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“A Man in a Hurry”: Henry Kissinger, Transatlantic Relations, and the British Origins of the Year of Europe Dispute

The Year of Europe initiative, publicly launched by President Richard M. Nixon’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, Henry Kissinger, with a speech delivered to an annual Associated Press gathering of prominent publishers, newspaper editors and media executives at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on 23 April 1973, is primarily remembered as a major policy failure that quickly unravelled amid acrimony and recrimination. Despite its high-sounding aspirations, Kissinger’s call for a new sense of purpose and revitalised set of objectives to animate the transatlantic alliance had the contrary effect of provoking European suspicions of American motives, and fears that the forging of a new “Atlantic Charter”—as Kissinger proposed in his speech—would become a device for Washington to reassert its hegemony over its alliance partners, just as there was a growing impetus behind closer moves toward Western European unity, with the European Community (EC) expanding its membership from six to nine at the start of the year, and beginning to search for a collective political voice. By the summer of 1973, indeed, transatlantic relations had reached a point of almost complete paralysis, whilst later in October, the Yom Kippur war was again to expose deep differences of perspective, and not least between Britain and the United States. Although subjected to near-constant entreaties from Kissinger that a failure to engage in a timely and constructive fashion with his Year of Europe initiative would imperil the whole series of security and economic ties between the United States and Western Europe, and even help to precipitate a new wave of disillusioned American isolationism, the principal European leaders responded “with all deliberate speed,” deflecting Kissinger’s suggestions to participate in a multilateral forum for negotiations, and endeavouring—in laborious fashion—to coordinate their own, collective European response rather than have proceedings orchestrated from Washington. Kissinger’s later conclusion on the result was characteristically blunt: “what started as an effort to foster Atlantic unity turned into a device to organize all the democracies against the United States.”