To appreciate the radical changes that have taken place in the transatlantic relationship, it helps to have a sense of perspective.  Why is the ‘crisis’ so much more real now than it was in decades past?  You don’t need to do a lot of reading to learn that the relationship has never been easy.  Somehow, this time feels different.  To explain why, I pulled together a collection of thirteen articles I wrote about the evolution of the transatlantic relationship over the past twenty years.  One of the articles was published in Italian and so I included the English-language working paper for those who are interested.  There are three big themes in this collection – about the changing nature of power in international relations, the challenge of maintaining domestic support for engagement with the outside world, and the progressive loss of trust across the Atlantic together with the breakdown of solidarity on either side.  The articles in this collection were not written to trace these themes.  Those themes arose as I kept coming back to the same subject matter from one year, election, administration, ‘crisis’, or decade to the next.

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