Conflict in Washington - Undermining authority

Henry Kissinger once complained that when he wanted to talk to Europe, he never knew who to phone.

By deriding disunity, Kissinger pointed to a weakness, one that EU solidarity has done much to overcome in intervening decades.

Europeans who want to talk to America today face the same dilemma — do they phone the White House or do they phone Republican House speaker John Boehner, who has provoked a controversy by inviting Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu to address the House of Congress in March, despite the explicit disapproval of the White House.