LONDON -- In a world of disorder, fluidity and shifting power centers, one factor has remained fixed and constant for all states, all governments and all national leaders: the supreme importance of relations with the United States, and how to handle them.
This is the foreign-policy issue that preoccupies Beijing; it is the issue on which Russian President Vladimir Putin ponders longest in Moscow; it is doubtless one of the issues at the top of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's in-tray as he sits at his new desk in Tokyo; and it is the uppermost issue in the mind of every European leader.
For four decades after World War II, it all seemed fairly straightforward. The U.S. was the chief guardian of the free world, and if a country did not want to be swallowed up by communism, it needed to stay as close as possible to the Americans. That was obvious for Japan, just as it was obvious for most Europeans.