Rivalry, Community, or Strained Partnership?

With the United States now considering the Asia-Pacific region as the futurestrategic zone of interest, the European Union appears liable to vanish from the picture. This slide into irrelevance, however, presupposes that the EU will not become a significant rival to the US in a multipolar world. It also assumes that the EU is no longer an indispensable partner for the US in dealing with international issues. Yet rivalry and partnership, which more or less correspond to the conceptual approaches of “soft balancing” and “security community”, are still widely used to describe the EU-US relationship. This contribution asks whether and to what extent these two opposing approaches are relevant. While the security community approach corresponds to current EU-US relations more than the idea of the EU acting as a soft balancing rival to the US, important tensions and contradictions are apparent in the partnership. This leads to the conclusion that the EU and the US being partners does not prevent a challenge to the former’s ties with the latter.