A participant on the sidelines of talks in Berlin between Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and Richard Holbrooke, a would-be secretary of state in a John Kerry presidency, told a story about the meeting and the theme of how a Kerry-friendly Europe would leap to America's aid in bringing stability to Iraq. (Or maybe hide under the bed.)

"Schroder," the American said, "asked Holbrooke what Kerry would do if he were elected. Holbrooke replied one of the first things would be to get on the phone and invite him and President Jacques Chirac to the White House. The chancellor laughed out loud. Then he said, 'That's what I was afraid of.'"

The participant recalled the moment as very jolly. Everybody in the chancellor's office, including Holbrooke, a former ambassador to Germany, joined in the chuckles.

That was in June, when the subject was still handled elliptically. Early in September, a German official, asked privately by a visitor if Kerry's claim of good relations with Europe could get him a German military presence in Iraq, stifled a guffaw; an explicit response, but wordless, and difficult to transcribe.

But last week, just after Kerry's major speech on the war in which he insisted that the United States "must make Iraq the world's responsibility" and that others "should share the burden," Schroder's sense of courtesy collided with reality and he drove a spike into the notion. He told reporters, "We won't send any German soldiers to Iraq, and that's where it's going to remain."

For many Europeans, the problem in making sense of Kerry's speech was not Schroder's rather predictable reply, but how much delusion or candor there was in the Democrat's campaign promise to enlist countries opposed to the war to bail out the United States militarily. Add to that the candidate's linked idea of leveraging a notional European military presence into a pullout by some American troops as early as next summer. It seemed enough to make Kerry's continental friends cringe.