Vol. 21 · No. 3 · Issue 68 · Fall 2003

Stephen Kalberg

Download full article [subscribers only]

Abstract

The disagreement between Germany and the United States over the war in Iraq was massive. During the winter of 2002, many observers spoke of a long-term rift between these longstanding allies and a total loss of credibility on both sides. No one can doubt, regardless of recent healing overtures, that the German-American partnership has been altered and significantly weakened. It has suffered a blow far more damaging than those that accompanied past conflicts over, for example, Ostpolitik, the neutron bomb, the Soviet gas pipeline, the flow of high technology products to the Soviet Union, the imposition of trade sanctions in 1980 against the military government in Poland, the stationing in the late 1970s of middlerange missiles on German soil, and the modernization of shortrange missiles in 1989.