EUROPEANS ARE beginning to experience the same sensations of impotence that Muslims long have. Whatever they think or say, it is tossed in the wastepaper basket by their American friends.

In the last week or so it has become evident that the Bush administration is hell-bent on implementing a new law, part of the recent anti-terrorist legislation, that sets out in no uncertain terms to undermine the new International Criminal Court, the pride and joy of a lot of countries but of the Europeans in particular, who see it as an effective tool for deterring would-be war criminals.

The U.S. State Department has made it clear to all foreign countries that their military aid will be cut off unless — like Romania and Israel last week — they sign a pledge to protect Americans serving in their countries from the court's reach. Norway has told the Americans "no" and doubtless other Europeans if asked will say the same thing. But "nos" won't be enough perhaps.

The law says, as the New York Times reminded us, that authority is given to the president to free Americans in the court's custody by "any necessary and appropriate means." One presumes that means war.

Now the Europeans are beginning to understand what President George Bush meant when he said last autumn, "who is not with us is against us."

At the rate things are going, who knows whether there may be some briefing from some Pentagon "think paper" that will warn that Europeans are no longer to be regarded as allies. Saudi Arabia is still recovering from last week's shock of being labelled by a Pentagon working party as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" of the U.S. in the Middle East. Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that he did not dissent from this piece of inside advice.

At best, many Europeans consider what has happened in America the last couple of years as bizarre. First, acting as if it were some insecure newborn democracy, it chooses as a president the son of the second last president but one who has few qualifications other than his family name. The election itself was run in such a roughshod way that the ballot was suspect.

Then the new president appoints a lot of senior officials — vice president, defence secretary, national security adviser and many other high-level appointees, who have never known war, or shed blood, much less seen corpses rotting on the battlefield or villages destroyed with the remains of children's bodies splayed in a hundred directions. Many of them, like the president himself, consciously avoided the draft at the time of Vietnam.