BERLIN: The European anti-war troika that formed before the US-led campaign against Iraq has been exposed as an ad-hoc alliance, but did eke out small successes in this week’s meetings with US President George W. Bush.

Has “the troika opposing the Iraq war definitively fallen to pieces,” as the liberal Russian daily Gazeta said in an editorial on Friday of the coalition led by Berlin, Paris and Moscow?

European analysts take a more moderate line, but note that Germany, France and Russia do have diverging interests when it comes to their future role in Iraq.

Pavel Podlesnii of the Institute for US and Canadian Studies in Moscow said the “US president is naturally aiming to weaken the troika because the United States wants to isolate France, scold Germany a bit and persuade Russia.”

However, according to Martin Koopmann of the German Council on Foreign Relations, the so-called alliance was never really one to begin with.

“There is no Franco-German-Russian alliance — it was an ad-hoc coalition. There were the Russians who, like France, “are anxious to play a role on the international stage and want to stay in the game,” he said.

Meanwhile Germany has taken on the role of the intermediary “between Gaullist France and the unilateralist United States,” Koopmann said.

“Germany wants to offer a diplomatic bridge to the United States but does not want to distance itself from France” even if Berlin refuses to make the same demand as Paris to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqi people within “months,” he said.

This week’s talks in New York between European leaders and Bush reflected the fact that “their interests are overlapping,” which also explained the likelihood of a compromise on a new UN resolution on Iraq, Koopman said.

Anne-Marie Gloannec of the Marc Bloch Institute in Berlin noted, however, that the Franco-German alliance appeared strong despite slight differences in standpoint, notably that Berlin is particularly reluctant to directly confront Washington.

Russia, for its part, chooses its alliances depending on circumstances, Gloannec said.

She noted that despite the fanfare surrounding the icebreaking meetings with Bush, “the president did not walk away with much in the way of cash or troops” for Iraq.

Pascal Boniface, director of the Institute for International and Strategic Relations in Paris, agreed that on the key issues of “men and money, none of these three countries accepted” Bush’s requests.

But was this just a temporary marriage of convenience for the troika?

“It was more of a club destined to last as long as the Iraq issue is presented in this way by the United States,” Boniface said.

Thierry de Montbrial, director of the French Institute for International Relations, said he never believed the alliance between the three would last.

“These countries have extreme reservations about the way the United States has conducted the Iraq issue but neither Russia nor Germany share France’s aim of being the spokesman for all the objections to American unilateralism,” he said.

He noted that the German conservative opposition was very pro-American and that “Germans are not ready to take on a long-running confrontation” with Washington.

“And Putin does not want to be on the outs with the United States. Russia is fighting for its survival and cannot allow itself to have a hostile relationship with the most powerful country in the world” he said.

“It simply uses Europe as a counterweight.”—AFP