NEW YORK


A few years back, Robert Kagan observed that“Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.”The phrase captured the United States’ tolerance for war in pursuit of its interests or ideals, and the European Union’s postmodern preference for peaceful multilateral engagement.

The expression also reflected internal aspects of the two societies: American enthusiasm for the harsh give-and-take of unbridled capitalism versus the European taste for social democracy in which welfare takes the edge off the market.

Americans liked to caricature Europeans as coddled has-beens enjoying the 35-hour week; Europeans took aim at the cruelty of a United States system that fails to provide health insurance for 45 million citizens.

So went the trans-Atlantic culture wars. But now it seems Americans and Europeans are all from Jupiter, a planet big enough for their dwindling differences to be reconciled. Certainly recent years have brought Mars and Venus a lot closer together.

The cost of two wars has cooled United States bellicosity. At the same time, financial disaster has led to the creation of a $700 billion financial rescue fund, the sort of massive state intervention for which Americans once mocked Europeans. The American market has been tamed with a large dollop of socialism.

Of course, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue. But Robert Gates, the defense secretary whom President-elect Barack Obama has wisely retained, said recently that “warfare is inevitably tragic, inefficient.”He lambasted the Rumsfeld- Cheney-Bush war effort for its gambler’s irresponsibility.

The financial equivalent of Rumsfeld’s reckless “Shock and Awe” has been “Sub and Prime.”One big name, Lehman Brothers, has fallen; others would have without state intervention. General Motors and Chrysler have said they will run out of cash by the end of the year without federal aid.

All this has provoked I-told-you-so European smugness. But along with the schadenfreude many Europeans have had to recognize they were more Americanized in their financial habits than they liked to admit.

European banks have been shaken. From Britain to Spain, economic booms based on exploding real estate prices and high leverage have collapsed. Wild American capitalism was scarcely foreign to European shores.

Where does this leave us on Jupiter- I think Obama has a fair chance to take advantage of the post-Mars, post-Venus constellation to solidify a trans-Atlantic reconciliation, reframe the war on terror in ways that get Americans and Europeans equally engaged, and push through some European ideas - like universal health care and high-speed train lines - from which United States society would benefit.

I’ve sometimes dreamed of a place called Eumerica where the steaks and the refrigerators and the can-do outlook would be American, the coffee Italian, the health care French, the colleges American with European fees, the (absence of) speed limits and the cars German, the work ethic American and the pleasure ethic European.

Even on the new Jupiter we’re a long way from that idyll. In the end that may be a good thing. Bailing out the United States auto industry is too reminiscent of European subsidies to me. Is G.M. the new Alitalia- America still needs a touch of Mars, or what would Europeans have to complain about?