Part of the fallout from what appears to have been a flawed, if not disastrous, EU treaty summit in Nice at the end of last year is the rank acknowledgment that relations between Germany and France are strained. To believe the international press, it's as bad as can be. The Economist titled its recent story on the Franco-German rift “Divorce after all these years?” The headlines in the Paris based, American edited International Herald Tribune have been even more alarmist: “Germans Try to Ease Friction with French,” “Paris-Berlin Tensions Worry Two Old Hands,” and “The French-German Question. Leaders Talk of Relationship That Remains Undefined.”