BERLIN German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has been getting help from the heavens lately. On the last Saturday of the tightest election campaign in the history of democratic Germany, Schroeder chose the Baltic port of Rostock as the backdrop for his closing speech. The idea was to advertise his empathy for the former East German lands by showing off Rostock’s expensively restored town square. And indeed, the place is as pretty as any coastal city in Holland. But pounding rainstorms were predicted for the whole day, driving indoors all but a few hundred hardcore party members and several beer-can-clutching malcontents, in their color-coordinated East European soccer-drunk sweat suits, who had come to howl about how little they liked being unemployed. It was a reminder that the jobless rate in this bleak region of warehouses and crabgrass is still near 20 percent, and that Rostock, like all other small cities in the east, continues to hemorrhage population. But seven minutes before Schroeder was due to climb onstage, the rain stopped and the clouds parted. By the time he appeared, the barriers were mobbed by clapping people and sunlight was streaming into the main square. Schroeder’s first term was like that. When he entered office in 1998, he was hailed as Germany’s answer to Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Schroeder was the man who would put an end to both his party’s socialist cant and his country’s scourge of chronic, double-digit unemployment. The jobless tally stood at 4 million then, and Schroeder told crowds that if he couldn’t get it under 3.5 million he wouldn’t deserve to be reelected. Voters took him at his word. Every poll taken since 1993 has ranked unemployment as the country’s number-one problem–and it has proved too much for Schroeder to handle, soaring this year to a record high of 4.3 million (in a shrinking workforce). Germany still has the highest nominal taxes in Europe, and it has been pummeled by the dot-com collapse–despite not having benefited from the dot-com boom. Tax revenues are through the floor. Financing for the government’s trillion-dollar investment in prettying up places like Rostock now looks precarious, and the improvements like Potemkin ones. Formerly a model of fiscal discipline, Germany may soon get a “blue letter” from the European Union, warning it that its budget deficits have overshot the 3 percent upper limit (agreed to by E.U. member countries at Germany’s–a bygone Germany’s–insistence). Schroeder avoided this sanction by withholding crucial federal budget statistics until after the elections. His own government predicts a growth rate under 1 percent this year, and non-government prognosticators call that estimate too rosy. The country’s health system is overgenerous and overburdened. Its retirement system, which kicks in at an unofficial age of 57 or 58, is reaching the point of actuarial absurdity. Watching Gerhard Schroeder strut behind a rostrum or joke in a television studio, one is pulled up short to remember that the “brash young chancellor” is 59–an age when the solid majority of his countrymen are collecting pensions. All year long, Schroeder had been running behind his challenger, Bavarian governor Edmund Stoiber of the Christian Social Union (CSU), local sister party to the national Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Stoiber had combined his region’s Catholic conservatism with tax breaks for business in a kind of right-wing socialism that came to be called the “laptops-and-lederhosen” model. It seemed to work. Immigration was limited in Bavaria, but anti-immigrant violence was lower than elsewhere in Germany. Businesses were moving in, but the state environmental laws were among the country’s toughest. Most important, the unemployment rate in Bavaria–5 percent–was at or below American levels. Stoiber promised to cut taxes nationwide and to do for Germany what he had done for his home state. The writing was on the wall for Schroeder. Stoiber is a Catholic with a big family, a tranquil home life, and a mind like a steel trap; Schroeder is a hard-drinking, cigar-sucking playboy who brags about never reading books, and has had four wives, most recently the kittenish tabloid reporter Doris Koepf. (Hence the CDU’s popular bumper sticker: “Three ex-wives can’t be wrong.”) Germans were almost unanimous in saying that Schroeder was the guy they’d rather drink a beer with. The election was turning into a battle between “competence” and “personality”–a battle, strangely enough, that both sides welcomed. But competence had the upper hand. In spring elections in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt, Schroeder’s party had lost half its votes, and this was the national trend. By mid-July, half of Schroeder’s 1998 voters said they would hesitate to vote for him again. Then came the flood. The Elbe river runs through the most expensively restored landmarks and infrastructure in the former East Germany. When it overran its banks after days of heavy rain in midsummer, it destroyed tens of billions of euros worth of new buildings, along with vast tracts of farmland. It was then that Schroeder showed he is the German Bill Clinton–at least in his mastery of leadership theatrics. Like Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, he addressed the nation. He flew to Saxony and spent days with the flooded-out inhabitants. Then he rushed back to Berlin to put on hold a business tax cut (which he had never much liked anyway) in order to fund a 150-billion euro East German rebuilding program through the year 2019. Stoiber flew to Saxony, too. But after a couple of hours’ talking with local politicians, he went back on vacation. Schroeder was suddenly “relevant” again. His environmentalist coalition partners in the Green party were also set to capitalize, since three-quarters of Germans believed the floods were due to global climate change. Something was changing in the German population, as well: 200 million euros in individual donations poured in to help the flood victims. “It showed solidarity,” said Schroeder’s campaign manager Matthias Machnig. “We had been reunified for a while, but only officially. It was somehow not in the heart.” And with the eyes of his newly patriotic countrymen upon him, Schroeder embarked on the gamble that would win him the election. He launched an all-out political attack on the United States, calling into question an alliance that has defined Germany to the world for the last 54 years. He tried to exploit an anti-Americanism he assumed was latent in German public opinion. Where it was not latent, he sought to create it. SCHROEDER HAS NEVER been comfortable with the terms of the postwar alliance that bound Germany’s fate to the other Western powers. His father, whose picture sits on his desk in the chancellery, was killed fighting with the Wehrmacht in Romania when Schroeder was three days old. So Schroeder’s mother made ends meet by laboring as a menial in British military installations. The working-out of Germany’s guilt in World War II is something that has never interested him–he believes, with reason, that he has already paid dearly for World War II himself. As a young member of parliament in the early 1980s, he preferred relations with Moscow to relations with Washington. He opposed the Kohl-approved Holocaust memorial that is now being built in the center of Berlin. At a time when the average German busboy can get the gist of “Seinfeld” on television, he speaks no English at all. Schroeder’s attack on America was pieced together out of several talking points. The first was a complaint that President Bush had not dealt with Germany in Augenhoehe–on an equal basis. With justice, he complained that getting a call from Washington two hours before to say “We’re going in” does not constitute “consultation.” He said that “the existential questions of German foreign policy will be decided in Berlin–and only in Berlin.” Most incendiary was his invocation of a Bismarckian deutscher Weg, a “German way”–presumably a better way–in foreign policy. And as the elections drew near, he and his campaign blamed the speech of Vice President Cheney on August 28, which justified preemptive action against Saddam Hussein, for having provoked him to respond. Taken as a whole, Schroeder’s position was held together by no logic. If America was now such a menace to world peace, why had Schroeder pledged his “unconditional solidarity” to the United States in the days after September 11? Why, in fact, had Schroeder risked a no-confidence vote in order to send German troops to Afghanistan? If an okay from the United Nations was of the essence, then why had Schroeder chosen NATO’s Kosovo operation, which had no U.N. sanction, as the occasion of Germany’s first participation in a military attack since World War II? If unilateralism was such a problem, why was he insisting that all Germany’s decisions be made in Berlin? How could he blame Cheney’s August 28 speech for sparking German reluctance when Schroeder had given his own “deutscher Weg” speech on August 5? And who had asked Germany to participate in an Iraq operation anyway? It took a while for even Schroeder’s allies to see what he was doing. Hans-Ulrich Klose, a fellow socialist who chairs the Bundestag’s foreign policy committee, warned that Saddam was a genuine menace. At the same time Schroeder and his ministers were calling for “unambiguous” information about Iraq’s chemical weapons program, Bild (the tabloid that had employed Schroeder’s wife) ran an article crediting Germany’s intelligence services as the source of information that Baghdad had developed new, long-range missile capability. Saddam, Klose warned, would never leave without a “threat scenario” of the sort the Americans were developing. Angelika Beer, a defense adviser to the Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer, said, “Pretty much the only thing we can offer [in an Iraq war] is AWACS surveillance, and Schroeder hasn’t mentioned that.” Foreign policy experts were trying to fit Schroeder’s move into a general German foreign policy strategy and couldn’t. It underestimates the boldness of Schroeder to say merely that Germany is a country of pacifists who can be moved by any Machiavellian. Granted, the pacifism is there: In a December 1990 poll, just after reunification, two-thirds of Germans said their big, new country should have a foreign policy like Switzerland’s. And Stoiber feared this pacifism enough to follow meekly behind Schroeder, even saying in his desperate last days that he would “definitely not” allow the United States to use bases in Germany for any unilateral attack. (Social Democratic Party [SPD] experts quickly noted that, since these were NATO bases, Germany did not have that right.) But in Kosovo, Schroeder and Fischer had shattered Germans’ reservations about armed intervention. (This, indeed, will be the most important legacy of the Kosovo conflict.) Post-1999, Germans are actually conflicted about war in general, and about Iraq in particular. One poll had 50 percent saying “No” to any invasion, 45 percent saying “Yes” to a U.N. operation, and 4 percent saying “Yes” to any kind of operation. Another poll asked simply whether Germany should take part in a U.N. operation against Iraq–and the answer was “Yes” for 61 percent. Schroeder’s move, that is, was not guaranteed to work for mass consumption. It was meant to mobilize his base. He didn’t want to follow the example of French prime-ministerial loser Lionel Jospin, and get left behind by a hard-line wing of his party that is being radicalized by questions of globalization. And he didn’t. Not only did Schroeder suddenly rise rapidly in the polls; the anti-globalist international left hailed him as a conquering hero. Britain’s Guardian ran a North Korean-style tribute headlined “Ordinary Joe has voters eating from his hand,” and on election night, all the Arabic-language stations available on my hotel TV led with celebrations of Schroeder’s victory. Both Schroeder and his advisers began to get drunk with their new role. The SPD parliamentary leader Ludwig Stiegler compared George W. Bush to Julius Caesar and U.S. ambassador Dan Coats to Pyotr Abrassimow, the arrogant and ruthless Soviet ambassador to East Germany in the years before the Berlin Wall fell. And then, four days before the election, Schroeder’s justice minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin compared Bush to Adolf Hitler. Daeubler had been having quite a lot of fun with the Americans that week. The Saturday before, her American counterpart John Ashcroft had traveled to Denmark to ask for German assistance in the case of two al Qaeda operatives, the Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui (who had gone to Germany to meet with plot organizers) and the Yemenite Ramsi bin al-Shibh (who had lived in Germany as hijacker Mohamed Atta’s roommate). Daeubler read Ashcroft the riot act. She refused outright to share any evidence until she got assurances it would not be used in a case that could lead to Moussaoui’s execution. Daeubler’s Hitler incident was not a he-said/she-said matter that may involve only an appearance of impropriety. There is almost word-for-word consensus about what she said to the trade union activists who were present at the conclave where she said it. Daeubler said: “Bush wants to divert attention from his domestic political troubles. This is a favorite tactic. We know that from our own history since Adolf Nazi” [sic]. The most arresting thing in the quote is not its comparison of Hitler and Bush, which reflects only her own ideological extremism. It is Daeubler’s Opa war kein Nazi! attitude, which betrays either disingenuousness or ignorance of her own country’s history. Hitler, of course, had worked out his war aims by the time he wrote “Mein Kampf,” a decade before he came to power. And whatever his domestic failures, he had none that were perceived as such by his adoring subjects; as he dispatched the Wehrmacht across Europe, Hitler was the most beloved leader in German history. Daeubler complicated matters further by first denying she’d made the comparison at all, then calling the editors of the Schwaebische Tagblatt to tell them, “I didn’t compare the persons Hitler and Bush, only their methods.” Here she opened a window into the moral world of the German left. Most people would say that Hitler’s methods were the worst thing about him. Yet Daeubler believes that we should be more repelled by some kind of evil essence in Hitler than by anything he did. In Daeubler’s mind, some people are repositories of 100-percent goodness and others of 100-percent badness. There are people like her, and there are people like Adolf Hitler. It was, in retrospect, a dangerous thing to install such a person at the head of a democratic justice system. Daeubler had been one of the few high-ranking socialists to support Schroeder back in the early 1990s, when he was a small fry battling for preeminence against party heavyweights. She differed with him only on matters of high principle. With her close ties to Germany’s Protestant church, Daeubler opposed cloning and most gene research, while Schroeder has promoted a less regulated biotech industry that he hopes will turn Germany into the Silicon Valley of gene technology. But for all Daeubler’s loyalty, her rantings provided a trove of material for weeks’ worth of psychoanalysis of the German temperament, and Schroeder was not in the mood for that. Literally a minute after the polls closed on Sunday, he announced that she would “under no circumstances” serve in his next cabinet. Schroeder’s anti-Americanism was foredoomed to get out of control. Whatever pacifist impulses it may have drawn on, it was primarily an expression of German nationalism. Schroeder likes the position of being Europe’s hard guy against the United States: On his first visit to Washington after the election of President Bush, he delivered a harsh letter from the E.U. warning the president that America could not hold itself aloof from the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change. From the United States, Schroeder’s actions may appear to be a “European” thing: Jealous of American unity and decisiveness, which they cannot imitate, Europeans have sought to impose their own bickering disunity–their any-crank-has-a-veto system–on us. But that would be wrong. In fact, Schroeder is wallowing in the very worldview that Europe is being constructed to prevent. The campaign was nationalist from the start. Last winter and early spring, Schroeder sought to scapegoat foreign bureaucrats in Brussels for his economic problems. He discarded this strategy only because it didn’t work. What makes it clearest that Schroeder’s position involves nationalism rather than Europeanism is that it has panicked France, and sent French politicians of all parties into a rage. For years, the Franco-German relationship–and hence the European Union–was built on an informal agreement: absolute equality in European institutions and a right to consultation on anything the other partner did. In French eyes, Germany has broken this deal three times: First (and probably unavoidably), when Helmut Kohl proposed German unity without seeking President Mitterrand’s permission; second, when Schroeder cold-cocked President Jacques Chirac at the E.U.’s Nice summit in 2000, asking (by virtue of the unified Germany’s larger population) for surplus representation on European bodies; and third, the present ugliness. Schroeder’s use of Iraq to humble America had the side-effect of breaking up Europe’s common defense policy. Germany may not be conscious of what a sacrifice George Bush made in asking the United Nations to okay an Iraq threat, but France is. Chirac even views Bush’s U.N. speech as a giant diplomatic achievement for Europe, since he and Tony Blair had urged it. Viewed in this light, Schroeder’s freelancing divides Europe, leaving the continent weaker, not stronger, against American influence. A favorite Schroeder theme throughout his four years in office has been that Germany must once more become “a normal country.” His campaign slogan this time around was: Fuer ein modernes Deutschland. Ask yourself what other leader of an advanced Western country would speak of an aspiration to be modern, and it becomes clear that what “modern” means is free of hang-ups over World War II, in the same way that some people (not very admirable ones, to be sure) use “mature” as a synonym for “without guilt.” Germans are losing their awkwardness about mentioning the Nazi era. Just before he retired from the Bundestag in early September, former chancellor Helmut Kohl was overheard in the cafeteria describing the socialist Wolfgang Thierse as “the worst Bundestag president since Goering.” One big Berlin chain of shoe shops now has a sign outside its stores reading: Budapester Schuehe. Qualitaet mit Tradition seit 1939. But it is Schroeder who feels this need to move on more passionately than any other German politician, even if he tends to express it only in cryptic metaphors. One bizarre flight of oratory in his Rostock speech puzzled many who heard it. Speaking of the flood damage in eastern Germany, he suddenly grew solemn and hectoring, and insisted that the bill for it be paid right now. “A disaster that happens in this generation,” he said, “should be handled by this generation. We shouldn’t lay it on the shoulders of our children and grandchildren.” What made this bizarre, and almost certainly metaphorical, is that Schroeder is not known to believe in paying for anything right now. A good case can be made that constant looking backwards has deprived Germany of both optimism and dynamism. The locking of the country’s politics into atonement for World War II, necessary though it was for many decades, deserves some of the blame for the adolescent, consumerist, hedonistic, pornographic society that Germany has turned into. A good case can also be made for declaring an end to Germany’s legal liability for its sins. Useful though it might have been to Alfonse D’Amato’s reelection efforts, sending out some American lawyer born in 1974 to seek Holocaust-era damages so steep that they threaten the job of a German machine worker born in 1977 leaves Germans with the feeling that atonement is impossible in other countries’ eyes, and is therefore pointless. Banging contemporary Germans on the head with their grandparents’ crimes is unlikely to turn the country into a more moderate, more tolerant place. But Schroeder and his allies have been seeking to get over the past in ways that are disingenuous and obsessive. They’re not “normal” at all. His defense minister Peter Struck, for instance, launched a “Soldiers for Schroeder” organization over the summer–a straightforward violation of German laws prohibiting politicization of the country’s military. In dealing with the past, the Schroeder government is trying to claim the best of both worlds. For the purposes of moral preening, they’re neutrals, because pacifist; for the purposes of ducking out of the fight to defend the free world against a tyrant, they’re disabled, because formerly Nazi. It’s almost as if Schroeder and his allies are dredging the German past up so that they can beat other countries over the head with it. World War II and the Holocaust thus become a source of expertise, and even haughtiness: The United States doesn’t think it’s acting like a fascistic country, but that’s only because it doesn’t know any better. We do! We’re the fascist experts! GERMANY’S DEFECTION from the Western alliance was of little military importance. The country’s potential contribution to an attack on Iraq consists of AWACS planes, a handful of medical units, and exactly six tanks, now stationed in Kuwait, that can monitor biological and chemical weapons. The real point of this demarche was (to take a page from Ms. Daeubler-Gmelin) to distract Germans from domestic difficulties by refocusing attention abroad. Poor Edmund Stoiber vainly stressed this. “No matter who is chancellor,” he said, “this winter, there is not going to be a single soldier of the Bundeswehr in Iraq. But there are going to be 4.3 million unemployed in Germany. That’s the real danger that confronts us.” For political purposes, all of Germany’s problems disappeared beneath discussions of Iraq, but that didn’t make them go away. Forty thousand German businesses are expected to go bankrupt this year, far and away a record. A particularly big one, MobilCom, with 5,500 employees, threatened to go under two weeks before the election. A subsidiary of the French government-owned France Telecom, MobilCom (in a story that will be familiar to Americans) paid way too much for rights in Germany’s spectrum auction, and lost its shirt. Schroeder’s instinct was to spend 400 million euros of government money to bail the company out. This is what he had done as governor of Lower Saxony when, in 1998, the local Preussag steelworks threatened to lay off thousands of workers and move its plant abroad on the eve of Schroeder’s run for chancellor. Back then, Schroeder bullied the government-dependent Norddeutsche Landesbank into ponying up a billion dollars in aid, prompting accusations that he had bought the chancellor’s office with tax money. He did the same thing with the Philipp Holzmann building company three years ago, stalling a shutdown with a federal cash infusion. But this time the strategy flopped–all that money was lost when the company went bankrupt months later. Schroeder called MobilCom “a healthy enterprise at its core.” But it wasn’t, and the bailout disadvantaged dozens of other high-tech companies in Germany and elsewhere, in a way that Europe’s increasingly punctilious competition authorities would never approve. So Schroeder’s only hope was that France could be browbeaten into having its high-tech industry throw good money after bad. The Schroeder view was that French capitalists should fulfill their Schutzpflicht, their duty to protect workers. The French view was that Schroeder was asking French taxpayers to subsidize the German unemployment system. Given the Schroeder-Chirac rift over Iraq, this was not going to happen. Stoiber could not make hay out of any of these bailouts, since he himself had been involved in the most spectacular such flop of recent years: the bankruptcy of the Kirch media empire, whose pie-in-the-sky expansion plans fell apart after the company had received 1.9 billion euros in unsecured loans from the Bavarian state. But he did accuse Schroeder of wheeling and dealing with CEOs while small business (where 70 percent of German jobs are created) suffers. Most notorious, at the horribly mismanaged Deutsche Telekom, shares sank 90 percent while the board of directors’ salaries rose 90 percent and a Schroeder industrial protege, CEO Ron Sommer, received a gargantuan buyout. Stoiber tarred the chancellor as der GenoBe der Bosse (“the bosses’ pal”), and the name stuck. It was to a boss that Schroeder finally turned to get himself out of the unemployment pickle. His crony Peter Hartz, a director of Volkswagen, which is the largest business in Schroeder’s Lower Saxony, had been deputized last winter to lead a commission investigating a scandal in Germany’s national employment agency. The agency had systematically exaggerated the number of Germans it had been able to find jobs for. Into the bargain, Hartz came up with an ambitious employment plan that he and Schroeder leaked to the newsmagazine Der Spiegel in late June. Its high points were a government-run temp agency and incentives (read: subsidies) for small business to make new hires. The magazine presented it as the chancellor’s economic Wunderwaffe–no one knew quite how it would work, but it was supposed to cut unemployment in half by 2005. Schroeder was able to campaign on the plan, even as he undercut it. He insisted that the government-sponsored temps get the prevailing (exorbitant) union wage, which would, of course, make them just as unhirable as private sector temps are now. He attacked the idea of a Hire-und-Fire-Gesellschaft, which is the new German word for “labor market,” and to which the Hartz report makes a grudging accommodation. By the end of the campaign, there was nothing left of Hartz’s recommendations that Schroeder would claim for his own–except, of course, the promise to cut the jobless rate. In its place was a howling and envy-laced populism that sought to blame declining services on the people who still had jobs. On the sunlit stage in Rostock, Schroeder insisted that health care “shouldn’t be only for those who are born with a silver spoon in their mouths.” Education, meanwhile, “shouldn’t depend on how much money is in Mummy and Daddy’s wallet.” IT IS DIFFICULT to say how much of this populist envy has found its way into Schroeder’s policy towards the United States. In a clear-sighted editorial, Thomas Schmid of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that Schroeder surely knows the awful impulses he is stoking: “Schroeder has gained himself a dark alliance: ‘National conservatives’ (who have long been disappointed in the Christian Democrats) will approve, as will many citizens in eastern Germany, where the GDR regime’s anti-Western and anti-democratic propaganda have not been without lasting influence. The peace protesters of the 1980s, desperate to avoid coming to terms with the wreckage of their efforts, see themselves as vindicated, as do the new, young peace activists, who have only now discovered the emotions of peace rhetoric. It is a national coalition of those for whom the battles over German history have been definitively worked out.” The tortured examinations of conscience that marked West Germany in the decades after the war, those soul-searching reflections of “working through the past,” were genuine, and they grew a country of honor and decency out of a moral disaster. Unfortunately, West Germany is a country that no longer exists. The worries that, after reunification, the west would crush the new eastern states into some kind of conformism has turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. The states of the old West Germany turn out to be relatively frozen in their political allegiances; the East is wide open, and it is to the swing voters of the former Soviet bloc that successful politicians now address themselves. The Stalinist government of East Germany taught its citizens that they were the victims of fascism. To the extent that they were doomed to spend their lives under communism while their Western cousins lived it up, this turned out to be true, in a sense. Easterners feel the very opposite of historical guilt. They feel historical entitlement. Even as their incomes have doubled in relation to westerners’ since the fall of the wall, they feel they’ve been wronged, dissed, screwed. Never denazified, historically frozen by decades of Soviet occupation, the east is something of a museum of German character. It is the easterners who provided the target audience for Schroeder’s anti-American message. Political scientists used to say that the CDU and CSU had a “structural majority” in Germany. This meant that, barring any dramatic irregularities, conservatives won elections. Indeed, had the election been limited to the western states, Schroeder’s coalition would have been thrown out of office. But with reunification and the moving of the capital to Berlin, Germany has lurched back into Central Europe. It has also inherited some of the region’s problems. Its population is collapsing, and its welfare state may collapse along with it. Its economy shows no signs of entrepreneurship and innovation. Its young people seem motivated by consumerism alone, and are disinclined to form families. Germans tend to be optimistic about solving these problems; as Jochen Thiese, a journalist for Deutschland Radio, notes: “We Germans wait until the last second before moving.” And good if they do, but why does everyone assume that these problems will eventually be solved? It is possible that Germany is undergoing a deep cultural change, and also beginning a slow economic spiral down to a standard of living below that of its neighbors. One can also wonder about its role in the world. The anti-American messages with which Schroeder wooed his newly Central European country may subside, and there may be a period of calm ahead for the German-American alliance. But why assume that Schroeder’s distrust of America–and the West?–is a temporary rather than a heartfelt thing? Perhaps it is–but even if it is, something has changed. Should Germany’s economic problems prove insoluble, should relations sour with its European neighbors, the United States has now been established as Germany’s scapegoat of first resort. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
