(Published in The International Herald Tribune, December 13, 2005)

The thing that was wrong with U.S. foreign policy, Helmut Schmidt said in the early 1980s, was that it often lacked calculability. That's O.K., an American responded back then, being a superpower allowed occasional room for creative incoherence.

 

During the era of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation, that unpredictability was a well-managed, if brazen, American option.

 

At the same time, European countries, caught between the two poles, had little to no room to surprise or to cross up the big players on either end. The stakes were too real, the bottom line too obvious for the middle-sized and little guys to become hard to reckon.

 

Now, with the United States recasting its relationship with Europe as one that focuses, give or take a pineapple quota, on how they deal together with the world beyond Europe, the old reflexive trans-Atlantic alignment seems increasingly replaced on the European end by a kind of a la carte involvement, surprises and controlled incoherence included.

 

In the 1980s, the American and European allies clashed and then substantially resolved their Eurocentric concerns: raising European defense budgets, stationing American middle-range nukes in NATO countries to face down Soviet SS20s, or penalizing the Soviets with trade sanctions for invading Afghanistan.

 

These days, when the issues are far-flung instead of European-based - Darfur, Afghanistan, lifting a European arms embargo to China, or even Latin America - there are no longer the same pressures to agree with the Americans.

 

Perhaps the biggest change right now, particularly in light of Iraq, and Europe's (in some respects contrived) concerns about the CIA's anti-terror activities, is that the European half of the Atlantic Alliance doesn't really police its own any more.

 

This means that the rest of Europe won't get automatically angry or feel threatened when a European ally, becoming troublesome or incalculable in the eyes of the State Department, actively challenges American policy at the other end of the world.

 

Take Spain. One day it says in terms perhaps more unconditional than any other country that any CIA flights landing in Spain on unknown missions were "without doubt, indeed certainly" in full accordance with Spanish law.

 

And almost the next, it sells $1.7 billion in military aircraft and ships to Venezuela whose president, Hugo Chávez, describes the deal as exemplifying Europe's "dignified attitude" in confronting "the hegemonic and imperialistic ambitions" of the United States.

 

Add another week to the narrative: with 75 percent of the voters staying home because of an opposition boycott, Chávez's forces win total control of the Parliament in Caracas. The legislature's president then says Chávez will soon amend the Constitution so as to be able to rule till 2030.

 

Here, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister who pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq, is asked if Spain's offer of planes and ships hasn't bestowed European legitimization on a man the United States argues is using his country's enormous oil wealth to take an aggressively destabilizing course in Latin America. Zapatero's answer: No.

 

Where's Europe on this? Could Tony Blair, tortured by a possible implosion of the European Union's finances during Britain's current EU presidency, and polls that show his Labour Party falling behind the Conservatives for the first time in 13 years, have found any yield in taking Zapatero to task for irresponsibility in Venezuela when the two met in London on Friday?

 

The Dutch, Atlanticists par excellence, are cutting themselves a deal to limit their troops' presence in harm's way in a repositioning of NATO forces in Afghanistan. The Germans' grand coalition, still deep in the uncertainties of how it will define its desired proximity to America, faces accusations that holdovers from the Schröder regime in its midst actually assisted the CIA in targeting and kidnapping a German.

 

As for the French, Jacques Chirac has met with Chávez three times this year. No strategic business yet, but Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, welcomed the Venezuelan to Paris in October with the words, "There's a common vision between our two countries on North-South relations and on the necessity to change things, to have new ideas."

 

Without the likelihood of European pressure on Spain, the Americans find themselves in a new kind of bind - short many of the old levers to resolve it.

 

On one hand, the Spanish under Zapatero's Socialists, after the Madrid railway station bombing by Islamic fundamentalists, have been tough fighters against Al Qaeda's international terror network at home. Indeed, the government's exceptionally frontal statement stressing the legality of CIA flights to and from Spain - including a stopover of a plane en route from Guantánamo to Bucharest - looks like a signal that this approach will continue.

 

On the other, with the United States' suspicions of Venezuelan aid to Marxist guerrillas in Colombia, and the prospect of Chávez's cash helping his friends running for office in Nicaragua and Bolivia over the next 12 months, there is private Bush administration rage about Spain's giving Venezuela both new military capabilities and an allure of support and respectability from a NATO partner.

 

Zapatero may well have sensed the extent of his impunity in closing a deal that back a ways other Europeans might have called too incoherent for Europe's good. Now he has landed a 1.7 billion contract that tells Latin America not only of his contempt for the Bush administration, but that Chávez is cool in Europe.

 

In Europe, indeed. Because regarding the aircraft to be manufactured by the EADS-CASA consortium (Spain has a 5 percent share), Roberto Centeno, a professor of economics at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, says the deal's "lion's share goes to Germany, which will provide the motors, and France, which will provide the structural elements" of the C-295 and C-235 transport and surveillance aircraft.

 

Should the Bush administration, remarkably mild in public until now, feel punitive, it could probably withhold authorization for the use of the high-tech American electronic components in the two C-235 surveillance aircraft.

 

More important, Zapatero has apparently concluded that in the 2005 world of an a la carte alliance, the attraction of new defense jobs, sustaining an edgy international profile, tweaking the Americans for political profit at home (and eventually having to beseech France for replacement technology for Chávez's planes) shocks next to no one in Europe. The approach may work and even have the look of things to come.