In a debate last month for the Democratic candidates in Wisconsin, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., was asked whether he felt any responsibility for the situation in Iraq after his vote authorizing President Bush to go to war. Kerry’s reply included a telling phrase: he said he and Congress had voted “to build a legitimate international coalition.” Kerry’s line prompted conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan to ask in The New Republic magazine, “Was the Clinton Kosovo war the product of an ‘illegitimate coalition’? Is Kerry now saying that only U.N.-sponsored coalitions are henceforth kosher? What signal does this send to those many countries who did join the coalition?”

Kerry’s remark at this forum was not the first time he has dismissed the contributions of the nations that joined the United States in toppling Saddam Hussein and reconstructing Iraq. In fact, Kerry—who is touted by his supporters as a man who would form lasting bonds with the rest of the globe—has demonstrated a consistent pattern of alienating and misunderstanding the role of our allies. In comments published in the Des Moines Register on March 9, 2003, Kerry declared, “The greatest position of strength is by exercising the best judgment in the pursuit of diplomacy, not in some trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and extorted, but in a genuine coalition.” Just in case there was doubt that Kerry had changed his mind since the end of the Iraq war, he repeated the charge in a December 2003 interview with Rolling Stone: “The president made a series of promises to us—number one, that he was gonna make every effort to possible to build a legitimate coalition. He did not—he built a fraudulent coalition.”

Kerry’s repeated statements on the issue of allies raise critical questions. What exactly constitutes a “legitimate coalition?” Kerry supported the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) campaign against Serbia under Milosevic in 1999, in which the U.S. acted without the support of the United Nations Security Council. So we hope it is safe to assume that the senator does not believe that a legitimate coalition always requires a U.N. mandate.

The next question is how a President Kerry intends to win more support for American foreign policy abroad by insulting those governments that have stood by us thus far. There are now 10,000 troops, representing several European allies, under Polish command in southern Iraq. The Poles, for their part, have not been able to obtain the same privileged visa-free status that French and German travelers now hold to enter the U.S. This remains State Department policy in spite of the fact that France and Germany, unlike Poland, are known to have terrorist cells operating on their soil. Polish companies have found lucrative reconstruction contracts scarce in the new Iraq.

The senator’s charge of a “coalition of the bribed” hardly fits the facts, then. But such charges are heard loud and clear by the opposition in Warsaw. Indeed, they ask reasonably, why should they stick their necks out for Uncle Sam when there is so little quid pro quo, and the opposition party in America accuses them of being stooges? All of this comes on the heels of strains in Poland’s relations with its new partners in the European Union and sneering comments in major German publications last year referring to Poland as “America’s Trojan donkey.”

Then there is the small matter of what could happen in the future if a President Kerry decided that military action had become unavoidable, and sought the support of the European Union. Kerry’s “coalition of the bribed” logic has sent a none-too-subtle message that Warsaw and Rome should have deferred to their betters in Paris and Berlin in 2002 and 2003 and that is hardly going to win back support from the two largest nations at the heart of the E.U. in the future; in fact, it is more likely to earn their contempt. If France and Germany were to refuse to join the U.S. again and the rest of the continent remembered his rhetoric during the campaign, Kerry’s administration could find itself without friends among Spain, Italy and Poland, Europe’s medium-sized powers.

Those nations would correctly perceive that Kerry sacrificed the principle of “presidents, prime ministers come and go” in favor of pandering to a small part of the American electorate, while being challenged by former Vermont Gov. Howard B. Dean. Within Germany, this principle was invoked by opponents of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 2002, after he built his campaign around opposition to the war. Now it is Schroeder’s government which may be on its way out, and the opposition Christian Democrats who urged a quiet, behind-the-scenes dissent towards Washington may yet reap the benefits. Kerry’s calculus thus makes little sense even from the standpoint of mending fences with Paris and Berlin. The Bush Administration has sent American troops to operate alongside their French counterparts to restore order in Haiti and hosted Schroeder to discuss the possibility of Germany leading the NATO peacekeeping effort in Afghanistan. France also has quietly, according to the U.S. Central Command’s website, contributed troops and airlifters to ongoing NATO operations in Central Asia.

Kerry’s defenders may cry foul, pointing to the alleged vilification of France by the Bush Administration in the run-up to war in Iraq as a justification for Kerry’s disrespectful attitude towards the nations that took part in the coalition. While this “eye for an eye” argument might satisfy partisans, it does nothing to address the question of whether the nation will in fact have a less ideological foreign policy, as Kerry argues is his goal. Politics of course has never stopped at the water’s edge, and vigorous and even fierce debate is historically the American way of foreign policy-making. But if there is to be hope for moving on to a new bipartisan foreign policy, the debate must not be poisoned by insults directed against both the governments that supported the Bush Administration in Iraq and those who did not.

Charles D. Ganske is a fellow at the American Freedom Center in Austin, Texas.