Global Power

The letter which the U.S. president wrote to his German counterpart on German Unification Day, along with other communications between Washington and Berlin, are being dissected as closely as utterances from the Kremlin once were because Germans want to know if President George Bush is still holding a grudge. Things have come to this because the shots which Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has fired at the United States since August were not regarded as haphazard friendly fire, but as a calculated affront to Bush.

The fact that Schröder choreographed an anti-American war hysteria to win votes in last month's national election, however, is not the reason why the Atlantic alliance is close to falling apart. It was at most a symptom of an erosion that started with the biggest triumph of the West: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the East-West divide.

A growing rift looms between the United States and its old European partners. While Americans have no political reservations or moral scruples about employing their power, Europeans have little to put up against this, and have grown accustomed to putting their weakness on a moral pedestal.

Europeans aren't the only ones to feel uneasy about the new U.S. security strategy; one can almost sense the regret that there is no counterweight to the superpower. The extended list of threats which Washington claims give it the right to carry out preventive attacks, the expansion of NATO's operating area to span more or less the whole globe, and the habit of using international organizations are all global tenets that can be laid down only by a nation at the top. The powerless are filled with mistrust and the desire to rein in this power. If that fails, they try to expose U.S. action as immoral.

In his widely regarded article, “Power and Weakness,“ Robert Kagan claims the United States could manage global security issues without the Europeans since it already carries most of the burden. Based on their military spending, the Europeans certainly look like mere assistants.

Yet whoever wants to mitigate the situation has to do more than call for the United Nations at every opportunity. Any concept for the solution of major future issues has to have a solid basis — above all greater military spending and strategic concepts. But while those are the Europeans' prime tasks, the United States would do well not to dismiss its partners' seriousness and goodwill.