The Perfect Storm and After: Retrospect and Prospect for American-German Relations
By Jeffrey Herf

Part of the explanation of the current woeful state of American-German relations is quite simple: we have been through a perfect storm of clashing cultural values and political perspectives that overlapped with a complete disagreement about security threats. In George Bush, the United States has the most conservative president since the Republican presidents of the 1920s. In Gerhard Schröder, and his governing coalition with the Green Party, the Federal Republic of Germany has been governed by the most left-leaning government in German politics since the Social Democratic coalitions of the Weimar Republic. It would be astonishing if the man from Crawford, Texas who stopped drinking at the age of forty, found hope in fundamentalist Protestantism, and knew little about Germany and Europe in general, could find any common ground with the provincial leftist politician from Hamburg who, despite his ability to work with German big business, has views on foreign policy that from outside appear to be pale echoes of the Juso (Young Socialist youth). The American-German conflict would be even worse than it has been had it not been for a pragmatic American Secretary of State, on the one hand, and an introspective and thoughtful former new leftist German Foreign Minister. Yet the charms of Colin Powell and Joschka Fischer could go only so far. Even if there had been no war in Iraq, relations between the men from Crawford and Hamburg, and the large cultural and political forces they represented, would have been frosty at best.

As readers who lived through the Euromissile dispute of the early 1980s will recall, the last four years are not the first time that the American right and German left clashed. As Ronald Reagan's son reminded us recently, although the former president did not wear his religion on his sleeve, the cultural and political polarization between the conservative American president and the West German left - not to mention of course the unmitigated hostility from Communist East Germany - was profound and bitter. After all, the West German left accused the United States of planning to limit a nuclear war to Europe. When, to the horror of polite opinion in Europe, Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as "the evil empire," he understood that it was a political conflict between two secular visions of modern society - liberal democracy versus communism.

Since the late 1990s and again following September 11, 2001, the fundamental foreign policy conflict has been between modern liberal democracies and terrorism inspired by radical Islam. The language with which George Bush has chosen to fight the "war on terror" is saturated with a public religiosity that is repellent to Europeans. During the early 1980s, the time when Reagan was most despised in West Germany and Western Europe, he was engaged in implementing, albeit with different rhetoric, a set of decisions taken by his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, to deploy intermediate range nuclear weapons in Western Europe should the Soviet Union refuse to reduce or dismantle its SS-20 arsenal. This decision had been made in conjunction with German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and other leaders of NATO, yet despite the multi-lateral origins of the decision, Schmidt's government fell because Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and the Free Democratic Party leadership concluded that the left-wing of Schmidt's own SPD, which included a younger Gerhard Schröder, had turned against the NATO double-track decision. The war in Iraq, by contrast, was rooted in American initiatives from the beginning.

With the replacement of the Schmidt-Genscher government by the Kohl-Genscher, CDU-FDP coalition, transatlantic ties at the government level became as close as they had ever been in the history of the Cold War. That change in the West German government was due to the fact that a majority of the West German electorate and the West German political establishment agreed with the United States that the threat from the Soviet Union was real. The arms build-up and stubborn refusal to dismantle the weapons of Leonid Brezhnev and his immediate successors in the Kremlin helped to elect and keep in power right of center governments in West Germany, Great Britain, and Japan, as well as the hard-line French Socialist government of François Mitterand. In this sense, it is clear that the western alliance was an alliance, not a love affair or a marriage, held together by the perception of a common threat and a shared rejection of communism. By the 1980s, however, the left-wing of the Social Democratic Party, and of course, even more explicitly and passionately, the Green Party, had turned against what they viewed now as the shibboleths of "Cold War anti-communism" in favor of rhetoric focused on the dangers emanating from both superpowers and the virtues of "peace policy" and "security partnership" with the Soviet Union.

I retell this familiar tale because it is now apparent that for Gerhard Schröder and many German elites, the collapse of communism in 1989 did not lead to a reassessment of the role of power and force in international affairs. Germans and many Europeans convinced themselves that Mikhail Gorbachev deserved the lion's share of the credit for the peaceful end of the Cold War. To be sure, in the 1990s, Fischer and some independent liberal intellectuals sought to revive the traditions of left-leaning armed anti-fascism in support of NATO intervention to stop Serbian ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Yet these were minority voices. In any case, it was belated American, not European, intervention that brought Serbian aggression to an end. The West German left-leaning generation of "1968" that came to power in the late 1990s brought with it a set of ideas about force and power in international affairs that was more and less a pale imitation of the leftist dissent of the 1960s and 1980s. In this intellectual milieu, which ranged from the Greens to the left-wing of the SPD, the United States was not viewed as the country that helped to liberate Europe from fascism and Nazism and succeeded in containing Soviet totalitarianism until it imploded. It was, rather, the country that had waged unjust wars in Vietnam and the third world and rattled nuclear sabers unnecessarily during the Cold War. These sentiments were expressed in varying degrees of radicalism, but they generally did not include the idea that the United States was fundamentally a force for good in world politics. The Clinton administration got along reasonably well with Europe, but neither the United States nor Europe faced challenges as dire as those posed by the attacks of September 11 and the prospect of Saddam Hussein breaking out of the UN inspection regime.

The tragic aspect of the downward spiral of the past several years lies in the collapse of a united front of liberal democracies against the mixed threat of secular Baathist totalitarian rule in Baghdad and the totalitarian ideology of radical Islam. It was hardly surprising that the post-1960s German left distanced itself from Cold War anti-communism. The striking feature of opposition to the Iraq war in Germany and Europe was that the group that now calls itself the "left" so adamantly opposed a war against a regime with such strong similarities to European fascism and Stalinism. In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, public commissions in the United States pointing to glaring intelligence failures, questions about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, and the remarkable failure of the Bush administration to understand that the three weeks of major combat was only the first phase of a longer war to defeat the Baathists in Iraq, we Americans have good reason to avoid lecturing our European friends. This is not the place to repeat the arguments in support of the war in Iraq except to recall that there was a fully secular, liberal case to be made regarding both the terrorism of radical Islamists as well as the threat of the continued existence of the Baathist regime in Baghdad. This was a case which, in part, evoked the echoes of Europe's totalitarian past - French fascist ideology, National Socialism and Communism, and yes, radical anti-Semitism as well - all of which had an impact on Islamic and Arab radicalism. Only a minority of politicians and intellectuals in Germany were willing to make this case.

The need for a transatlantic alliance remains profound, especially in light of the war in Iraq, which has still to be won, the need to assist the fledgling Iraqi government and consolidate the new regime in Kabul, and to win the war of ideas against totalitarianism in its radical Islamist form. Yet it seems doubtful that a more secular, more eurocentric, and simply more liberal American president might have convinced Germany to join Britain in supporting the war in Iraq. The German political establishment still seems unwilling to acknowledge that the combination of Saddam's regime with vast oil reserves in the ground meant that there was indeed a gathering threat that needed to be confronted preemptively. One cannot make that statement with the confidence of months past, but I make it in any case because I believe that Europeans and Germans need to think much more deeply about the after-effects of Europe's own totalitarian era as they became part of the dangerous melange of Iraqi Baathism and radical Islam. No country has more to contribute to understanding those issues than Germany. None has more experience in confronting a dictatorial past. There are opportunities for common transatlantic initiatives in post-Saddam Iraq. Yet their precondition for success in that regard is winning the war in Iraq and stabilizing the regime there and in Kabul. These tasks offer an opportunity to move from the perfect storm of disagreement of the past several years to transatlantic agreement resting on common interests in breaking the spell of authoritarian rule and religious fanaticism in the Middle East and the Islamic world.

Jeffrey Herf is Professor of History at the University of Maryland and a frequent participant in AICGS workshops.

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This essay appeared in the July 29, 2004 AICGS Advisor.

AICGS is grateful to The German Marshall Fund of the U.S. for its generous support of this essay series.
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The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s) alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.