At the beginning of the decade, President George H.W. Bush's administration proclaimed that a "new world order" now existed, and that change included the European continent. With the Soviet Union gone, Germany reunified and former Soviet bloc nations in Eastern Europe struggling with the shift to market economies and elected governments, many of the dilemmas that had brought Americans and Europeans together — and, at times, pushed them apart — were history, seemingly replaced by a new spirit of multilateralism.

When Bush sought international support in 1990 and 1991 to forcibly expel Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's troops from neighboring Kuwait, for example, France, which often had quarreled with the U.S. over military matters, contributed 10,000 ground troops to the effort. Nevertheless, U.S. President Bill Clinton, who took office in 1993, inherited a relationship with a politically and economically unified Europe that was beset with new challenges. Some Europeans, such as European Community president Jacques Delors, declared it was time for America to stop interfering in European affairs.

On the economic front, the United States and Europe were clearly competitors, each with their own free-trade blocs, industries and farms supported by government subsidies and import controls. When one of the world's few remaining communist regimes, Cuba, opened to capital in the early 1990s, Europeans eagerly invested in hotels and other ventures, thwarting a 30-year-old U.S. embargo intended to squeeze dicator Fidel Castro.

Many Europeans liked Clinton, a well-traveled former Rhodes Scholar, whose personal charm and glibness was matched by a near-encyclopedic command of the geopolitical nuances that people loved to debate in cafés. The American president also strongly believed in working with European leaders to achieve a consensus and then acting unilaterally to tackle security problems. When the former communist nation of Yugoslavia exploded in brutal ethnic warfare, Clinton had difficulty getting other NATO countries to agree on what to do. After a visit to Washington, D.C., in 1995, French President Jacques Chirac reportedly commented that the post of leader of the free world was "vacant."

Later that year, nevertheless, it was American cruise missiles that pummeled Serb paramilitary forces in Bosnia into submission, curbing the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims. When the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav regime sent troops into the southern province of Kosovo to crush an independence movement by ethnic Albanians, U.S. air power again played a crucial role in stopping the killing.

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