In spite of the rewards of more lucrative careers in business, the foreign services of Europe continue to attract the cream of each generation’s youth. With this sure supply of talent at her disposal, Margaret Beckett, the new British foreign secretary, might ask herself why European diplomacy seems to lurch from crisis to unresolved crisis. This is nowhere more marked than in relations with the US, where European policy swings between docile subservience and opportunistic pouting from the sidelines, forever falling short of the happy mean of assured self-confidence.

Docility and name-calling are soft options that fail to bring to bear Europe's vast experience of the most pressing security problems: religiously fuelled separatism and terrorism, insurgency, post-conflict civil society building and regional integration. Just think how the looming catastrophe in Iraq might have been mitigated had these skills, which the Europeans possess in abundance, been available to the US.

Now the Europeans seem to be sleepwalking into a repeat performance over Iran. In its recently published National Security Strategy, the US administration asserts that "the US may face no greater challenge from a single country than Iran". From their private comments, no one in European chanceries seems remotely to agree with that statement's implication that the U.S. should be focusing more emphasis on Iran than on any other global problem.

However, European actions lead in the opposite direction. By moving the issue to the UN Security Council without an agreed framework of what is likely to happen there, the Europeans have empowered the administration's most belligerent elements, who have been gunning for Iran for years. Even if the full neo-conservative democracy package is not under discussion for Iran, retired generals have already been out in strength on television -- much as they were in the run-up to the Iraq war -- discussing how the US can "take out" the centrifuge site at Natanz. This is perhaps the most likely scenario once it becomes apparent that a sanctions regime would only be a recipe for another decade of frustration and intra-alliance bickering.

A few years ago Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese emigre now living in Washington and an unrepentant enthusiast of the Iraq war, wrote a book called Dream Palace of the Arabs in which he bemoaned what he saw as the Arab predisposition to live by illusion. Events in Iraq show that the Arabs have no monopoly on illusion. It is clear that the US invaded an Iraq of its dreams rather than Iraq as it really is.

So, let the Europeans strip away the U.S. illusions over Iran. The U.S. has not had an embassy there for 25 years. The upper levels of the State department are devoid of Farsi speakers. Much of the information available to the US comes from technical surveillance or shadowy exile sources, including the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, officially a terrorist group. By contrast, the Europeans have official relations with Iran and embassies in Tehran. On-the-ground knowledge abounds. A recent German ambassador in Washington spoke Farsi. The Europeans should be interpreting the recent Iranian letter to the Americans, not the other way around.

This information "edge" should allow the Europeans to demand something in return from the US supporting their negotiations with Iran. This could include a guarantee from the US that should Iran abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions, the US would move quickly to normalise relations. The Europeans seem not to have sought anything of this sort, so it is not surprising that their negotiations failed.

The lesson from this is not that the Europeans should adopt a confrontational approach but that they should make their strengths count. On Hamas, for example, if it turns out that some form of re-established EU funding is the factor that prevents the Palestinian territories from collapsing into a terrorist-ridden failed state and allows Hamas to mature, the Europeans should expect a substantial reciprocal policy move from Washington.

Experts fuss over the health of the transatlantic relationship, but it is so deeply embedded that it can take care of itself. The relationship is, however, not good per se. It needs to produce good outcomes in the real world. To that end the Europeans need to add a dash of self-belief to their interaction with Washington, justified by the fact that they have substantial assets to offer in areas of crucial importance.

The writer is a former British diplomat. He is a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy and a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author, with Stefan Halper, of America Alone: the Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge University Press).

This article first appeared in the Financial Times (5/10/06), and comes to us courtesy of the Committee for the Republic and the author.