Collateral Damage

By Josef Joffe

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."

The tone and language of American diplomacy have not helped. Compare Donald Rumsfeld with James Baker, Bush the Elder's Secretary of State. Twelve years back, after Saddam's Kuwait grab, Baker crisscrossed the world in a painstaking (and successful) effort to harness a global coalition against the despot. Yet Rumsfeld, who dismissed France and Germany as "old Europe," seems to operate under the motto "I would rather lose a good friend than a good phrase." Power does not substitute for persuasion, and obliviousness shading off into hauteur does not exactly increase the supply of the willing and able.

But what if the end of alliance is the deeper truth? Then the new game will be the old game of nations. No more privileged relationships, just ever-changing combinations as in the 18th and 19th centuries. History whispers that this was bound to happen once the balance of power tilted as drastically as it did when the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the last remaining superpower to rule the roost. But for America's unprecedented might to endure, it will have to be softened by trust and acceptance. Will Bush & Co. muster so much wisdom?

Tomorrow's historians will know the answer. In the meantime, Saddam Hussein has scored three long-distance victories just by sitting tight. As the intra-Western war continues, his prediction may yet come true. "No doubt, time is working for us," Saddam told the Egyptian weekly al-Usbou in November. "We have to buy some more time, and the American-British coalition will disintegrate."

Josef Joffe is editor of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit