East Is Best: America's friends in Europe, and what they understand.

'What's the easiest way of gaining security and prosperity for our country?" ran the Communist-era joke in Poland. Answer: "Declare war on the United States, and hope that they invade and occupy." Let us hope there is an Arabic version of this joke and that it's being whispered in the coffee houses of Baghdad right now. It certainly helps to explain why the Central and East Europeans have generally expressed solidarity with America in its confrontation with Saddam Hussein.

That solidarity is especially remarkable for being shared not only by veteran anti-Communists but also by their former tormentors. In Poland, for example, the government is headed by Leszek Miller, once a member of the Politburo, now better known as one of eight signatories to the "New Europe" letter published in the Wall Street Journal in support of George W. Bush. Solidarity with America extends well beyond the ruling circles, too. To take just one case: A friend of mine was in Tehran recently, trying to explain to a multinational audience America's reasons for invading Iraq. Amid the barrage of criticism that ensued, only the Ukrainian, Slovak, and Polish participants came to the Americans' rescue. It is also no accident that the first German politician to break publicly with the policy of the Schroeder government was Angela Merkel, leader of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and an "ossie" -- that is, someone who spent most of her adult life in East Germany.

To some extent, this is counterintuitive. One would expect the people who spent 45 years being fed anti-American propaganda to be more receptive to fresh charges of American imperialism than those who have enjoyed decades of liberty and prosperity under American protection. Indeed, in Russia, according to a recent television poll, 90 percent of the population opposes the war. So why do the Central and East Europeans nevertheless support America, and why has their own skepticism about the war not fed into anti-Americanism? There are a number of reasons.

To begin with, America is drawing on a store of goodwill accumulated over the years thanks to its moral stance against the Soviet Union. You might say America is reaping the dividends of Radio Free Europe, Fulbright scholarships, and Ronald Reagan. Eastern Europeans are more susceptible to the missionary language of George W. Bush today because they themselves were once the beneficiaries of a pro-democracy crusade. Nothing jars on East European ears more than talk of the need to preserve "stability" in the Middle East, because they remember what "stability" meant in their own countries not so long ago -- the stability of a concentration camp.

Second, East Europeans are particularly sensitive to imperious treatment of the kind formerly meted out to them by the Soviets. Jacques Brezhnev -- as the Slav street is now calling the French president -- put his foot in it badly when he suggested that EU candidate countries should have kept quiet on Franco-German opposition to the United States. In Poland, he reinforced an impression of French phoniness going back at least to September 1939, when France failed to act against Hitler in the West even as Poland fought in the East. The effete bureaucracy of the European Union contrasts unfavorably with the American-inspired camaraderie of NATO.

Third, while West Europeans may complain of America's "unilateralism," they themselves practice it towards their poorer cousins in the East. The Wall Street Journal letter came in reaction to a Versailles declaration of opposition to the U.S. that France and Germany had issued without consulting anybody else. I don't know whether there is an English word to describe two countries' attempt to impose their will on their neighbors, but I know we need one. For every one time a U.S. president has said, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists," East European foreign ministers have heard ten times, "These are the conditions of your EU membership: Take it or leave it."

Fourth, we have long memories in my part of the world, and we remember that the Maastricht Treaty was adopted in 1991 -- in the very week the Soviet Union collapsed -- specifically to draw the West European club more tightly together. Yet that treaty contains not one mention of the most momentous geostrategic event of the century. We had, and still have, the impression that our liberation from the bloodiest tyranny in history was viewed essentially as an inconvenience by our richer neighbors. In our heart of hearts, many of us suspect that the West Europeans regard themselves as superior beings just because they had the good luck to spend the Cold War on the side that was liberated by tanks bearing a white, rather than a red, star.

And the West European reaction to our solidarity with America has reinforced that impression. In the progressive salons of Berlin and Paris, we are now being called "the vassals." Vassals of the United States, that is -- even though the new democracies expressed their friendship for the United States without being coerced and, in fact, at some political risk to themselves. We are very touched to see such concern for our independence, especially coming from people who never used such crude words as "Soviet satellites" or "captive nations" back when our all-too-real subjugation was being enforced by the Red Army. (Conversely, the legacy of Yalta also means that the East European public will turn against the U.S. if the Kurds or the Chechens are sacrificed on the altar of Realpolitik.)

The East Europeans could pay dearly for their solidarity with Uncle Sam. Twice, in 1963 and 1967, France has vetoed the accession into the European community of a country (Britain) that she suspected of transatlantic sympathies. And, let's face it, the 30 years since Britain finally did join -- and, now, the case of Iraq -- have shown that it was, from the French point of view, a justified fear.

Enlargement of the EU will strengthen the voice of countries that do not share anti-American obsessions, and France's voting power will be correspondingly diluted. I would not put it past the French elite to engineer a mechanism to put off enlargement till kingdom come. If that happens, Europe's entire institutional architecture will blow to bits. In the coming months and years, it will be vital for America's credibility and future influence to show that it pays to be the solid ally of a U.S. in need. Relocating some military bases to Eastern Europe as a gesture of reassurance is the least that should be done.

There may yet be a silver lining, however. If the war in Iraq is quick and successful, some tempers will cool and a time will come for reassessment.

American diplomacy over the war may have been clumsy, but it has at least shown one thing: that it is impossible to unite Europe on the basis of the lowest-common-denominator ideology of anti-Americanism. The U.S. has proved that it has enough friends in Europe to keep the continent from uniting against it. If the crisis over Iraq can finally bury the fantasy of splitting the West by building a rival European superpower, even the recent tantrums of France and Germany may well have been worth it.