In a speech this week, a senior western politician controversially compared the effects of George Bush's foreign policy to the conditions which created the rise of Adolf Hitler. But the politician in question was not the unfortunate former German justice minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin, who was sacked by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on Monday for saying much the same thing at the height of the German election. The man who drew the comparison this time was none other than former US vice-president Al Gore.

In his remarkable speech in San Francisco on Monday night - remarkable not least because Gore spoke there with a freedom and frankness that he disastrously abandoned during his presidential election campaign two years ago - Gore ripped into Bush's ideological opposition to "nation-building" as a catastrophically dangerous policy. "The absence of enlightened nation-building after world war one led directly to the conditions which made Germany vulnerable to fascism and the rise of Adolf Hitler, and made all of Europe vulnerable to his evil designs," Gore argued.

It remains to be seen whether the US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, takes time out this week to accuse Gore of "poisoning" the domestic American political atmosphere with his remarks. But, given the contempt in which Rumsfeld and his hawkish conservative colleagues in the Bush administration hold most Democrats, it is a fair bet that someone somewhere on the right will do so soon. After all, this was the term that Rumsfeld used to describe the effect of Däubler-Gmelin's comments on US-German relations. And in the Rumsfeldian worldview, those who are not with them are against them.

The sudden depths to which relations between the Bush administration and Europe's most important nation have plunged this week are a remarkable testament to the way that the rightwing Republican government in Washington now does things. As well as his "poisoning" remark, Rumsfeld went out of his way to deny his German opposite number, Peter Struck, a one-on-one meeting in Washington this week. Meanwhile, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, dismissed Schröder's letter to Bush on the Däubler-Gmelin row as "an explanation rather than an apology" and the re-elected chancellor was said by an anonymous Bush aide to have "a lot of work to do" to repair ties between them.

At one level, these spats are obviously silly and trivial. Experience says they are likely to blow over before long. But this is not a traditional American administration. It believes, according to the new White House national security strategy document it published at the weekend, that this is a world where there is just "a single sustainable model for national success". And that model is certainly not the German one.

No US administration for the past half-century would have adopted such an insouciant approach towards Germany as the Bush administration is now doing. To Americans with a sense of cold war history, the alliance with Europe's greatest power, to say nothing of the nation in which thousands of US service personnel, planes and bombs were based, was far too important to be put at hazard by the petulant behavior coming out of Washington this week.

Certainly Schröder is keen for fences to be quickly mended, which is one reason why he came to talk tactics with Tony Blair over dinner at Downing Street last night. But can one be quite so sure these days that the wounds will heal quickly? Maybe this is to underestimate the capacity of Washington's ideologically driven triumphalist Republican rulers to take offence from those - like Europeans and US Democrats - whom they regard as the failures of history.

What is striking about the former German justice minister's famous remarks is not how ill-judged they were, but how restrained. Politically, of course, it is not very clever to make friends and influence people by comparing them with Hitler. But the point that Däubler-Gmelin actually made was not such an unreasonable one. Bush, she argued, "wants to divert attention from his domestic problems. It's a classic tactic. It's one that Hitler used." And Bismarck too, she might have added.

That Bush has been in trouble on the home front this year is not seriously open to doubt. If November's mid-term elections were fought on issues such as the economy or corporate governance, the Republicans would be on the defensive. The war against terrorism and Iraq, by contrast, is their issue. Every Washington commentator has been pointing out this week that the Republicans are trying to keep Congress focused on Iraq for as long as possible at the moment, in order to ensure a good result in November.

That hardly makes Bush a Hitler. But then Herta Däubler-Gmelin did not say he was. Her crime, of course, was to bracket the two men in a single multi-clause thought. In terms of scoring a direct hit on the conservative Republican ego, it was almost the equivalent of the shock of September 11 itself. It penetrated the carapace of Republican self-regard with the directness that the hijacked planes hit the twin towers.

For these are politicians in the grip of a vision of themselves as neo-Churchills, not neo-Hitlers. Churchill's stock has always been exceptionally high in the US, of course, but it has risen still further as post September 11 Americans don the mantle of the world's embattled lone defenders of freedom. Bush now keeps an Epstein bust of Churchill in his office (shamelessly loaned to him from the British government's official art collection by Tony Blair). And only last month, Rumsfeld himself made a speech in California comparing Bush - "that lone voice expressing concern about what was happening" - to Churchill.

Then there is the current obsession among American conservatives that Europe is in the grip of a wave of violent anti-semitism. Europeans underestimate at their peril the degree to which many Americans, not just many American Jews, see Europe as the place where the locals kill Jews, and America as the place where the locals don't. So when a German politician, even a distinguished social democrat of the postwar generation, mentions Hitler, the effect on some US opinion is almost as provocative as if she had praised him.

In the obsessive world of American conservatism, Germany is, for the moment, a marked nation. If Rumsfeld, who is historically one of Washington's pro-German rather than its Anglophile politicians, takes the abrupt view that he does, then what about the rest? One can be sure that others in his party - a party in which not to possess a passport is sometimes a badge of honor - will have even more contemptuous views. Germany may be the world's third-strongest economic power, but in the eyes of some in Washington it could be on the verge of consignment into the ever-growing dustbin of US-defined failed states.

There is, though, a great paradox in all this. The US administration that prides itself on avoiding the entrapment of nation-building has managed, inadvertently and against its real intentions, to shape the future of one of its most important allies. The US has intervened in European elections plenty of times in the past to help rightwing parties. But this must be the first time in many decades that Washington's efforts have managed to dash the prize from the right's hands and place it in those of a social democrat.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

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