Vice President Joseph Biden is overseas buttering up the Europeans, partially as means of damage control after Obama wounded their egos by canceling a summit with Spain earlier this year. But his real focus? Trying to get Europe on board with a system for tracking terrorist finances.

Biden prefaced his trip -- during which he's become the first leading US official in 25 years to formally address the EU parliament -- with an op-ed in the Times explaining that the United States wants to help "create a more secure Europe that takes into account the changing nature of the threats we face." This means giving the US investigators the authority to inspect European bank data, something that Europe flatly refused only a few months back.

US authorities currently use a system called the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program to monitor cash that exchanges hands trans-nationally, and Europe worries that if it joins, the Union will breach its own privacy standards. Biden has tried to acknowledge and quell these worries with promises of privacy safeguards, and the European Parliament will vote on a new agreement in coming months.

And they'll probably say yes, thanks in part to the laudatory language used by Biden and his symbolic attempts at mending the cross-Atlantic political partnership. In his Times piece he called the US-EU relationship "the most successful alliance in history"and went so far as to say that Brussels, which is home to the EU's governing bodies, has rights to the title of "capital of the free world." This weekend he'll be in Spain, shoring up ties and seeing off a group of Spanish soldiers scheduled to ship over to Afghanistan.