The View from Pluto: Germans see the world with peculiar eyes

Berlin

The day after Baghdad fell I was ordering coffee with a friend at Starbucks in Berlin. He is a freelance journalist and hails from Basra. His wife still has family in Iraq. When we mentioned to the young woman on the other side of the counter that we were celebrating developments, she looked a tad horrified. Najem had already told me about the neighbor who had knocked on his door to offer condolences. He and his wife, Inaam, had said that yes, they were afraid for their relatives because of the fighting in Baghdad -- but they were elated that the American liberators had finally arrived. This provoked a lecture about an "illegal war of aggression."

Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus, says Robert Kagan. The Germans? They must be from Pluto. It's easy to get a rise out of people here. Just mention the 45-nation coalition that helped the U.S. and Great Britain in Iraq. "Yes, Micronesia and El Salvador!" comes the cynical, hooting reply. Or, bring up Tony Blair. There's only disdain for the British prime minister here -- that "poodle" of the Americans -- and fury that other countries would support George W. Bush. It's a source of great frustration that "real" countries joined the coalition -- nations like Japan, Australia, South Korea, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal. "How could [Spanish prime minister] Aznar stab us in the back after all the subsidies we've provided over the years?" one Berliner wondered.

The old Atlantic alliance is crumbling. Germany's foreign policy is becoming more French, bent on rivalry and opposition to the U.S. France is looking (even) more Gaullist. The European Union -- i.e., France and Germany (or "Old Europe") -- was quick to pressure the U.S. about the U.N.'s role in post-war Iraq. But then there are those pro-American countries in "New Europe," which seek admission into the EU. Ten of them supported the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein. Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, recently applauded renewed German and French efforts to build a European defense, adding: "I keep telling the applicant countries in Eastern Europe that in the long run they will not be able to seek prosperity from a united Europe and security from America." Does Prodi really mean that the East Europeans will eventually have to choose?

The French have chosen. For years, we had downplayed France's maneuvering against American foreign-policy aims as "the French being French." Anytime the Americans were serious and our vital interests were at stake, the French might flirt with the enemy, but in the end they would always be solidly with us. Iraq was different.

It was ironic for France to demand more time for U.N. inspectors, since it abstained when the Security Council created UNMOVIC in December 1999 (Paris was joined by Russia, China, and Malaysia). The major French oil companies Elf Aquitaine and Total had just signed lucrative contracts with Hussein's regime, and Baghdad was openly threatening to cancel the deals if Paris followed Washington's harder line. France's frequent lament of American "unilateralism" and breach of international law is hypocritical in light of its behavior in Africa: Since 1960, France has intervened 37 times on that continent, always alone and without asking the U.N. for permission.

Paris had a valuable client in Saddam Hussein. France accounted for nearly 25 percent of Iraq's imports. But for France the Iraq debate was never just about Iraq. It was about two longstanding French ambitions: to tie down the United States and to lead Europe. Poor Berlin! German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was so worried about being the junior partner of the United States that he ended up the junior partner of France. But old French Gaullism and Germany's new Euro-nationalism serve a common end: cutting America down to size.

Historian Arnulf Baring once wrote that the overwhelmingly positive view that Americans have of Germany stems from the fact that tens of thousands of servicemen and their families over the years have visited castles, enjoyed bratwurst, and cruised happily down the Rhine. If more had been able to read the editorial pages they might have had a different view.

To understand what makes today's Germany tick, one must keep two things in mind.

First, Americans probably underestimated Germany's frustration at having to play a subordinate role during the Cold War. The rest of Western Europe was dependent on us, too, but the divided, emasculated Germans probably felt it -- and resented it -- more than most. Today, they're tired of playing second fiddle. Alas, two facts keep getting in the way: American power and German weakness -- the first a near national obsession. The Christian Democrats' foreign-policy spokesman, Karl Lamers, rejected missile defense several years ago on the grounds that it would make the Americans "masters of the universe." A television poll before the Iraq war asked Germans whether they should "give in" to the Americans over Iraq -- a whopping 80 percent said no. Like the French, many Germans seemed more interested in containing America than in containing Saddam Hussein. A recent editorial in the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel sums it up this way: "The superpower was supposed to be put in its place . . . [but] morality and world opinion were useless. America can do whatever it wants."