Disastrous though the EU constitution would be, both for the people of Europe and, to a lesser degree, the US, the Bush administration needs to be very careful how it tries to influence its future. If the US is seen to be ‘interfering’ (or can be portrayed as so doing) that may well be counterproductive. The old State Department policy (which, like so many other State Department policies, failed to recognize the way in which the world had changed after the Soviet collapse) of actively promoting a more federal EU (Bush was, incredibly, still pushing this line as late as 2001) has at least now been discarded. That’s progress, but this story in the EU Observer may well not be.