Collateral Damage

Let's doff our hats to the most powerful man in the West: Saddam Hussein. Any war against him is still at least a few weeks off, yet it has already claimed three prominent victims: Europe, NATO and the U.S.-German relationship.

When French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, hoping to refurbish their creaking "axis," pledged to join forces against the American-led war effort, the other Europeans were not amused. Their counterthrust came in the form of two open letters, splashed across the front pages of Europe's newspapers, in which 18 countries agreed to stand together against Saddam--and at the side of the United States. It didn't help when Chirac, cane in hand, blasted the East Europeans among them for "misbehaving." For now, say goodbye to Europe's speaking "with one voice." And score that round 18 to 2 for the U.S.

Franco-German revenge came swiftly. When the U.S. asked NATO to start planning for the defense of Turkey in case of an Iraqi attack, Berlin and Paris retaliated with a veto. Ever since, the alliance has been trying to repair the damage. Yet whatever the murky compromise may be, the message was deadly. The alliance is now ad hoc and a la carte. Out goes the "All for one, and one for all" rule at the very heart of NATO. The new motto is "Some for one, some of the time." History's longest-lived alliance deserves a grander death than to be done in by pique and spite.

What a sad twist U.S. and German relations have taken! Twinned by enduring mutual interest, the Federal Republic and the U.S. used to be the two cornerstones of the Atlantic alliance. Alas, no more. For reasons perhaps not fully fathomed by Schroder himself, the Chancellor moved from injury last summer, when he began to rail against U.S. "adventurism" and against war as an option, to insurrection this winter, when he threatened to vote against the U.S. in the U.N. Security Council. What began as a desperate ploy to save his sinking electoral campaign (it worked) has now escalated into barely masked antagonism toward the U.S. Schroder seems like a man on a mission: to stop the war together with the French, Russians and Chinese.

He could have taken a cheaper way out by telling President Bush, "Look, we don't have the military manpower and the public support. You leave us alone, and we'll give you benevolent neutrality plus the use of our airspace and your bases in Germany." That would have earned him sour smiles in Washington, but not clenched teeth. Why this refusal to heed the insights of Diplomacy 101?

Perhaps the answer, echoed by millions of antiwar demonstrators across Europe, is as old as international politics itself. Perhaps Schroder, Chirac et al. have become too uncomfortable with Gulliver Unbound, with a giant whose strength is no longer stalemated by the Soviet Union. They may see America's power play, let alone its triumph, in the Middle East as a greater evil than Saddam and his weapons of Armageddon. If so, the name of the game is to put the ropes back on Gulliver--to constrain and contain him. Or: "Let's all gang up on Mr. Big."