“The history of any alliance,” Robert Dallek has written, “is the history of mutual recrimination.” For the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), recriminations often stemmed from schizophrenic uncertainties about the compatibility of Atlanticism and Europeanism. Intermittently frustrated by intra-European paralysis, American statesmen nevertheless reacted nervously when faced with European initiative. Meanwhile, Europeans who chafed under American guidance also fretted whenever America's attention strayed.

Summing up eighteen scholars’ essays on U.S.-European relations in the “long 1970s,” Matthias Schulz and Thomas Schwartz see the strains of this period as a particular demonstration of the cyclical nature of intra-allied relations throughout the Cold War. Whereas shared values and interests favored cooperation, differing priorities and strategies produced quarrels. Driving the cycles were catalytic events, shifting domestic alignments, economic fortuities or mishaps, and clashing or jelling personalities. Europe's postwar economic recovery and America's Vietnamese fiasco buffeted the alliance's internal balance. But if Europe's resurgence could prompt intra-allied discord, so, too, could Europe's continued vulnerability—as the Arab oil shocks, the crisis over intermediate-range missiles, and the collapse of détente soon showed. Bewildering shifts thus accelerated and intensified the intra-allied cycles of this period. But structural constraints nevertheless continued to dampen the cycles’ amplitudes. Among these were economic interdependency, Cold-War security, and the ever-increasing weight of institutional interconnectedness.

Investigating the compatibility of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik with his country's western integration and the pace of the superpowers’ détente, several of the included authors submit that American worries were both overstated and overcome. If Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were prone to private outbursts [Nixon called Brandt “that son-of-a-bitch” (p. 48), Kissinger labeled Ostpolitik “a disaster” (p. 30)], neither their jealousies nor their reservations impeded them from recognizing the overlap of concepts and interests. Bernd Schaefer's documentation supports what I have elsewhere suggested: writing in the Reagan years, Kissinger in his memoirs deliberately overstated his reservations about Brandt to shore up his credentials with the anti-détente wing of his own party. The Americans, agree Gottfried Niedhart and Ronald Granieri, could have slowed or stopped Brandt's progress, as Brandt's Christian Democratic opponents urged them to do. But Kissinger carefully steered Nixon away from getting closer to the opposition than to the government. In the end, American concerns gave way before the reality that Brandt was just as adept at Cold-War “linkage” as the Americans were.

American diplomacy proved less astute in the realm of economics. Brandt's early pursuit of a gas pipeline venture with the Soviets, argues Werner Lippert, really was intended to carve out a new and transformative form of West German political maneuverability; the American leaders initially seemed to miss this challenge. Their oversight, Lippert continues, came back to haunt the alliance by producing “diverging strategic interests” (p. 66) during the Yom Kippur War three years later. Lippert's well-documented argument that “Bonn's utilization of trade [was] for strictly political ends” (p. 69), however, would seem to set limits on his argument about the Americans’ lack of perspicacity—for the West Germans, too, did not expect the pipeline to have more than an incremental commercial effect, let alone to produce energy dependence.

The U.S. administration proved less forthcoming in the transatlantic crisis over monetary policy. The shocking American withdrawal (1971) from the Bretton Woods (1944) monetary system—the repudiation of the gold standard, the sudden imposition of tariffs, the devaluation and later floating of the dollar—suggested a reversion to self-interested unilateralism over institutionalized transatlantic cooperation. But as Hubert Zimmermann recalls, the crisis of Bretton Woods involved much more than Nixonian rancor. The multilateral advantageousness of the gold-convertible, dollar-based, fixed-exchange currency regime had been predicated on the imbalance between the rich Americans and their war-ravaged trading partners. With European economic recovery, that currency regime had become increasingly outmoded. Adjustment could have taken the form of a retuned transatlantic system, European monetary coordination, or monetary unilateralism. Both Paris and Bonn had already gestured toward the third option: Charles de Gaulle had threatened as early as 1965 to convert every incoming dollar to gold, and the Brandt government had “temporarily” floated the D-mark three months before Nixon's more momentous move. Finance Minister Karl Schiller's initiative should have eased pressure on the American currency: as William Gray shows, the Brandt team, fearing the importation of American inflation, tried to win the French to a more Atlanticist approach. But after the “Nixon shock,” the follow-up American “passive-aggressive strategy” (p. 162) of negotiating but not defending new exchange rates rendered Schiller's position untenable. European states, it appeared, could choose either unilateralism or a coordinated response. Either way, the assumption that Atlanticism and Europeanism were compatible was shaken.

European sputtering toward a coordinated alternative made manifest the difficulty of European integration without, or against, American leadership. Yet, Gray and Zimmermann (p. 143) both argue that “the debate was over” by March 1973: the Europeans were heading for monetary integration, and the American battle against trade preferences was lost. When Kissinger then attempted to press the reset button on transatlantic relations, his diplomatic acumen seemed to desert him. Examining the misunderstandings that dogged Kissinger's “Year of Europe” initiative, Daniel Möckli and Fabian Hilfrich find crocodile tears in Kissinger-the-memoirist's professed astonishment regarding “cynical” European mistrust. Yet, Kissinger's prescriptions were grounded in strategic concerns. His priorities were American recovery from Vietnam and avoiding Allied flaccidity in an era of détente. Fearing that European solidarity was becoming an opportunistic (amid Watergate) anti-American fetish, Kissinger was horrified by what he saw as the confrontational exclusion of the United States from the Europeans’ internal councils and struggled to maintain the primacy of Washington's state-to-state over its state-to-European-Economic-Community relations. But if Kissinger was indeed looking to reassert American preeminence, Europeans who resented American guidance seemed hardly less trusting of each other or capable of coordinating policy on their own. The Year of Europe, argues Möckli, inadvertently catalyzed the very drive for European unity that Kissinger distrusted. But Möckli, Hilfrich, and Alastair Noble all show that, despite such European intentions, the Arab oil shocks that accompanied the Yom Kippur War in October produced uncoordinated, self-interested, and counterproductive European responses. Despite Vietnam and Watergate, the gap between European and American vulnerability stood reconfirmed. As Eurosclerosis returned with a vengeance, only Kissinger's energy summit (February 1974) reestablished some vestige of a common policy.

The next two years brought a transatlantic thaw. “Personal chemistry,” notes Matthias Schulz (p. 289), played a role: Nixon, Edward Heath (Britain's most Europeanist prime minister), Georges Pompidou, and Brandt gave way to the amiable Gerald Ford (still seconded, however, by Kissinger), Harold Wilson (with James Callaghan, a Euroskeptic, as foreign minister), Valery Giscard d'Estaing, and Helmut Schmidt. For the new leaders, mastering the economic crisis required prioritizing transatlantic cooperation. To be sure, writes Sarah Snyder, Kissinger's underestimation of the significance of the Helsinki conference on European security continued to exacerbate intra-Allied tensions. But it also provided an arena where the Europeans could take the lead.

The transatlantic Indian summer ended when Ford gave way in 1977 to Jimmy Carter. Pursuing pump-priming amid stagflation, then shifting course unsteadily as the unfortunate results set in, Carter exasperated European leaders such as Schmidt whose proclivities remained Atlanticist but whose historical reference point was not unemployment but hyperinflation. Using Schmidt's papers, Schulz documents how the chancellor's troubled relationship with Carter—now the quintessential example of intra-allied strain (their glowering expressions adorn the dust-jacket)—was ravaged by economic clashes well before it was destroyed by the neutron-bomb fiasco and the tensions over how to respond to the Soviet buildup of intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles (two additional essays here on the Carter years are less illuminating or well documented). The result (February 1978) was Schmidt's surprising proposal to “pool” (p. 303) European currency reserves. Taking effect in April 1979, the European Monetary System, with the European Currency Unit as a unit of account, facilitated intra-European currency stabilization without resort to the dollar; it was “the most far-reaching decision toward monetary union until then” (p. 307). But far from pursuing German aggrandizement under European guise (as some have argued), Schmidt, writes Schulz, had come to this more vigorous Europeanism quite reluctantly, as his record during the Ford years demonstrates. Moreover, like the Federal Reserve under Bretton Woods, the Bundesbank now faced the daunting task of triangulating its domestic with its new international responsibilities.

Transatlantic relations in the Cold War, Ronald Granieri suggests, were “not a Newtonian relationship between competing forces and fixed points of reference but rather a relativistic system, where all actors and reference points were in motion. Parties and individuals may have had firm ideals and interests, but the movements of other actors, and the system as a whole, created new uncertainties requiring continuous adjustment” (p. 84). That the transatlantic partnership has endured even as Europeanism has flowered confirms that Europeanism and Atlanticism by no means constituted a zero-sum game. And while cyclical strains have continued, so, too, have secular changes that superpose new rhythms and fluctuations atop the old. Focusing on economics and high diplomacy, this volume can only hint at other relevant variables: domestic social and cultural shifts, Mediterranean and Asian developments, and even Watergate enter only peripherally, and the east is treated as a black box. But historians more drawn to those areas of inquiry will nevertheless profit from the success of these essays in penetrating complex monetary relationships, multilateral diplomatic stratagems, and bureaucratic mazes. While not providing surprising revelations, this well-edited and historiographically attentive volume clarifies as well as deepens our knowledge of a complicated and turbulent epoch in transatlantic history. As such, it can facilitate comparative insights that extend well beyond the period under discussion.