Postwar, old allies jostle for position

In a recent cartoon in Mexico City's Reforma newspaper, a solicitous Mexican official is shown extending a hand to an aloof American bureaucrat and asking sheepishly, "Friends?"

In the wake of an Iraq war that the Fox government firmly opposed, Mexico is in essence asking its big neighbor to the North if bygones can now be bygones so the two countries can get back to pending business.

It's a question that a string of America's friends and allies who blocked its plan for a broad UN-based coalition in support of the war are asking - with varying responses from a victorious US in no mood for a general show of magnanimity.

With the US showing particular disdain for France, a willingness to work out differences with Russia, but zero tolerance for any challenges to its dominant role in the Mideast, the post-Iraq-war period is shaping up as the most significant geopolitical reordering since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"This will prove to be a historical turning point, with particular repercussions for transatlantic relations that will look quite different than in the past," says Charles Kupchan, a diplomacy expert at Georgetown University in Washington. "The fact the US is talking about retribution against those who didn't go its way suggests this will not just be a blip."

Just how the US plans to approach the new world order it sees - and how the antiwar countries expect to respond to what they worry will be an emboldened and even more independent America - should begin to emerge this week as the US introduces a resolution to lift UN sanctions on Iraq to the Security Council.

"Countries like France see little opening for influencing American policy in this postwar period, and even little benefit from trying," says Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States in Paris. "So that leaves them to work with the Americans when they can but pursuing their own interests despite the consequences."

The ensuing UN debate, which could extend through much of May, is also likely to recast top US ally Britain in the role of go-between. It's a casting Prime Minister Tony Blair hardly relishes, in part because Britain may reap diminishing returns if the US feels it needs its antiwar friends less.

"Throughout this process, Blair did have some influence on the US position," says Wyn Grant, a public-policy professor at Warwick University in Britain. "The question is whether he can still exert influence in Washington: that is less likely now that the Iraq war is over."

The initial testing of friends will come in the Security Council because the US does need the web of sanctions lifted for Iraq's political and financial rebuilding to proceed. But US officials are making clear they're not going to bend far to accommodate the concerns of those who sat out the war - especially France, which Washington sees as the ringleader behind the pre-war rebellion.

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