between views, matter.

In recent months George W. Bush has rediscovered the virtues of having allies and working within alliances. In every big challenge confronting the US – from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Iran to North Korea – he has sought to enlist the help of America’s traditional allies. But in many cases the very allies who bitterly complained about the US president’s unilateralism only a short time ago have been reluctant to do their part in helping multilateralism succeed.
Nowhere is this more true than in Europe. Last month's Nato summit should have been the time for a rousing call for the alliance to act effectively and transform itself into an organisation that would establish partnerships around the world to address common threats. But progress was minimal, because the Europeans were unable to seize the opportunity presented by an America that has realised it cannot solve these problems alone.

Beck told delegates during a special meeting in Berlin that such defense ambitions for the EU would not rupture the trans-Atlantic relationship because, without the United States, "we cannot solve global problems." However, instead of "following" or "adhering" to the United States, he said, the Europeans should establish a partnership "based on quality. This is the particular challenge for Europe."

An EU move toward establishing its own force, Dunay said, could lead to more efficient defense spending at a juncture when countries are reluctant to increase military budgets while being asked by the United Nations in particular to join peacekeeping missions.

When European commentators say they are still yearning for an end to American unilateralism, moral crusades, and the influence of "fundamentalist evangelicals," what they really mean is that they are longing for a United States just like secular, post-national, consensus-seeking, Social Democratic Europe. But, of course, even with Democrats controlling the House and the Senate, it ain't gonna happen.

Europe yearns for a pragmatic, problem-fixing America, engaged in the world's real problems and building international collaborations to meet these challenges. America has departed this space on ideological quests and left a giant void in global affairs that the Europeans have had to partially fill.

After all, nothing is a bigger threat today to the Western way of life and quality of life than the combination of climate change, pollution, species loss, and Islamist radicalism and petro-authoritarianism --all fueled by our energy addictions. And no solution is possible to these problems without concerted government actions to reduce emissions, to inspire green innovation and to shift from oil to renewable power. Therefore, green is not just the new red, white and blue — the next great American national security project -- it should also be the color, focus and cement of the Atlantic alliance in the 21st century. As a German official remarked to me, "The whole issue has the potential of becoming a big trans-Atlantic project at a time when we have no other good big project that [embodies] a vision." (...) Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently gave a major address on how "energy security will strongly influence the global security agenda in the 21st century."