Washington ? The German election campaign did not change the government in Berlin, but it may yet change the world. Gerhard Schroeder’s flagrant flirtation with German unilateralism and anti-Americanism is reverberating as a major shock for his partners in Washington, Paris, London and elsewhere.

Ironically, the tactical setback in American-German relations may be overcome more quickly than the strategic damage done to Germany’s role in Europe. Schroeder jettisoned all appearances of European consultation and coordination that is, all appearances of pursuing a thoroughly European Germany rather than a “German way” for Europe in the tight electoral battle with his conservative opponents. Schroeder on the stump, invoking national destiny and Germany’s right to decide, made George W. Bush sound like a pussyfooting diplomat.

Schroeder’s aggressive distancing of himself from Bush’s demands for “regime change” in Iraq can be marked down to electoral opportunism. The chancellor probably would have promised voters Saddam Hussein’s head on a platter if that would have guaranteed him victory. Such political motivation can be understood by practical politicians in other nations.

But Sunday’s election, which resulted in a tiny four-vote majority for the Social Democrat-Green coalition first elected in 1998, also exposed global political fault lines that have been forming since the end of the Cold War.

A reunited Germany was bound to emerge as Europe’s heavyweight, pushing for its own interests and increasingly chafing at having to host on its sovereign soil tens of thousands of American troops. The only question was when. The answer, we discovered in this campaign and balloting, is now.

U.S.-German relations are in need of modernization in a time of testing and redefinition of global alliances dating from the Cold War. Russia and India sound more supportive of many U.S. strategic goals and the war on terrorism than do many European nations today.

The immediate task for Washington is to work through the hurt and anger that Condeleezza Rice and Don Rumsfeld justifiably voiced over Schroeder’s campaign rhetoric and get to work on a new strategic relationship with a new Germany that still has fundamental choices to make about its destiny. Plenty of good reasons to reduce, redeploy or even withdraw American troops from Germany will present themselves in the near future. Pique over campaign slurs is not one of them.

The Clinton administration’s hopes that NATO expansion would provide a common cause large enough to keep Washington and Berlin in strategic lock step have predictably fallen short. The Bush administration’s questioning of the importance and utility of traditional alliances in fighting the war on terrorism, and its emphasis on pre-emption and global domination in military affairs, have increased the policy gap between the two capitals in recent months.

Diplomats are paid to bridge gaps created by conflicting domestic political demands. A list of quick fixes includes: Germany’s assuming leadership of the international force in Afghanistan and more security responsibility in the Balkans; a fence-mending visit here by Germany’s most popular politician, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer; and logistical and diplomatic support for U.S. action against Iraq that Schroeder was careful not to rule out in his campaign.

Germany and the United States are major powers with enough common interests and sufficient clout in the world to accommodate growing divergences between themselves. It is less clear that France, Spain or even Britain can as successfully accommodate an abrupt and deep changing of Germany’s priorities in international and regional cooperation without major dislocation. The European Union certainly cannot.

That is why Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and other Europeans need to inject new energy and vision into the European process and trans-Atlantic relations to limit the consequences of the German campaign and election. They should not leave the repair work to Washington alone. They must deal with the currents and forces in the German electorate that made a trump card out of Schroeder’s appeal to German nationalism and anti-militarism.

Analyst Robert Kagan has written insightfully that Europeans and Americans have developed differing views of power that now make them ineffective allies. Germany’s election campaign helps out Kagan’s argument, which seems to me already to mistake Germany’s ambivalent attitudes on military power for those of Europe as a whole. France still covets and uses power in ways that make me think that realpolitik is a German word but a French vocation.

There is still time for Europe (including Germany) to show in Iraq and elsewhere that the German way traced in the campaign is neither irreversible nor universal on the continent. America still needs a few good allies.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.