U.S.-European love affair: forget the headlines. The money ties binding the world's' two largest economies are quietly strengthening.

• Author: Gross, Daniel

A great deal has been made of the festering alienation between the United States and Europe, the two largest economic blocs in the world and ones that have been intertwined for centuries. Polls of the European public invariably show hostility to U.S. government policy and abysmal approval ratings for President George W. Bush. In the United States, it's easy to detect hostility toward European countries that have been critical of American foreign policy--toward France, most notably, but also toward Germany and Spain. (Just watch a few minutes of comedian-turned-neocon pundit Dennis Miller's CNBC talk show, if you can bear it.) A series of trade disputes the ongoing feud over agricultural subsidies and the inability of the U.S. Congress to resolve illegal export tax breaks--has further poisoned the atmosphere. "On major strategic and international questions today," Robert Kagan wrote in an influential July 2002 Policy Review article, "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less."

Acts of economic isolation may garner large headlines--the New Jersey restaurateur who poured out his French wine, the ongoing Euro campaigns against McDonald's. But executives, investors, consumers, and tourists are seeing through their rhetoric. Looking across a broad landscape of economic data, it's clear that Kagan is wrong--at least when it comes to commerce. In the past couple of years, the Atlantic World has become more closely knit together, not rent further apart. Economic integration between the United States and Europe is deepening and growing stronger--despite significant disagreements over foreign, monetary, and fiscal policy. The Concorde may no longer fly, but people, goods, services, and cash dollars, euros and British pounds sterling are still speeding across the chilly maritime divide that separates the Old World from the New World.

Let's go to the numbers. The broadest measure of economic integration--the absolute level of imports and exports has grown. Both U.S. imports from the Eurozone and U.S. exports to the Eurozone are up--thanks to the insatiable American consumer and the strength of the euro. In 2003, according to the International Trade Administration, U.S. exports to Europe were $172 billion, up 5.1 percent from 2002--although still below the boom years of 2000 and 2001. Nearly a quarter of all U.S. exports go to Europe. The United States last year exported more goods...