Not so many years ago, many hoped Europe might step up as a counterweight to US imperial policies. Such hopes were focused in particular on Germany - not only as the leading European power, but as a known moderating, non-military force in international politics.
US vituperation of the reputed European preference for diplomacy and peaceful conflict resolution as well as official Britain, in the person of Richard Cooper, former prime minister Tony Blair's international-relations guru, deemed it necessary to lecture "post-industrial Europe" about the need for "double standards" and colonial ruthlessness to beat down benighted non-Westerners, seemed to give substance to these hopes.
Well, Germany and the European Union did step up - but rather differently than expected. And it was no electoral twitch that set the stage for "better be wrong with the United States than being right against it". Since Angela Merkel's visit to Washington (as the conservative opposition leader) on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, to denounce then-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's decision to oppose the war, the return to US good graces was not only the main conservative foreign-policy project; it turned rapidly into the supreme project of the German political class - including the Social Democrats.
Merkel became the chancellor-to-go-to, the most trusted European interlocutor for the US political class to work jointly and determinedly to harden US global hegemony against the consequences of America's Iraq-inflicted weakness - this not only in the wider Middle East but also, and especially, with regard to Russia and China, the Bush administration's original enemy of choice before the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" consumed so much of its political capital.
Overcoming the domestic constraints on its ability to use the German army more extensively for "humanitarian interventions", for the defense of "Western civilization" against Islamist terrorism, is an important, though not the most important, part of the Merkel government's "the West united behind the US" policy. Notwithstanding the absence of public debate on its strategic implications - eg, of the US (and Israeli) doctrine of preventive war, the abolition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's geographical restrictions, the mission of "securing access to raw materials" - the rejection on general principles of a more activist military role by a majority of Germans has not (yet) been overcome.
This has far-reaching consequences: it has, in a significant way, rebooted German elite attitudes and expectations toward the EU, and toward Germany's relationship with France. The public discourse about foreign policy as well as the underlying elite mindset is changing - from "responsibly conservative" to the channeling of the demons Hannah Arendt dealt with in her search for the origins of 20th-century disorder: (British) imperialism, Western militarism and racism. And since the majority of Germans is (again) far behind the curve of elite opinion, the efforts of "re-educating" them (as Der Spiegel recently demanded again) are as consistently strident as they are mythologizing.
But there are also quite a number of senior officials and politicians, still serving or retired, who are looking with dismay or worry at the evolution of German policies in response to the crisis of US-German relations. Their publicly voiced concerns are focused on the expansion of German military commitments - of the easy to get into, but next to impossible to get out of sort - and the rapid deterioration of relations with Russia.
~ from Germany, The Re-engineered Ally (Part 1) ~
Part 2: Broken machinery: Forces that oppose or even appear to question American interests face a simple choice: "Us or chaos."
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