Posted on 10/11/2002 6:57:45 AM PDT by aculeus
The problem with the recent German criticism of President Bush was not the willingness of Mr. Schröder to voice unease with the purported American "adventure" in Iraq. Germany is a sovereign nation and can and must do as it sees fit. It has a perfect right to express its foreboding forcefully. In addition, no one, here or there, has ever envisioned concrete German help in freeing Iraq from Saddam Hussein.
So the chancellor's ploy was gratuitously rhetorical rather than substantive or of any import to our military efforts in the Gulf. An absence of a canteen or a handful of obsolete tanks here and there is no great loss. That a self-righteous European socialist government trades with, rather than opposes, a Middle Eastern madman with weapons of mass destruction in a post-September 11 world is to be expected, rather than shocking, in these depressing times of the new amoral morality.
Instead, American angst derived from a variety of other considerations. First, the flurry of German anti-Americanism was not confined to Mr. Schröder, but, in fact, was echoed by a variety of other politicians once considered to be more sober. Fellow socialist Ludwig Stiegler suggested that our president was akin to Julius Caesar — the firebrand who destroyed centuries of republican government and sought to lay the foundations of Roman imperial rule.
Herta Däbler-Gmelin, the minister of justice and a lawyer trained in the use of legalese, trumped that, declaring, "Bush wants to divert attention from his domestic problems. It's a classic tactic. It's one that Hitler also used." Her barrister's logic? Americans, who once rid Germany of Hitler, with very little help from Germans themselves, are now to be properly slandered by Germans for being Hitler-like.
Even that surprising venom was not confined to Socialists in power, trolling for votes in economically depressed times by appealing to nationalism and the fears of a purportedly pacifist populace. Jürgen Möllemann of the Free Democrats spoke of the "intolerant, spiteful style" of some prominent Jews — an anti-Semitism voiced earlier by the former defense minister, Rudolf Scharping, who complained that Mr. Bush was trying to please "a powerful, perhaps overly powerful, Jewish lobby."
Americans were especially perplexed about such choices in vocabulary. If even Socialists and Leftists revert to nomenclature of a half-century past, has the specter of German nationalism and belligerence really vanished?
Look at some of the creepy rhetoric. Schröder promised that Germans would not simply "click their heels." He talked of the "German way" (deutscher Weg), stressing that Germany was a "modern" country (with autobahns no less?), where decisions will "be made in Berlin — and only in Berlin." Based on that eerie verbiage, a Mel Brooks movie could not have offered a better caricature of repressed nostalgia for the 1930s.
A cynic would see the new German belligerency as particularly opportunistic, coming as it does only after the Soviet threat was gone, after the dream of unification was achieved, and after Berlin is emerging as the capital of a new "modern" Germany. A more jaded skeptic would see in contemporary Germany socialism, pacifism, and relativism shades of a weak and decadent Weimar — with all the attendant extreme reactions to it looming on the horizon. We sadly expect residual anti-Semitism in Germany, but when ex-officials there complain of the power of American Jewish constituencies in New York and Miami, the awful subtext is, of course, that there is no such problem now in Germany, because….
Finally and most disturbingly, Schröder's antics did not, like Le Penn's nationalism, fail, but may well have won him the election. So it turns out that Minister Däbler-Gmelin's allusions were Freudian: Which country, in fact, really did turn to nationalism — and anti-Semitism — to deflect domestic concern over a faltering economy and a reduced world influence? Had the German people turned out in droves to drive Schröder out, the entire fiasco would have disappeared, and we would have forgotten that prominent Germans were implying that we were fascists while opposing real fascists as they proclaimed their neutrality and traded profitably with fascists.
Americans were also especially surprised at this invective because our history and relationships with Germany have always reflected our own goodwill. Americans, in short, respect the postwar German people, whom they found confident, competent, self-reliant, and appreciative. After their horrific losses of civilians and territory in World War II, they did not turn to terrorism, but instead embraced democracy and sought to atone for the evil Hitler wrought.
So to learn that the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, NATO, the American nuclear shield in protecting free Germans from 400 Soviet divisions, and the recent near-automatic American support for German unification are apparently ancient history came as another post-9/11 wake-up call. In turn, we wonder whether Germans are really aware that over 70,000 American troops on German soil alone allow Mr. Schröder's government to continue to spend no more than 1 percent of GNP on defense, with the assurance that no hostile country would dare enter German airspace.
In Europe these sudden outbursts have put neighbors east and west on notice; indeed France, Holland, Italy, and the eastern Europeans are more likely to strengthen, not enfeeble, their American ties. Astute politicians there may sense that there is something nasty brewing in Germany that trumps socialism, the EU, and the other utopian pretensions that were supposed to have supplanted all those silly 19th-century ideas like nationalism, status, and honor across the Rhine. If I were a Frenchman, Pole, Greek, or Czech, I would reexamine very carefully the fashionable anti-Americanism of the continent, dissect it, and determine what, in fact, are its real undercurrents and repercussions — before the spooky German rhetoric is turned on them and we, in our disgust, are long gone from the scene.
Because of the manner in which he launched his campaign of anti-Americanism, Mr. Schröder has made a terrible mistake. Had his ploy failed with the electorate, had he not unleashed his venom at mass rallies, had he not chosen such historic vocabulary, had friends and opponents denounced rather than echoed his attacks, Americans could pass it all off as election-style pyrotechnics. But given the opposite circumstances, they won't.
Instead in our pique and pride we will remember past lax policies on Middle East terrorism from the Munich Olympics to the realization that a number of the September 11 murderers refined their final plans on German soil and much of Saddam Hussein's purchases of the last decade came from Germany. We shake our heads that the Germans, given their history, should have been the first to line up to fight fascists and the last to voice cheap anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.
What will be the result of all this? Our elites and theirs claim that they will huddle together and quickly fix the problem. But I am not so sure. In the short term, I would imagine that the American military will be very wary in placing key military assets on German soil, lest, in the manner of France during the Libyan crisis, we are told that we cannot fly through German air space.
Far more importantly, without fanfare we should probably gradually — say at the rate of 5,000 to 10,000 soldiers a year — either bring home or transfer Americans from Germany. Such a move is vital to restore clarity and health to our relationship and bring maturity to the Germans, who must understand that their nastiness in part derives from their very sense of inferiority to and dependence on us. Let them be grownups rather than teenagers who loudly assert their independence from their parents as they drive to the mall — only to call at midnight that the battery is dead.
It is their decision, not ours, whether they choose to adopt a policy akin to Sweden or Switzerland in line with their present defense expenditures, or wish to take a more active and muscular role in world affairs as we would hope. For our own part, even if we choose not to reduce our overseas European commitments, we will find a number of neighboring countries eager to open replacement bases.
In a sense, Mr. Schröder and German leaders may have achieved their traditional aspirations — a unified country, with the largest population and economy in Europe, without enemies on the horizon, and now free to chart its own course. Fine and more power to them. And we should ensure that the German government does not feel that it has to click its heels to anyone, simply accept that long-overdue reality, remain friends — but most definitely begin to come home. It will be healthier for all parties involved. And that fact may well usher in a slow return, after a half century, to an inevitable bilateralism with particular European states — with all its attendant dangers that we have seen in that part of the world over the last 130 years.
Mr. Schröder has no idea of the repressed historic forces that he has unleashed both at home and abroad — but unleashed them he most certainly has.
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