Rob Eshelman submits:

US Conservatives Cast Wary Eye at EU Treaty
Frederick Studemann, Financial Times

US conservatives have teamed up with eurosceptics in Britain to tackle what they see as a threat to American strategic interests.

Organisations such as the American Enterprise Institute, home to leading neo-conservatives, and the Heritage Foundation, a more traditional conservative foreign policy think-tank, have expressed concern that "vital American strategic interests" are threatened by the European Union's constitutional treaty and its implications for foreign and security policy.Helle Dale, director of foreign policy at Heritage, says: "Our concern is that the relationship between Britain and the US could suffer if Britain had to submerge its foreign policy into a common European foreign policy."

She is concerned that Britain would have to seek permission from France and Germany before it could commit itself to joint US-UK initiatives, such as the war in Iraq.

David Frum, a research fellow at the AEI and a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, says that while closer European economic integration has been - and remains - in US interests, there is "rising awareness that the non-economic component of the European project raises important strategic questions".

In Britain the attention from these influential think-tanks has been warmly received by groups hostile to the EU, which hope that intellectual and moral support from America will bolster their efforts to shift UK policy on Europe.

The New Frontiers Foundation, one of the most active eurosceptic groups in Britain, has been energetically cultivating transatlantic ties in the US.

"There is definitely an axis there," notes Timothy Garton Ash, senior fellow at St Anthony's College Oxford and author of a recent book on transatlantic relations. He says there is an "eurosceptic, Anglo-spherist tendency" in Britain that is "both delighted by the neo-cons and delights them".

The NFF is hosting lectures in the City by US academics such as Richard Epstein from Chicago University Chicago and Robert Barro from Harvard, who criticise aspects of European integration.

Dominic Cummings, NFF director, says the lectures are intended to encourage discussion about trade and defence between the UK, north America and sympathetic countries in eastern Europe - a subject on which NFF hopes to co-host a conference next year with Heritage. The key to nudging such aspirations towards reality lies with the Conservatives, says Mr Cummings, who was briefly the party's director of strategy.

In recent years, senior Tory figures were instrumental in getting the neo-conservatives in the US to address euroscepticism.

"The breakthrough will come when the Tories say it is party policy to take back control of trade negotiations," he says.

While the Tories have become progressively eurosceptic over the past decade, the party leadership remains committed to EU membership. Recently, however, senior party figures such as John Redwood, a former cabinet minister, have mooted a renegotiation of Britain's terms of membership - a move that many analysts believe risks prompting full-blown withdrawal.

Such a move remains unlikely, not least as the Tories are forecast to suffer a third defeat at the next general election.

In Washington there is no coherent policy towards the EU. While the State Department upholds the traditional US policy of broadly supporting integration, others - notably the Pentagon - are distinctly less enthusiastic.

But while Mr Cummings draws comfort from the re-election of Mr Bush and hopes for a more robust policy towards Europe, not everyone agrees. "I don't think the neo-cons will be in the ascendant," says Mr Garton Ash.

Radek Sikorsi, head of the New Atlantic Initiative, an offshoot of the AEI, acknowledges that those calling for the UK to distance itself from its neighbours as part of a process of "disaggregation" hold minority positions. "But three years ago you would not have heard them at all," he adds.