  The perturbative expansion of static force and potential is reanalyzed
concerning its practical applicability. A well behaved perturbative prediction
is given by the integration of the renormalization group equation for the
coupling $\alpha_{qq}(\mu=1/r)=(C_f)^{-1} r^2 F(r)$. Since the Lambda-parameter
of the $\nf=0$ theory is known from previous work, the perturbative prediction
contains no free parameter. It is confronted with recent non-perturbative
results. For $\alpha < 0.3$ where the truncation error of the perturbative
expression is naively estimated to be moderate, it is really quite accurate and
large ``non-perturbative terms'' are excluded.
