A New Cold War?(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Alliances: "Old Europe" now wants its own defense force to help pry itself away from America's influence. European citizens should be very worried.

Give France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder at least some credit. They seem nearly indefatigable in their efforts to oppose U.S. influence in Europe -- even if it means risking the European Union's security.

France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, meeting Tuesday in Brussels, unveiled their plan for a new defense force with its own military headquarters -- separate and apart from NATO.

It sounds innocuous. But it isn't. It's a bad idea whose time should never come. It will create insecurity and unease among the new nations of Europe -- nations that have only recently removed the yoke of communism from their neck.

The past 150 years have given us plenty of lessons from Europe about what happens when countries in that region militarize. Europe has been regularly convulsed by wars, including three in the last century that the U.S. had to step in and stop, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives.

So why shouldn't Europe provide for its own defense? Well, it should -- and already does. It's called NATO. The Atlantic Alliance has worked extraordinarily well, bringing peace to a ...