It’s not as if our investment is yielding great returns. In Iraq, our coalition has neither increased the likelihood of victory nor reduced costs.

What’s more, the resources devoted to our coalition have done little to help the United States gain legitimacy. According to a recent Pew Global Attitudes survey, few people worldwide believe that the United States pays attention to the interests of others when making policy decisions. In the international community, the perception of America as unilateralist is pervasive. ~Patricia Weitsman, The New York Times

But why would most of the world take seriously claims to international cooperation founded on the bought-off governments of such world powers as Mongolia and Estonia?  One basic rule of power politics is that if you can readily buy off a country, it is probably not important enough to buy off and so not worth the trouble in the first place.  If the goal is to share the burden of a war, you typically don’t ally yourself with countries that have GDPs smaller than that of Nebraska.  There has been a lot of yapping about “New Europe” over the past four years, as if we had just found a new island chain in the South Pacific full of resplendently militant Europeans who desire to do our bidding (call it Nuropa for short).  The problem with the “New Europe” story was that it was agitprop cooked up by Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar (you remember him, the ex-prime minister of Spain?), stage managed by the warmongers at The Wall Street Journal and foisted on several of the poor countries of Nuropa by their typically ex-commie governments.  The countries that were signatories to the infamous Vilnius Letter were all NATO-wannabe allies (Albania, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovakia) or countries only recently admitted to NATO (Slovenia, the Baltics, Romania, Bulgaria).  This would include the Albanian government that sponsored the KLA, the heirs of the Ustasha, and the Slovak government that actively discriminates against its Hungarian citizens.  The rest of Nuropa consisted of the ’96 admittees to NATO, with the Czechs committed to Iraq by Vaclav Havel on his way out the door, the Poles led by “reformed” communist Kwasniewski and the Hungarians (over the objections of a vocal opposition) by former commie regime agent Peter Medgyessy, then Socialist Prime Minister. 

It was assuredly an odd group to join together for the freedom of mankind–or perhaps not so odd when you see the project as a mad revolutionary “war of liberation” like those waged on the countries of Nuropa by another, um, benevolent hegemon.  The entire Nuropean coalition would have seemed much more notable if the governments of the nations involved did not give the impression that they were, as a Russian-American friend of mine put it very aptly, ” bootlicking eastern Europeans.”  That Nuropa was joined in the fight by mighty El Salvador and the indomitable Philippines (which probably had as much real choice in the matter as the new NATO allies did) and every other small nation of no geopolitical importance did not help to dispel the impression that this was the war of the master who was calling on his lackeys and retainers to do his bidding.  One notable exception to this list of nice, charming countries with no power was Japan, which has, of course, determined to leave Iraq.