"America's blankness"

In the end, after receiving a few concessions, the major European powers will no doubt agree to help the U.S. win what U.N. resolutions it needs concerning Iraq. They may also contribute more cash and troops to the international effort in Afghanistan. But, aside from the U.K., they will give the U.S. none of the substantial help it needs in Iraq. They would presumably be willing to contribute to a U.N. and NATO operation, so long as the U.S. reduced its visibility and relinquished command and control. But short of such a dramatic volte-face by Bush, the Europeans are not about to ride to the rescue.

So here we can register a genuine and serious injury to U.S. national security that is directly traceable to popular anti-Americanism. It is largely a self-inflicted wound, the result of the Bush administration's contemptuous treatment of America's European allies. The damage will become even more galling if it turns out, during the next months, that very few non-European countries are willing to maintain their contingents or send more soldiers to Iraq even if the U.S. pays the freight.

Events may yet intervene and undo some of the damage that the Bush administration has cavalierly inflicted on the Atlantic alliance. Everything would change dramatically, for example, if there were more Madrid-style terrorist attacks in Europe. The anti-American feelings now roiling many Europeans could, under the shock of a mass-casualty strike in France or Italy, easily yield to anti-Muslim rage, fed by popular resentment toward Muslim immigrants and guest workers. Let us all hope and pray that nothing of the sort transpires. But if it does, anti-Americanism may well be overshadowed by a more virulent and consequential strain of Western xenophobia.

Terrorism is by nature unpredictable. But European-American relations will also be transformed to some extent by a perfectly predictable event, the American presidential election. So I should mention the almost messianic hopes that America's traditional friends in Europe are now investing in John Kerry. This remarkable faith suggests, first of all, that residual pro-American feelings exist just beneath the surface in Europe, even though no one can imagine a repair in U.S.-European relations if Bush stays in office, this time released from the first-termer's need to mollify his electorate. The hopes that political elites in Europe place in Kerry are easy to explain psychologically. Politically serious Europeans recognize that there are no effective solutions to many of the world's greatest problems without American support and leadership.

Some European commentators have said that there are few doctrinal differences, in foreign policy, between Kerry and Bush. But they quickly add that removing Bush from office in November will still make a decisive difference to international security, including the global struggle against terrorism. The need to correct grievous errors alone speaks for the importance of putting a new foreign policy team into the White House, a group that has no incentive to conceal embarrassing blunders or to continue failed policies.

But other European commentators go further, expecting Kerry to rebuild the Atlantic alliance on a wholly new basis. Bush acceded to the presidency, they say, with the conviction that the collapse of the USSR combined with America's military superiority made the Atlantic alliance essentially otiose. Europeans did not see Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat. But America didn't care because it could invade Iraq with or without the help of its former allies.

Kerry, according to his European admirers, should do everything in his power to avoid this slide into gratuitous unilateralism. His first step, they say, should be to soberly examine the principal post-Cold War threats to U.S. national security -- WMD proliferation and non-state terrorist networks plotting mass-casualty attacks on U.S. cities. The national security establishments of our primary European allies say that these are the main threats to European security, too. The perception of shared threats, in fact, provides the obvious starting point for a post-Bush foreign policy. Kerry will easily grasp this point.

Next Page: Military force is of little value for effectively countering terrorism

• View blog reactions