DURHAM - A friendly new French president vacationing on a lake in the United States -- not on his own Riviera -- and weekending with the Bush family in Kennebunkport. But a new British prime minister looking dour during his Washington visit last month. What's going on with American-European relations?

Our strategic relationship remains fundamentally sound. The Iraq imbroglio profoundly shook the trans- Atlantic bond. Anti-Bush views remain wide and deep. Plenty of other issues, many of them unrelated to the Bush foreign policy, are sources of tension. But policymakers and other opinion leaders on both sides of the Atlantic continue to hold to a fairly robust consensus that international peace and prosperity are best served by U.S.- European cooperation.

This is a main reason why Europeans already are paying close attention to our 2008 presidential election.

While spending most of the year in Britain and Spain, I spoke to a group of journalists in Barcelona on foreign policy, with just a few comments on the '08 race. This got a long article the next day in La Vanguardia, the leading newspaper, but almost completely on my election remarks. British media also have been full of stories on the various candidates.

These are countries in which campaigns last only a few months. How many Americans even know the name of Tony Blair's successor? Does anyone here notice when Spain has an election? We could do well with a bit more attention to their politics, and they with a bit less to ours.

Doing so is not just a gesture but rather recognition that the relationship is changing from the senior/junior partnership of the Cold War era. With new leaders such as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, European politics are more dynamic than in quite awhile. Defining these and other leaders as whether they are pro- or anti-American misses a lot and distorts even more.

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BROWN IS COMMITTED to the British-American "special relationship" without being as automatically supportive of U.S. policies as Blair was. Sarkozy is not as inclined to oppose U.S. policy as was former President Jacques Chirac, but is less pro-American than pro-France and pro-Europe.

Europe does have its own problems. The European Union has gone back to the drawing board on a constitution. Disputes continue over whether to admit Turkey, a majority-Muslim country. Numerous countries are wrestling with issues involving their own Muslim populations, including terrorism that is part home-grown and part al-Qaeda.

For Europe as for the United States, there are tough issues of balancing national security and civil liberties, and adapting our societies to the greater heterogeneity that is the new reality -- and ultimate challenge -- of globalization.

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IN MANY ASPECTS OF GLOBALIZATION, Europe is ahead of the United States. Economically, the EU, not the United States, is China's largest trade partner; London, not New York, is Russia's main financial center.

Global climate change is the No. 1 issue in most of Europe. The EU recently set ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Britain set even higher goals for itself. In Spain, the Cortes (legislature) has been working on a bill setting about a $4,000 sales tax spread between fuel-efficient cars and gas guzzlers. Supermarkets have many products labeled not just for caloric content but for the carbon impact of their production. Read the newspaper and count the number of ads that have "green" themes.

This discourse is strikingly different from our politics: Europeans are focusing on solutions rather than still wrangling over whether there really is a problem.

For all that is new, one also gets a sense of the old: Walking the streets of Oxford amid 12th- and 13th-century buildings; climbing Hadrian's Wall near the Scottish border, the northernmost extension of the Roman Empire; experiencing Cordoba and Toledo, capitals of Moorish Spain for many centuries (including for periods in which as one author put it, "Muslims, Jews and Christians created a culture of tolerance"). The power and presence of history are there in ways that both manifest tradition and bear on contemporary society.

Along with my own foreign policy work, I hope to help students in my courses at Duke get a better sense of this as a global era in which, whoever our next president is, we can ill afford to take our position for granted.

(Bruce W. Jentleson is professor of public policy and political science at Duke University and former director of the Sanford Institute at Duke.)