A DOZEN YEARS ago, an American president named George Bush was the toast of all Germany. Alone among top foreign leaders, he had championed the reunification of West and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. More than any other non-German, he made reunification happen.
Today, ironically, another American president named George Bush is "toast" in the united Germany his father helped to create.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder trumpeted his opposition to Bush II's belligerence toward Iraq in a successful ploy to win re-election two weeks ago. His stance was so popular among Germans that his more conservative opponent did not dare challenge it in substance.
When one of Schroeder's Cabinet officers (since fired) went so far as to compare the second Bush's drum-beating policies to Hitler's, the White House was outraged and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the U.S.-German relationship had been "poisoned." He refused to meet with the German defense minister, Peter Struck.
Predictably, efforts to mend the rift between these two allies are under way. Continued animosity is in the interest of neither country. It would be a mistake, however, to pass off the dispute as just one of those irritations that roil the friendliest of nations. If Americans are to understand fundamental changes in the German scene, they had better take a dispassionate look at what this bitter exchange symbolizes.
Schroeder is the first leader of his nation who came to office without fear of Soviet attack. For all of his predecessors, from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl, the Communist threat was the beginning and the end of German foreign policy. Each chancellor, despite the nuances that agitated Bonn's hothouse politics, made it his business to hover under the American nuclear umbrella while trying to avoid angering the Russians.
Before the fall of the wall, West Germany was the quintessential status-quo power - a middle-sized power at flash point in the middle of the superpowers' Cold War. If the war turned hot, German territory on both sides of the Elbe would be devastated. Burdened with the shame of the Nazi legacy and fearful of annihilation, this once-militant nation turned pacifist in its basic instincts. (It still is.)
While German politicians were obeisant to the distant dream of national reunification, none believed it would happen for decades, if ever. Nor were they prepared to fight for it.
The German world, the European world, indeed the whole geo-strategic world was turned upside down with the sudden unforeseen collapse of the Communist East German regime (and, two years later, its Soviet senior partner). What needs to be recalled at this juncture is the central role of President George Bush I in uniting the two Germanys.
The French were against it, even to the point of sending their president to tottering East Berlin to proclaim his support for two separate German states. The British were against it. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, apprehensive of German domination on the continent, said her inability to prevent reunification was her greatest failure.
In contrast, Bush I rallied to Kohl's side in defying his NATO allies and his Warsaw Pact opponents. A year later, as formal reunification went into effect, Kohl paid "special tribute" to the president.
"Thanks to his vision, statesmanship and dedication, it became possible for us to realize the dream of freedom and unity for all Germans," the exuberant chancellor declared.
Contrast this to the situation today between Washington and Berlin. Taking a more extreme tack than any other friendly power, Schroeder has declared he will not support a war to topple Saddam Hussein even if it is sanctioned by the United Nations. And while letting it be known that he would welcome a White House invitation, he has not altered his stance. It has been left to his diplomats, as one put it, to find a way to bring him in from the cold.
What's really happening is Germany's steady emergence as a "normal country," throwing off the psychological burdens of its Nazi past, and throwing around its weight as a nation of 80 million people with almost double the gross national product of Britain.
Schroeder, like Britain's Tony Blair, is a product of the modern European center-left, even though they are on opposite sides over Iraq. They favor market economies, more reliance on the private sector, even some privatization of government operations. When he was first elected chancellor by defeating Kohl in 1998, Schroeder's campaign theme was German "self-confidence." The government, he said, should become "more German" in its policies.
Schroeder pleased the Clinton administration (and angered the left wing of his Social Democratic Party) when he broke with post-war tradition to send German troops on a peacekeeping assignment in Kosovo.
The spectacle of German troops in the former Yugoslavia, once a target of Nazi attack, would have been unthinkable before the wall came down. Likewise, Schroeder's public baiting of Washington over Iraq is a show of defiance, independence and assertiveness greater than any indulged by his predecessors.
Not that the American-German relationship has always been placid. Far from it.
Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Kurt Georg Kiesinger and Kohl, Christian Democrats all, had their share of differences with the United States. Adenauer knew he had to accommodate Washington's Cold War strategy, but always his greater passion was reconciliation with France.
Erhard, to advance his "economic miracle," presided over greater trans-Atlantic competition.
Kiesinger was insignificant, partly because of his record during the Third Reich.
Kohl was the most pro-American of the lot, partly out of gratitude for American assistance during his boyhood. But always his interests properly rested with his country.
Washington's strains have consistently been greater with Social Democratic chancellors - Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and, now, Gerhard Schroeder.
Brandt famously did not notify the Nixon administration in advance when he went off to Russia to seal his "Ostpolitik" by accepting the postwar division of Europe. And the brilliant, talented Schmidt, who could not abide President Jimmy Carter, once complained in the presence of this reporter that American presidents (he was speaking of newly elected Ronald Reagan) were woefully unprepared for their jobs.
Yet Social Democrats Brandt and Schmidt, like their Christian Democratic counterparts, shared one objective. They considered maintenance of the German-American security arrangement their No. 1 priority - a priority even greater than their desire to avoid disruptions to the east.
With the Soviet threat gone, Schroeder has never had to cling so tightly to Washington for protection. Perhaps for the first time in its history, reasonably friendly countries surround Germany. NATO is an alliance in search of new missions that may not be in accord with German interests.
If the American connection still ranks highest in the German foreign ministry, it is not out of fear of the bankrupt Russians but out of concern that a unilateralist America, edging away from Europe, would become the enemy of the status quo that Germany treasures.
While Germans hardly go out of their way to acknowledge it anymore, they have benefited greatly from American toughness in the past.
The Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, NATO, containment, medium-range missiles in Europe, the whole panoply of American power in winning the Cold War often made Germans nervous. After all, they were on the front line facing real guns, real mines, real hostility.
But in the end, U.S. policies led to security, prosperity, respectability and reunification for Germany. Now, in the matter of Iraq, their chancellor can step forward as the "more German" leader he wants to be.
Joseph R.L. Sterne is a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. He was editor of The Sun's editorial page from 1972 to 1997 and The Sun's correspondent in Germany from 1969 to 1972.