In the fall of 1998, the career of Helmut Kohl, Germany's apparent
chancellor-in-perpetuity, was terminated after sixteen years in
power. Only Prince Bismarck, with nineteen years at the helm of the
Second Reich, had ruled Germany longer. The defeat of the sixty-eight
year-old chancellor ended not just a political cycle of extraordinary
length. October 27, 1998, the day Gerhard Schroeder was sworn in as
the Federal Republic's seventh chancellor, marked the end of an era
in German history.

Born in 1930, Helmut Kohl was the last chancellor who had actually
experienced World War II, the surrender of the Third Reich, and the
rebirth of West Germany under the loaded guns of the occupiers. While
his successor Schroeder was in grade school, Kohl witnessed the
secular equivalent of transubstantiation: when victors turned into
allies, when the most hated people on earth were granted a place in
the community of Western nations. To this day, Kohl fondly recalls
how his first dark suit, the one he wore on the night of his prom,
had come out of an American care package--as had his wife-to-be
Hannelore's gown. Unlike Schroeder and his cohorts, Kohl was already
an adult during the darkest days of the Cold War between the Berlin
Blockade of 1948-49 and the Berlin Wall of 1961.

Today, Germany's foreign and defense policy is run by a trio of men
born between 1944 and 1948 who have been formed by very different
memories. Gerhard Schroeder, the oldest, was seventeen when American
and Soviet tanks faced each other across the freshly built Wall near
the Brandenburg Gate in 1961. Rudolf Scharping, the defense minister,
was fourteen. And Josef ("Joschka") Fischer, the foreign minister,
was thirteen. But the dividing line between the Kohl and Schroeder
generations is not just a matter of biology.

In the early 1970s, Gerhard Schroeder was head of the Jungsozialisten
in Hannover, the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party
(SPD). Compared to the "Jusos", the American Students for a
Democratic Society seemed like a well-kempt bunch of Ayn Rand
acolytes. Later, as national Juso chairman, the young "Marxist", as
he called himself, would pooh-pooh classic Social Democratic attempts
to reform capitalism, demanding instead the "abolition of our current
economic system." During the same period, Fischer, the trio's
youngest, was teaching urban combat tactics to his comrades from the
Revolutionarer Kampf ("Revolutionary Struggle") in the Frankfurt
woods. The targets of their rock attacks were the "pigs" and,
occasionally, the institutions of "American imperialism" in
Frankfurt. Rudolf Scharping, Germany's current defense minister and
also a former Juso leader, was almost expelled from the Social
Democratic Party for distributing flyers badmouthing the Bundeswehr,
the Federal Armed Forces.

All three came of political age in the heady Sixties when they
imbibed pretty much the same ideological brew in the
"anti-imperialist struggle" against the Vietnam War: anti-capitalism,
anti-Americanism and "anti-anti-communism", plus what the French call
tiers-mondisme (especially of the "anti-Zionist" variety) and
contempt for "bourgeois" political virtues such as moderation,
compromise and pluralism. They grew up in a political milieu where it
was licit to express at least hedged sympathy for those like the Red
Army Faction who would push the "revolutionary struggle" all the way
to arson, abduction and armed terror.

From Youth to Middle Age

So where is that trio now? Is ideology really destiny? Of course not.
Indeed, nothing can be more heartening to worried Germany watchers
than the wondrous transformation of Schroeder and colleagues as they
moved into middle age and the middle of the road. Phenomenologically
at least, the mutation was nothing if not spectacular. Schroeder, the
former Juso radical, now sports Hermès ties, and the only thing
remotely "red" about him is his pricey Cuban Cohiba cigars. Since
moving to the head of the Foreign Office, Fischer has been wearing
only gray three-piece suits; when sworn in as ecology minister in his
home state of Hesse in 1985, he was still sporting jeans and white
Nike running shoes for a little épater les bourgeois. Sending his
Bundeswehr boys off to their staging areas in Macedonia in early
1999, Scharping looked as if he had worn army fatigues all his adult
life. Yet after high school, he served only for a few months. While
his cohorts were putting in their obligatory eighteen months,
Scharping managed to get out of the barracks and into the university.

The Bundeswehr makes for the crudest irony of them all. At the
beginning of the air campaign against Serbia in March 1999, it was
the Red-and-Green Schroeder-Fischer government that sent German strike
aircraft into combat for the first time since World War II. Half a
century after Adolf Hitler had taken his armies to the gates of
Moscow and Cairo, it was a coalition of leftists and pacifists that
dispatched German combat troops to the Balkan theater. Only four
years earlier, Helmut Kohl, the pro-Western conservative, had
established as holy writ that "the Bundeswehr shall not tread where
the Wehrmacht has conquered." All gone and forgotten now--discarded
by leaders whose parties in the past had gone to the brink of
insurrection over such matters.

Let us briefly glance backward to savor the full flavor of this
astounding reversal. In the early 1950s, the Left, spearheaded by the
Social Democrats, had marshaled all the weapons of mass mobilization
to halt West Germany's rearmament and its entry into NATO. Though the
party lost the contest by losing the elections of 1953 and 1957, it
resumed the struggle even more passionately in 1958 when the
Bundeswehr began to acquire nuclear delivery vehicles (for atomic
munitions under U.S. control). In the late 1970s, the "neutron bomb"
rekindled--and remolded--the peace movement. Traditionally a broad
coalition of Social Democrats, organized labor and the churches, the
movement began to sprout a "green" wing. So by 1980, when Joschka
Fischer's Greens were founded, German pacifism had its very own
party. Red and Green now fought together against Pershing II and
cruise missiles, putting hundreds of thousands of protesters on the
streets in 1981 and 1982. Though the Left failed again and the
missiles were deployed on schedule, it did manage to bring down a
chancellor in 1982--their very own comrade Helmut Schmidt who would
not yield to the pacifist-neutralist nationalism that was then
engulfing the SPD.

In 1991 during the Gulf War, the truest believers on the Left hung
white sheets from their windows, while the Kohl coalition wiggled out
of military participation by giving $10 billion in tribute to the
United States. Nor was his Center-Right government any more eager
than the Left to put German forces into harm's way in the Bosnian
theater. Indeed, the Kohlists kept hiding behind the lore invented by
Helmut Schmidt and his Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in the
early 1980s in order to evade naval duty in and around the Persian
Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War. This dogma conveniently claimed that
the Basic Law had rendered out-of-area missions strictly verboten.

Accordingly, the Social Democrats went all the way to the Supreme
Court in 1994 to block German officers from serving in NATO's AWACS
planes circling the skies over the former Yugoslavia--on the somewhat
specious grounds that these would not only track hostile planes but
also relay the order to shoot them down. And that would be
out-of-area combat. Only after the Constitutional Court dismissed the
"defense only" interpretation of the Basic Law in 1994 did the
Bundestag authorize the dispatch of German peace-enforcing troops to
Bosnia. It was only four years later, under the very aegis of those
who had most bitterly fought all things military and nuclear in the
fifty years past, that German Tornado strike aircraft actually loosed
shots in combat.

Looking back, Defense Minister Scharping now thunders: "Never again
must [Europe] fail as it did in the Balkans a few years ago." He now
claims that "the SPD never interpreted security merely as defense
against an aggressor"--as his party had done for twenty years by
condemning any action beyond national and alliance self-defense as
unconstitutional. The former anti-Pershing protester has only the
kindest words for the alliance: "We owe decades of freedom, peace and
safety to NATO." In a parliamentary debate on the Kosovo war, his
Chancellor Schroeder told the House: "Before the background of our
German history, there must be no doubt about our reliability,
decisiveness and firmness." For only a "solid front of the entire
international community will bring Milosevic to reason." And there
shall be "no German Sonderweg"--no separate road that would lead
Germany away from its Western obligations.

Today Scharping points out that the West perceives the Red-and-Green
coalition in a "completely different light", "precisely as the
opposite" of what it used to fear. How shall we crack this amazing
paradox of a left-wing government turning on its own deeply held
beliefs? Indeed, how to explain that Red-and-Green, by ordering
German forces into action out-of-area, dared go where even Kohl's
conservatives had refused to tread? Why, of all people, would
old-time NATO and America bashers like the SPD and Greens lead
Germany into a war managed and munitioned by the United States?

Adapting Ismay's Dictum

The paradox of Germany's Western ties affirmed becomes more vexing
still if one applies a neorealist perspective to post-Cold War
European affairs. As early as 1990, it was argued that the demise of
bipolarity would return Europe to a multipolar order of five
competing major powers that would be "more prone to instability." In
other words, no more NATO and no more United States qua European
power. More recently, it was argued in these pages for the nth time
that NATO is doomed--the victim of victory in the Cold War. For
either "gone or eroding" are those "three unifying forces" that held
the partnership together--the Soviet threat, America's economic stake
in Europe, and a generation of Atlanticist leaders on either side of
the ocean.

To be sure, the Soviet threat is no more. It is also true that U.S.
trade with Asia is now one and a half times larger than with Europe.
But the latter for many years has been in slight surplus, whereas
America's permanent deficits with China and Japan are a constant
source of political irritation. Here are some other interesting
numbers: in 1998 Europe's investments in the United States quadrupled
compared to 1997, while American acquisitions in Europe doubled. This
hardly bespeaks a loss of economic interest in each other. As to
generational change, the more interesting observation relates once
more to the dog that did not bark. To stretch the metaphor a bit: not
only did Schroeder, Scharping, et al. not bark, but they have been
making the most friendly noises when facing the United States and the
alliance. The same holds true for Tony Blair and Labour and,
amazingly, even for the post-communist D'Alema government of Italy.

Though Soviet power is gone, structure is not always destiny, at
least not in the medium term that is now ten years old. Something
seems to have happened to the iron law of history that says,
"Alliances die when they win." NATO, of course, should be dead by
now, ten years after victory. The Soviet-American compact against
Hitler, for instance, hardly outlasted Germany's surrender. The World
War I entente against Germany was practically defunct by 1923, four
years after Versailles. And the all-European coalition against
Napoleon that brought France to its knees in 1815 had unraveled by
1822.

How shall we explain that events have refused to obey what history
and theory (at least the neorealist brand) apparently prescribed? The
best way is precisely in the language of neorealist theory.
Structurally--in terms of the distribution of power--NATO's functions
have always followed the immortal words of Lord Ismay, its first
secretary-general: "To keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and
the Germans down." Strangely enough, these may be precisely the
reasons that--suitably refurbished--still provide the triple raison
d'être of the Atlantic Alliance.

Keeping the Russians Out: Russia is down and out as a state and as an
economy, and likely to remain so for the next quarter century. Yet
one thing will never change. Russia is simply too "big" for Europe.
It retains thousands of nuclear weapons and, though dependent on the
munificence and goodwill of the West, it has not always played a role
in Europe consistent with that of a responsible great
power--especially when acting as tacit protector of Serbia and
Saddam. Hankering for its lost power and once more unsure of its
mission in the world, Russia will be many things--but not a
predictable factor of stability in Europe. Russia is, has been and
will be a problem in the European balance, and so NATO with its
Atlantic anchor is, has been and will be the critical
counterweight--until Europe can discharge that task by itself.

Keeping the Germans Down: Evidently, this function changed long ago
to "keeping the Germans integrated." But even in the new setting,
this function has not lost its claim on the future, especially--and
this is a point worth stressing--in terms of German interests. No. 1
and in the middle, the country is again too big to be left alone, and
not big enough to go it alone. But this time the Germans know it.
Multilateralism and community remain unwritten articles of their
constitution. The Germans realize full well that NATO and the United
States reassure everyone else by shortening the shadow of German
power that has lengthened considerably since reunification and the
retraction of Soviet/Russian power.

NATO's subsidiary function is not only well understood, but welcomed
by the intelligent part of the political class. People like Foreign
Minister Fischer go even further by routinely stressing the powerful
connection between Germany's democracy and its Westbindung, its
community with the West. "If we turn our back on that community, we
might jeopardize our democratic revolution--the first in German
history that worked." "To me", Fischer insists, "the West is an
indispensable insurance against the return of German nationalism."

The more reassured everyone else is, the easier it is for them to
live and cooperate with the giant in their midst. The giant's clout
is fed mainly by "soft power"--economic strength, cultural influence
and geographic centrality. But "soft power", Germany's greatest and
most profitable asset, works best when "hard power" is devalued,
because classical security problems have virtually disappeared. NATO
helps keep it that way because it still provides the most solid
barrier between the Europeans and the renationalization of their
defense--historically the most powerful source of rivalry, conflict
and war. To remain integrated, to produce security collectively, is
good for Europe and good for Germany, and the Germans will
accept--nay, cherish--such a set-up as long as it is available.

Keeping the Americans In: Even with a reduced strategic threat, it is
not at all clear whether there can be European security without
Atlantic security. Europe has flourished because the United States
has essentially become a European power--and Europe did not flourish,
as in the first half of this century, when American power was not
part of the balance. Moreover, everybody from Lisbon to Lodz wants
the Americans in--even the cranky French who, deep in their hearts,
want to keep the Americans (at least half of the time) as a
counterweight to Germany, and as a reinsurance against Russian power.

The sorry record of Europe's attempts since 1991 to generate European
security on its own--especially in the War of the Yugoslav
Succession--has added a very practical dimension to these concerns.
Lord David Owen, the former EU representative for Yugoslavia, said it
all when he mused: "This was going to be the time when Europe emerged
with a single foreign policy and . . . it unwisely shut out an
America only too happy to be shut out." As I have written in another
context, while others

"may resent America's clout, they have also found it useful to have a
player like the United States in the game. . . . In the language of
'public goods' theory: There must always be somebody who will recruit
individual producers, organize the startup and generally assume a
disproportionate burden in the enterprise. That is as true in
international affairs as it is in grassroots politics."

The moral of the Bosnian War of 1992-95 and its Kosovo sequel of 1999
is still the old one. While EU-Europe matches if not exceeds the
United States in terms of economic, demographic and many military
resources, as a strategic actor it remains less than the sum of its
parts. Fifteen wills, alas, do not add up to one Big One. There is
also an unyielding technical problem. In spite of its wondrous
richesse, the EU has not been able to generate the military hardware
that counts. Europe has neither long-range logistics (ships and
transport aircraft), nor long-range intelligence (spy satellites plus
evaluation capabilities), nor long-range throw-weight (cruise
missiles and precision munitions delivered by strategic aircraft).
Europe at this point is not equipped to fight a Yugoslav-style war on
its own, let alone anything bigger at a farther remove like the Gulf.
And because it does not wield the clout, it cannot even begin to
impress the Milosevics of this world. The difference between being
hit by a British or German Tornado and an American F-16 is critical.
Behind those Tornados stand but medium powers; behind the U.S. Air
Force plane in the Balkan skies stands a superpower that can hurl all
the ordnance in the world without having to expose itself to
counter-fire.

A Team Player at Last

The foregoing has tried to elucidate some general continuities--in
particular, why an alliance apparently doomed by theory and history
continues to flourish ten years after victory. Instead of succumbing
to a drastic downward shift of demand (the decline of the strategic
threat), NATO has successfully opened new markets (via eastward
enlargement) while hawking new products (peace enforcement in the
Balkans). A more specific question is this: On this new post-bipolar
stage, why does Germany continue to declaim from a familiar script?
Let us sharpen the paradox: Germany has suffered from more
constraints in the Cold War than any other nation in Europe; hence,
it has gained more freedom than anyone else in the aftermath. So why
does Germany insist on acting as avatar of continuity? Why not act
more like Britain or France?

In fact, this is precisely what the new Schroeder government tried to
do right after assuming power. Taking a page out of Margaret ("I want
my money back") Thatcher's book, Chancellor Schroeder used interesting
language in pushing for a cut in Germany's huge contribution to the
EU (dm22 billion, roughly $13 billion net per year). More than half
of the money "being frittered away" by the EU was coming out of
German coffers. "In the past, compromises [in the EU] were often only
reached because the Germans paid for them. This policy has come to an
end", Schroeder stated in an interview this year. And why? Because the
times had changed. "Now one could be less inhibited about pursuing
one's interests than in the past."

Less inhibited, perhaps; more successful, no. When the returns were
counted in time for the EU's Berlin summit three months later, very
little the Schroederites wanted had really come about--neither a cut
in the EU's agricultural budget nor in Germany's net contributions.
For that policy to "come to an end", Germany would have had to take
on France, the main profiteer of the agricultural support system,
plus the Mediterranean countries and Ireland, the beneficiaries of
the EU's "cohesion" and "structural" funds.

Why not go to the brink if Germany had shed those Cold War fetters
that demanded deference to France and unrelenting generosity to the
EU as a whole? Because No. 1, with the largest resource base, always
has to pay more. Nor is this so painful, given that the biggest power
usually profits most from the common institutions--as Germany, the
world's second-largest exporter, does most obviously from the vast
common market that is the EU. "The more we pursue our interests
multilaterally, through Europe", Foreign Minister Fischer postulates
correctly, "the more we'll get for ourselves." You do well by doing
good for others is the message. Not bad for a great regional power
that has learned in the most painful way that, in the new game of
peaceful penetration, cell phones and wing-tips are so much more
useful than Panzers and jack boots. "We have to do for Europe in
order to do for ourselves", reiterated Fischer in a conversation I
had with him in February, adding just with a hint of a smile: "We
lead from the second row, but we are doing quite well there."

So Germany does not have to write a new script and don a new costume.
Germany is like a Gulliver who likes his ropes. In his mind are
etched two commanding lessons from history. Whenever he struck out on
his own, he reaped not hegemony but ever larger disaster, as in 1914
and 1939. But when he accepted the bonds of multilateralism and
community in all things economic and military, he flourished beyond
belief.

Such twin lessons are not easily unlearned, and the speed with which
they were internalized by a new government supposedly free of
yesteryear's restraints may well serve as a testimony to their
strength and endurance. But why not at least maneuver a bit more
freely now that Germany's excruciating dependence on the West has
vanished along with bipolarity? The short answer is this: there is no
need for post-Cold War Germany--the "Berlin Republic", if you
wish--to stray from the mainstream of Western policy.

What is it that has routinely drawn Germany to Schaukelpolitik, the
policy of maneuver and balance between East and West? First of all, a
strategic geography that menaced Germany from both sides--the
notorious cauchemar des coalitions, as Bismarck called it. So
maneuvering was often a condition of survival. Beyond necessity,
there was sometimes enticement: a Russia that not only posed a
threat, but also offered a temptation. But whether threat or
temptation, Russia would invariably instill a propitiation reflex in
modern German Ostpolitik. And at no time was this reflex more
compelling than in the post-1945 period. For in those decades, the
Soviet Union was perfectly positioned in the twin role of blackmailer
and briber.

The best Soviet armies were ensconced some thirty miles from the
gates of Hamburg, and Germany was the most exposed, hence most
vulnerable, member of the Atlantic Alliance. If that existential
threat was ever ignored by Bonn, the Russians could always resort to
West Berlin, a convenient lever located deep inside
Russian-controlled territory. All the way to the Battle of the
Euromissiles from 1977-86, Soviet pressure campaigns against the West
focused first and foremost on West Germany, playing on the country's
angst as designated target of abandonment by the West or extinction
by the Soviet Union.

Bonn's propitiatory instincts grew stronger still once the "New
Ostpolitik" in the early 1970s launched a cooperative relationship
with the Soviet Union and its satraps. Moscow held the key to East
Germany and Eastern Europe, and so access required good behavior on
Bonn's part as it sought to lower the barriers of partition between
the two Germanys. Hence "Genscherism", hence an enduring détente
imperative that led to repetitive clashes between Washington and West
Germany over Afghanistan, gas pipelines, the Moscow Olympic Games,
INF and SNF. For renewed Cold War would only refreeze what the New
Ostpolitik had so painstakingly thawed in the attempt to overcome the
intra-German confrontation along the Elbe River.

The propitiatory impulse has by no means disappeared. Consider, for
example, the stubborn insistence of the Schroeder-Fischer government
on bringing the Russians into the Balkan peace process and on making
NATO "out-of-area" operations contingent on a mandate of the UN
Security Council (where Russia wields a veto). But the reflex has
obviously weakened. With reunification achieved, Russia no longer has
anything to offer. And with the retraction and collapse of Russia's
military might, Moscow now has far less with which to threaten
Germany.

This, then, is the single most important change in Germany's
strategic geography. It helps to resolve the paradox of a
Red-and-Green government sending the Bundeswehr into harm's way. No
matter how many hundreds of thousands of people the Milosevic regime
might have uprooted, Germany would not have gone into action while
Soviet/Russian power remained intact. For German pacifism has always
rested on two sturdy pillars of realpolitik. First, the Soviets could
always have retaliated against Germany's Central European détente,
rending the carefully nurtured fabric of intra-German relations.
Second, there was the fear of entrapment in a peripheral conflict
that would ignite a general European war in the center, with Germany
as prime battlefield and victim. But those motive forces no longer
exist. Germany, in other words, need not walk a Sonderweg, not at
least for the time being. It need not deviate from the Western way,
for the demise of Soviet power has removed both threats and
temptations from Germany's strategic geography.

Strategic Equilibrium

Structure has not been destiny--not yet, after ten years. The major
relationships forged in the 1940s and hardened by decades of
bipolarity have not passed into history. Why is this? First, because,
as argued earlier, the basics have not changed that much and there is
still a lot of functionality in those bonds. And second, because
where structure-qua-distribution-of-power has changed most
drastically as a result of the Soviet collapse, it has actually made
it easier for Germany to sail in the Western mainstream.

Theory and history predict that allies will balance against a No. 1
(the United States) that is no longer constrained by an equivalent
No. 2 (the Soviet Union). But in this instance they have not done so.
No one in Europe has joined France and Russia in their intermittent,
half-hearted attempts to protect, or side with, declared foes of the
United States like Iran, Iraq or Serbia. None other than the French
calls America a hyperpuissance whose power must be reduced by the
harsh discipline of multipolarity.

The reasons are plain: America is more needed than feared, and while
carrying a unipolar stick, it usually speaks quite softly. Not even
the French have tried to forge a real countervailing compact; indeed,
when the crunch was on, as in Kosovo in early 1999, the French
without so much as a side-swipe joined the American-led alliance
against Belgrade. What we do observe, though, is the usual economic
rivalry dating back to the 1960s, as well as a more recent phenomenon
that might be labeled "psychological balancing."

One manifestation of the latter tendency is the euro, which many
Europeans have celebrated not as an agent of economic efficiency or
monetary stability, but as a bulwark against the almighty dollar and
as a weapon that would turn Europe into the monetary equal, if not
superior, of the United States. Another means of psychological
balancing involves unending calls for a common defense identity that
would at last allow the EU to act militarily without the United
States; just to celebrate the ambition must soothe souls riled by
Europe's repetitive failure to take care of business in the Balkans.
A third palliative is an old acquaintance dating back to the
nineteenth century: the moral and cultural denigration of the United
States. The most striking recent example is the reaction to the
execution in Arizona of two brothers of German origin, Walter and
Karl LaGrand, for a murder committed in 1982. Hardly noticed in the
United States, this episode unleashed huge waves of resentment in
Germany, prompting German politicians of all stripes to condemn the
United States as a morally retrograde "stronghold of barbarism."

Such instances of pseudo-balancing against the "last remaining
superpower"--the assertion of great strategic ambitions and of
cultural superiority--bespeak unease, perhaps even subliminal fear
and a need for emotional compensation. But because the level of
Euro-American transactions and dependencies actually keeps rising,
these phenomena may well be a substitute for the real thing: the
fraying of ties and the parting of ways.

Certainly, this reassuring assessment seems to fit Germany better
than most. Comfortable in its standing and power, it need not emulate
those French antics that reflect the loss of strategic weight and
cultural pre-eminence. There are no fines in Germany for calling a
brush-and-water contraption a "car wash" rather than an "Autowäsche."
Instead of being fought with the force of law, English is
deliberately promoted as a working language in companies and
universities. American investments are welcomed, not blocked, by the
government.

Germany is in a position of grand strategic equilibrium. The
reunified nation, though it remains in the same geographic location,
is where no Germany has ever been before: comfortable with its
possessions and unchallenged by its neighbors. Or as Defense Minister
Rudolf Scharping put it: "For the first time in its history, Germany
is surrounded by friends and partners." In such an august state,
nations do not lightly deviate from the policies that brought them
there as long as new threats and temptations do not arise.

In a system that works, continuity rules. One factor is obviously
NATO and the U.S. security tie, which serves as insurance against the
resurgence or collapse of Russian power and which helps to take the
sting out of Germany's weight and centrality in the European balance.
A second is a Continental option, as embodied in the special
relationship with France. Though Germany no longer needs France as
legitimator and secondary protector, interests continue to dovetail,
for each regards (and manipulates) the other as an indispensable
partner in the leadership of Europe.

A third element, which helps to limit dependence on France, is Germany's subsidiary British tie. The reason is that some German interests - like freer trade or the eastward extension of the Western communities - are better served by London (and The Hague) than by a Paris beholden to Little Europe ambitions. Anglo-German relations have in fact warmed up under the "Third Way" duo of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroder. Fourth is the traditional Russian connection - though greatly scaled down because Moscow now has very little with which to blackmail or to bribe Germany. It is rather the fear of Russian weakness - the specter of "Weimar Russia" - that makes for solicitous (and worried) attention. Fifth and finally, the stabilization of Germany's East European hinterland is the easier and more profitable task. Economically, these countries are Germany's "Mexico": next door and with favorable wage-to-productivity ratios. Their markets are ideally suited for penetration, but that requires political stability. Hence Germany, like the United States, will try to integrate the East-Central Europeans into the EU and NATO while taking care not to do So too blatantly for fear of alienating Russia.

In the absence of a strategic threat, Germany will try to do what it knows best: to play on its surfeit of "soft power" while eschewing for as long as possible the ways of a traditional great power and the use of force for strategic purposes. And why not? If a country is surrounded only by friends, it will seek to keep them. If it enjoys a setting no longer overshadowed by prospects of major war, it will strive to preserve it. For this is a wondrous system indeed: permissive, peaceful and (still) protected from the turmoil that continues to grip the rest of the world. Pourvu queça dure - provided that it lasts - as Napoleon's mother-in-law used to caution.

Josef Joffe is editorial page editor and columnist of the Suddeutsche Zeitung in Munich and associate of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University.