Michael Ledeen has a theory regarding France and Germany’s resistance to U.S. efforts in the war against terror: the Europeans are in an explicit alliance with radical Islamic terrorism. According to Ledeen, the old European powers are challenging the dominance of the United States by fighting on the diplomatic front of a coordinated two-front war – on the other front is real combat, featuring the necessarily asymmetrical tactics that a weaker power will use against a stronger foe, i.e., terrorism.

It seems to me that one would want to know a lot about clandestine operations against terrorist networks, and especially what kind of contribution the European intelligence services have made to that effort, before making that kind of accusation. If Ledeen has that kind of information, he does nothing to indicate it here.

The simpler explanation is that the French and Germans are trying to exploit the rift between the U.S. and the Islamic world to increase their own influence in the Middle East. Franco-German opportunism, to the extent that it blocks regime change in Iraq or hinders other U.S. actions in the war against terror, may have effects that are beneficial to terrorists, but that doesn’t make them allies of the terrorists. The world is not so easily divided into those who are either "with us, or with the terrorists." This may be a regretful situation, but one that needs to be understood if the U.S. is going to prosecute the war against terror successfully.