This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Fran Burwell.

Fran Burwell is the vice president of the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., running its European Union program.

Fran, obviously, we're going to talk about transatlantic matters.

And as you know, when President Obama went into the White House, there was this big talk about

a so-called pivot to Asia and the European Union.

Many people in the EU worried that the US was looting interest in the EU.

Fast forward a couple of years, a few years now maybe.

And now there's another narrative whereby on the back of the NSA scandals or revelations,

this new discussion about

inquiries into some corporations, U.S. corporations' tax payments or not, as a case may be,

and then there's broad discussion about technology that there's a kind of anti-Americanism now

in Europe. What do you say to that?

Well, I think that when President Obama came into the White House,

we were in quite a different geopolitical and economic situation. We were just at the beginning

of the financial crisis moving from the United States to Europe. And Europe's geopolitical

neighborhood, in terms of the east and the south, looked quite calm.

So from the perspective of a president who has a rather global outlook, focusing on Asia seemed to be a not illogical thing to do.

After all, Europe had a lot of the systems and networks and institutions in place that guarantee its

security and its prosperity. And those seem to be doing fairly well on the financial crisis,

or at least the Europeans seem to want to handle that more themselves, rather than having

the U.S. totally engaged in that.

To me then it seems as though the President looked and saw that he had this rapidly growing

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