It's clear, to me, that Americans and Europeans need to develop better understandings of how the other works and thinks, because we do, in my opinion, have some fundamental differences in our beliefs.  Most, if not all, of these are hardly differences that would deliver a mortal wound to American-European relations.  I've written about the fundamentally different ways in which Americans and Europeans think about economics, for example, although the differences in that category quite often seem to reflect a simply desire to argue with each other rather than genuine differences.

Which leads me to also point out that I think it's fair to say that Americans and Europeans, whether they admit it or not, get a kick out of fighting with each other.  There's nothing wrong with it.  We love harassing you all, and I, personally, am not so thin-skinned that I can't laugh at myself and my country when Europeans return fire.  (My English friends and I do this all the time.)  Too many people on both sides of the Atlantic take too much of what the other side says personally.  As afew (in my opinion) rightly pointed out, Americans are too willing to take European criticisms, or even European jokes, as condescending.  Europeans are too willing to lump Americans into simplistic categories -- sometimes just one category -- and assume  that we actually believe we know what's best for you.  (Americans admire Europeans and, especially on the Left, envy them in many ways, even if they don't always admit to it.

The important point to make is that we're both too willing to jump up and begin screaming across the Pond when the folks on the other side so much as open their mouths to state a criticism.  (That was, after all, America's greatest fault in the run-up to Iraq: We didn't listen to our friends.)

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin