Continental divides.

• Author: Joffe, Josef
• Position: Quarterly

A GERMAN chancellor openly defying the United States? Accusing George W. Bush of "adventurism" and hurling an ever louder "no" across the Atlantic--a "nein" to war against Saddam under any circumstances? During the Cold War, America's trustiest ally would not have dreamed of insurrection, not while Soviet shock troops were ensconced 25 miles outside of Hamburg, whence I write. Thereon hangs a tale that transcends yesteryear's transatlantic troubles of the "Whither NATO?" variety. It is the story of bipolarity lost--the first chapter, not the last.

The Atlantic Alliance has been dying a slow death ever since Christmas day 1991, when the Soviet Union committed suicide by dissolution. Having won the Cold War, the Alliance lost its central purpose and began to crumble like a bridge no longer in use--slowly, almost invisibly. In 1994 the departure of the last Russian troops from Central Europe signaled that the capitulation was complete. The Europeans saw their existential dependence on the United States lifted, the latter its lesser but still vital need for a European glacis.

Only one year later, as the wars of Yugoslav succession began in earnest, NATO as quasi-supranational army was already defunct, for those who fought with the United States were but a loose coalition of willing and able. The most obvious watershed was 9/11. It was not that the Europeans withheld fealty from the United States; indeed, as the Alliance invoked Article 5, numerous NATO members contributed to the American cause. The deeper message of 9/11 and the Afghan campaign was one of systemic transformation.

Above all, the United States demonstrated a surfeit of autonomous power that finally rendered explicit the transition to unipolarity. Moving unopposed, and several military-technological orbits above the rest, it needed merely assistants, not allies. And so Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would famously proclaim that the mission determines the coalition and not the other way around. This spelled the unheralded demise of NATO as we knew it--as a community that would either act together or not at all. Alliance was now formally ad hoc and a la carte.

Or even less, as the run-up to the second Iraq war would demonstrate. History and theory have always predicted more than just the death of alliances as the price of victory. The larger warning is that the international system abhors imbalances, that power begets counter-power. Surreptitiously, balancing against the United States had already begun in the latter 1990s when Washington regularly found itself alone and on the other side of such issues as the ABM Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Au fond, all of these duels were not about principle, but...