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.

Allison, who said “Europe is totally preoccupied with the self-development of Europe,” cited the fall of the Soviet Union, Europe’s lack of power in comparison to the United States, and differences over cultural issues like religion.

“There are big style problems with the Bush administration and President Bush in particular for Europeans, but if it were President Gore, the fundamental issues would still be significant strains,” he said.

Regardless of the sources of tension, most professors said the U.S. has a tough road to travel in mending relations.

“There’s nothing automatic in international politics, and so whereas it may appear that the Europeans and the Americans really have no choice but to cooperate against common international problems, this could go either way—toward a renewal of our relationship or toward further unraveling,” Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs Ashton Carter said.

Carter said the key to improving relations lies in a shared sense of a new common enemy.

“I think an objective look at the world would indicate that we do face huge threats, especially from terrorism in the future, and that they are threats to both sides of the Atlantic,” he said.

Professor of Government Andrew Kydd said that while the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is now more fragile than it was in the 1990s, its rationale remains, and is expanding.

“I don’t think it’s in that great a danger even now despite people like Kagan,” Kydd said. “NATO has weathered a lot of crises in one form or another.”

Cederman said he could not predict the outcome of the Summers-Kissinger task force, but said he doubted that the current American political climate would allow for change.

“I’m fairly pessimistic that as long as the neoconservatives continue to dominate this administration and continue to actively undermine international institutions that it is in the power of any specific individuals to build bridges,” he said. “This is so diametrically opposed to what Europe stands for.”

Professor of Government Andrew Moravcsik, the director of Harvard’s European Union Center, suggested several ways to improve relations.

First, he wrote in an e-mail, Europe and America should “insulate areas of positive cooperation” on terrorism and create structures to regulate policy on “out of area” places like Iraq.

He added that Europe and America should “agree to disagree” in the case of another U.S. invasion of a Middle East country.

“Europeans must accept that distinctively American military forces can be a cost-effective mode of regime change,” he wrote.

At the same time, “Americans must accept that the distinctive ‘civilian power’ controlled by Europeans—E.U. trade and membership, aid, peacekeeping, international monitoring, and multilateral legitimation—makes a unique contribution to global peace and security,” he wrote.

While Allison said most task forces “end up having not very great impact,” he thought Kissinger’s and Summers’ prominence might counter that problem.

Summers has often been compared to Kissinger, as both were Harvard intellectuals who went on to great political success in Washington.

And Summers’ appointment is unusual—no Harvard president since James B. Conant ’14 has had significant influence on national policy while in office.

Summers’ position, however, will be far less time-intensive.

Stephen Shoemaker, the teaching fellow for Religion 1513, “History of Harvard and its Presidents,” said Conant, a chemist by training, spent around 50 percent of his time during World War II in Washington working on the Manhattan Project.

The task force, Kupchan said, will meet once a month in New York until September 2003, when it plans to release its report.

Allison said task forces are generally not labor-intensive, as staff workers with the sponsoring think tank do much of the drafting of the reports.

The appointment may signal a departure for Summers, however, who has been reluctant to make his political voice heard as Harvard’s president.

He has made a point of speaking out on education-related issues like affirmative action and anti-Semitism in the academy. But he has in the past declined to comment on whether he supports war in Iraq or the Bush administration economic policies. He does, however, indulge in the occasional humorous jab at Bush.

Summers was unavailable for comment yesterday.

Former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74, who left for Princeton last year after a dispute with Summers over his own extracurricular activities, was also unavailable for comment. He was off-campus.

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.