Current Affairs: Crisis. What crisis? If a week is a long time in politics then six months seems more than enough for an Irish prime minister to save the Western World.
When the Republic of Ireland took over the EU presidency in January, the union was in chaos: constitutional negotiations in tatters, bitter disagreement about who should run the European Commission, and the transatlantic relationship in its worst state since the Suez crisis. A "Bertie hat trick" later, and all is sweetness and light as western leaders queue up to pay tribute to the Drumcondra school of diplomacy.
Writing on current affairs is a risky business, as Timothy Garton Ash readily concedes. The world moves on before the proofs are even back from the printers. Yet for all its "futurology", this brilliant book stands and falls on its lucid and penetrating analysis of the Western Alliance. Free World is a quick and enjoyable read, but one that demolishes the received wisdom about the transatlantic relationship. International affairs is a crowded market place for writers. To be heard, public intellectuals have to shout, which inevitably means presenting complicated analysis in a glitzy, headline-catching way. "The End of History!", "The Clash of Civilisations!", "Americans are from Mars! Europeans are from Venus!". Free World makes a half-hearted attempt to follow suit with its banal sub-title, but in reality this book is a plea for more not less sophistication.
Oxford don Timothy Garton Ash is particularly good at flattening any snobbish notions we might have that Americans are brainless. The stereotype too often has been that worldly-wise old Europe has a highly developed sense of global politics ("l'intelligence européenne") that brash, ignorant, blundering America cannot match. "The truth is that Washington has at its fingertips", writes Ash, "a range and depth of foreign policy analysis, in government, think tanks, universities and the media, which London has not matched for 50 years and no other European capital, least of all the EU 'capital' of Brussels, can begin to approach". The traffic in ideas flows from Yale to Cambridge, and New York to Paris, not the other way round.
"The Pearl Harbour of the 21st century took place today," President Bush dictated into his diary on 9/11. The consequences of that day underpin every foreign policy debate in contemporary America. How can the US maximise its power to overcome its vulnerability?
The answer given by the Bush administration a year after 9/11 was that American military power should be put "beyond challenge". If this meant "pre-emptive actions" against threats from terrorists or rogue states, then so be it. That new national security strategy led directly to the Iraq war. This in turn forced European leaders to answer the question: are you with us or against us?
The Atlantic Alliance, which for so long had been taken for granted, suddenly and unexpectedly became "a coalition of the willing".
"America acts, Europe reacts", contends Ash. US policy in the Middle East split Europe down the middle. Free World is compelling on the nuances of this rift, which was emblematic of a fundamental divide about the relationship with the US between Euroatlanticists ("New Europe") and Euro-Gaullists ("Old Europe"). Euroatlanticists believe that in shaping its own foreign and security policy Europe must always stay close to and influence the United States. Euro-Gaullists want the EU to become, in the words of former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine, a second "world nation" - a counterweight - to rival the US.
"This is the argument of the decade", writes Ash. "On its outcome will depend the future of the West". The Iraq crisis in fact showed Euro-Gaullists to be on a hiding to nothing. An attempt by France and Germany to unite Europe round a rival policy to the United States had the exact opposite effect.
The European response was fragmented and contradictory; the US went ahead and did what it wanted anyway.
Which brings us back to the Irish European presidency. Taking its opportunity on the world stage, Ireland intervened decisively to return the EU to an Atlanticist agenda ("Boston" over "Berlin").
Perhaps the least important of these interventions was actually the most symbolic: the new President of the European Commission, Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barosso, is the same man who hosted the Iraq pre-war summit in the Azores, situated, appropriately enough, in the mid-Atlantic.
"Taoiseach, I appreciate your leadership", said President Bush at Dromoland Castle in June. And he meant it. When Timothy Garton Ash updates Free World for the paperback edition, he will have a new element to consider: the "Bertie factor".
• Richard Aldous teaches international history at UCD. His book, Harold Macmillan and Britain's World Role, is published by Macmillan