When two republics failed to go to war together
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: March 18 2003 20:18 | Last Updated: March 18 2003 20:18
George W. Bush's 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein has been received almost unanimously in France as an admission of "shattering diplomatic failure", to quote Tuesday's leader in Le Monde. This view is widespread in all the countries that oppose military action against Iraq and many that support it.
But in France especially, this low opinion of US diplomacy has taken a strange form. Many in Paris now express overt nostalgia for the more patrician style that the current American president's father employed to build a coalition for the Gulf war in 1991. Even Serge July, hard-left columnist for Libération, spent the day after the ultimatum waxing nostalgic over Bush pe`re's respect for the United Nations, his multilateralism and his measured tones. "The change, from one Bush to the other," he lamented, "has been radical." He is looking at post-cold war history through rose-tinted glasses but he raises a question worth asking: would the tattered Franco-American relationship have survived under another US administration?
Probably not. It is certainly tempting to blame diplomatic style rather than geostrategic substance for the Paris-Washington breach. After all, had substance been at issue, no two countries on earth would have laboured harder to arrive at terms. The French are the world's masters at identifying and neutralising the concrete interests of other countries. The Americans themselves have played this game non-stop, cajoling, bribing and chivvying potential allies: Chile, with threats to tie up a recently signed free-trade agreement; Australia, with a high-profile visit from Robert Zoellick, US trade representative, who promised even to press powerful US farm lobbies to open agricultural markets; Turkey, with offers to sweeten a multi-billion-dollar aid package (which the Turks rejected anyway, before regretting it). This culminated in a bizarre half-week that US diplomats spent chasing Dominique de Villepin through the capitals of those lucky African countries on the UN Security Council, trying to outbid the French foreign minister for their votes.
This effort is evidence of good-faith negotiation that belies the charge of American diplomatic klutziness. Let us not forget that the coalition the US and Britain have assembled - with more than a dozen partners in Europe alone - is huge by any standard except that of the 1991 Gulf war. And, for all the French nostalgia for earlier administrations, it is hard to imagine them listening happily today to George Bush Sr's pronouncements on the New World Order, or Madeleine Albright's on the "indispensable nation".
What has happened since the Gulf war is not that American diplomatic skills have declined. It is that America's national interest has re-emerged following the World Trade Center attacks. In the decade stretching from the Gulf war until September 11 2001, the national interest of the world's leading power appeared - to a degree unprecedented in history - congruent with that of mankind at large.
Whether this was true can be debated elsewhere. But over that time, whether governments on either side of the Atlantic were left- or rightwing, the "international community" sought exactly the things the US did: free markets, technological advancement and human rights. In a world that appeared increasingly commercial, it became easy for non-Americans to forget that the US had a national interest at all.
Both the US and France entered the Iraq crisis working on the assumption that the interests of the world and America were still so intimately interwoven that they were in effect identical. Americans assumed that the world was as panicked, infuriated and - most important - viscerally terrified by September 11 as they were. The world was not. It was sympathetic, it was interested - but the 18 months since have made plain that Europeans are nowhere close to understanding the event's impact on the American psyche. The French meanwhile assumed that, if they themselves did not feel terrified by the arrival of terrorism in New York, anyone who did was overreacting.
This falling-out between France and the US can only be described as a tragedy. If each of the world's two great republics has come to view the other as not so much misguided as insane, it is the result of a decade in which the two countries grew more and more alike, and more and more sympathetic, to the point where nothing short of mass murder could pull them apart.
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