“One of the most significant ingredients of contemporary political attitudes in Western Europe is a pervasive and often virulent anti-Americanism [so much so that] it no longer seems perverse to suggest that that the threat to world peace comes from…the United States of America and its trigger-happy President.” -“Storm Over the Alliance,” Alun Chalfont, Encounter, January, 1983

The Kerry campaign is subjecting American voters to an intensive course of attempted treatment for a nonexistent memory disorder. Democrats have seeded the political discourse with what amounts to False Memory Syndrome. Not recovered memory syndrome, mind you, which assumes that the memory summoned to consciousness is real, but FMS.

What else are we to make of the repeated references to the “allies” allegedly lost by President Bush’s cowboy unilateralism, his supposed disrespect for international institutions and multilateral arrangements? Senator Kerry weekly summons us back to a time that actually never existed. Things were never as good as he pretends, and are not as bad as he now asserts. France and Germany are deployed in Afghanistan. French diplomats tell me they are now ready to help train Iraqi security forces.

Sure enough, the NATO countries and France were closer to America during the era in which the next world war was expected to break out with thousands of Soviet tanks rolling across from the plains of central Germany, from east to west. Under those conditions, democratic Germany was our best friend, although the socialist chancellor, Willy Brandt, launched an ostpolitik strategy at odds with the prevailing view in Washington. While in France, another socialist, President Mitterrand, supported positioning medium-range missiles to counter the Soviets, West Germans took to the streets to protest the deployment of the Pershings in their country.

The Western Alliance showed many signs of strain throughout the Cold War. America was officially unsympathetic as France and England went through forced decolonization. In 1954, the French begged us to use atomic weapons to relieve the communist Vietnamese siege at Dienbienphu. President Eisenhower refused, notwithstanding America’s desire to block the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, because America couldn’t back what amounted to a continuation of French colonial rule in Indochina. The French were routed and abandoned Vietnam to its fate.

This pattern repeated itself two years later when Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles pressured the English and French to quit Suez after their joint attack, with Israel, on the Canal, because, again, America couldn’t support what looked, smelled, and walked and talked like colonialism. While Washington pressured Paris and London, the Soviets used atomic blackmail to force the government of David Ben Gurion to stand down.

England and France returned the favor by refusing, for the most part, to aid America during its own expedition against the communists in Indochina, choosing to see it as the same colonialism against which America had preached at them and of which they now proclaimed themselves cured.

The fact is that the “Western Alliance” about which candidate Kerry waxes nostalgic never existed in the form he conjures. His harping on the theme now has the aspect of a false recovered memory syndrome, where a patient is led by a therapist to believe that he/she experienced childhood trauma that never actually happened.

Something similar can be said of Mr. Kerry’s finger pointing in respect of the United Nations. The debate has now been transformed so that we are discussing whether America must seek permission from a foreign power before acting to protect itself. But by harping on the proper role of the U.N., Mr. Kerry has asked for what is probably a distortion of his own position. Getting U.N. sanction, as in the first Gulf War, was a plus but not a sine qua non. Most American actions have not been blessed by the U.N., which for most of its existence featured a Security Council divided into democratic and communist camps.

Whatever Mr. Kerry’s intentions, his emphasis on the U.N. has not been lost on other nations. An August 5 commentary in Beirut’s Daily Star reckons that “Arab countries and civil society activists need to work now to prepare for what might be an eventual end to American unilateralism. There is no way to predict whether Mr. Kerry will win the election. But by becoming engaged with the European Union and forging common positions on the peace process, the Arab world will be better positioned in either case, come November.”

But why look abroad? Senator Edwards’s speech accepting the Democratic nomination to run for vice president underscored how unintentionally dangerous this manipulation of memory can be. In contrast to Mr. Kerry, who omitted any reference to the Jewish state from his convention speech, Mr. Edwards said a Kerry administration would be committed to “a safe and secure Israel.” Great, but the whole context was unnerving:

“A new president will bring the world to our side, and with it a stable Iraq and a real chance for peace and freedom in the Middle East, including a safe and secure Israel.”

His point seemed to be that the obstacle to “peace and freedom in the Middle East” is Mr. Bush’s unilateralism. But the allies are already on “our side” when it comes to Israel-Palestine peace making. The E.U. is an original signatory to the “Road Map” for Middle East Peace. The obstacle is not the absences of allies but the pathology of the Palestinians who cannot rouse themselves for peace by fulfilling the Road Map’s opening requirement that terrorism be abandoned. Of course, many repress this thought as too painful to endure, and would just as soon recover a false memory, that progress begins with pressure on Israel.

Mr.Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.