Starting his first public policy role since taking office at Harvard, University President Lawrence H. Summers will co-chair a new high-profile task force aimed at mending relations between Europe and America.

Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger ’50 will serve as the other co-chair for the task force, which is being sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a New York-based public policy research center.

The task force, announced Monday, comes in response to mounting concern from policymakers that dissension over war in Iraq as well as post-Cold War political realities have pushed the longtime allies apart.

Several Harvard international relations experts say that European-American relations are at their lowest point since World War II.

Summers and Kissinger, along with about 20 American and five European experts on business, government and public policy, will consider the sources and severity of the current rift and how to fix it, ultimately recommending American policy changes.

Summers and Kissinger will bring to the group a political and academic balance, said Charles A. Kupchan ’80, who heads CFR’s Europe Studies program and will direct the task force.

Summers, a treasury secretary under former President Bill Clinton, will be the task force’s economics expert, while Kissinger, secretary of state during two Republican administrations, is the geopolitical and diplomatic expert.

“Obviously having two people of that sort of stature—cabinet rank—is important in giving the group and its report visibility,” said Kupchan, who served on Clinton’s National Security Council.

Experts have differed on whether current European-American tensions stem primarily from differences between the Bush administration and countries like France, Germany and Russia over perceived U.S. unilateralism, or if they are indicative of more longstanding, fundamental differences.

The latter case was argued by conservative Robert Kagan in the book Of Paradise and Power, which has spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and posits a cultural split between Europe and America, with America cast as the Roman god of war Mars and Europe as the goddess of love Venus.

But Danziger Associate Professor of Government Lars-Erik Cederman, who said Kagan’s was a “very superficial analysis,” attributes the rift to Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq crisis, the United Nations, the Kyoto treaty and the International Criminal Court.

“I think there is a genuine feeling in Europe that the United Nations as an organization has been hijacked for specific purposes, especially by neoconservatives who are trying to undermine the credibility of international institutions in general,” Cederman said.

“Presumably if Bush were to fail to get reelected, for instance, there would be better prospects to come back to a convergence of the positions,” he added.

But Graham T. Allison, director of the Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said he thought Kagan “had the better side of the argument.”

“There are fundamental reasons now why the trans-Atlantic relationship is under stress independent of any American president,” he said.