Den Beste talks nuance:
Sometimes terms take on a life of their own, lasting well beyond the point where they make any sense, if they ever did at all. One of those terms was "peace process", for instance. For something like 20 years, there was this mythical "Middle East Peace Process" which represented a hope for an end to the struggle between the Israelis and sundry Arabs, external and internal.
In some senses, I suppose there was process in it. After 1973 (the Yom Kippur war) there has never been another serious threat of an attack by an Arab nation against Israel, and that is indeed an accomplishment. But it didn't really happen because of any kind of process towards peace. It appears to have happened for two reasons: America bought off the Egyptians and Jordanians (and continues to pay them vast amounts of money, every year), and Israel developed nukes and let the Arabs know about it. The real reason there hasn't been any attack on Israel since then is because the next time there's a formal military attack, Cairo and Damascus are going to be vaporized. However, that threat didn't work against the Palestinians, nor did it prevent the Arab nations from surreptitiously supporting various Palestinian factions. So low level war has been chronic in the region for the entire thirty years since the Yom Kippur war.
And yet, during the 1980's and 1990's I kept hearing about the "stalled peace process", "getting the peace process moving again", "discussing the peace process", and on and on, and somehow the difficulty was that there wasn't any peace, and there damned well didn't seem to be any process. Maybe that's because to me, as a systems engineer, a "process" is actually an orderly sequence of steps toward a defined goal, and what we actually saw was floundering and setbacks and confusion and multiple incompatible approaches and basically something which was about as un-process-like as it could be.
That particular term seems mostly to have fallen by the wayside, though you still occasionally hear it. Even after the failure of the last serious attempt to deal with the Palestinians, and the beginning of the Intifada, you still heard people talking about how we were going to get the peace process started again. It was when Bush decided, last year, that Arafat was the problem, and that peace was impossible as long as Arafat was involved, that the term "peace process" finally seems to have gone to the political graveyard of dead rhetoric. But don't be too surprised if it shows up again in future; this kind of term has more lives than a cat, mostly because those who are using it are advocating, not describing. The reason there was so much talk about a peace process wasn't that it actually existed so much as that a lot of people wished it did and were trying to build a fire under various politicians to make them buy such a "process" (by giving things away to get one).
Another term I'm finding myself becoming more and more uncomfortable with recently is "ally". If a process is an orderly sequence of steps toward a goal, then allies are entities who work together to achieve a shared goal. So when I see a headline reading "Allies resist U.S. war aims" then on one level I find myself thinking that it's internally contradictory: if they're resisting the goal, then by definition they're not allies, at least within the context of the discussion. They can't be allies if they don't share the goal, and if they did share the goal they wouldn't be resisting it. That headline is nonsensical on its face.
Of course, pure unity of purpose in an alliance is a rare boon; there's always a certain amount of difference of opinion. Yet in any successful alliance there will be some sort of very large and unambiguous goal that all agree is the primary purpose of the alliance, even if there are differences of opinions about the means by which that goal should be accomplished. And usually that shared goal will be easily stated and very straightforward.
The Anglo-American alliance in WWII was motivated by a very simple goal: eradicate Hitler. With any peoples as self-confident and motivated and bull-headed as the Brits and Americans, there were bound to be disagreements, some of which were bound to become extremely vicious. The crowning achievement of Eisenhower was to put together an integrated military command made up of British and American officers which was actually able to fight effectively, and not dissolve in partisan bickering. (Eisenhower was a political general rather than a battlefield general, and his talents fit the requirements of SHAEF better than almost any other British or American general I know of. One can imagine, for instance, what would have happened if Montgomery had commanded SHAEF.)
NATO's purpose was to prevent a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. It did a lot of other things over the decades, but that was the main job and everyone pretty much understood it. There were cases in which there were bitter arguments about how best to accomplish that, and France actually withdrew from NATO, but the overall goal was never in doubt during the Cold War and even during the years when France wasn't part of NATO there could be no doubt that the French Army would have fought if there'd been a Warsaw Pact invasion.
But the Cold War is over, and the Soviet Union won't be invading Western Europe because there no longer is a Soviet Union, and it's no longer clear just what, exactly, NATO is about any longer. I don't really see what purpose it serves; what is its mission? What is the large shared goal of all members of NATO?
Indeed, when NATO Article V was finally invoked, for the first time in the fifty years of the alliance, it was an anticlimactic fiasco instead of a historic event. It had no practical effect whatever. The largest and most powerful military "alliance" in history declared that it would rise to the defense of a member which had been attacked, and then no one did anything.
Political rhetoric in the last year and a half has been perverting the term "ally", and just as with "peace process" it has been used as a form of wishful thinking combined with what amounts to an attempt at coercion. The idea was that there really was a shared goal, except that it was shared by everyone except the US. The Europeans knew what the right thing to do was, and the Americans refused to play along. The reason the alliance was strained, clearly, was American pigheadedness; everything would be just hunky-dory if only the Americans would give up their foolishness and return to the fold, where they would again be welcomed as a friend and comrade. So the emphasis on discord between America and its allies was intended to lay political pressure on Washington to make it play up and follow the European lead.
But if the disagreement is sufficiently deep and wide, then for all practical purposes there is no longer an alliance. Which has been de facto the case with respect to Germany and France for more than a year, and since September 2001 the term "ally" has no longer been a statement of fact but rather has become a rhetorical bludgeon.
For instance, at one point Schröder complained that America shouldn't treat its allies the way it was, which is to say that America wasn't consulting with those allies and listening to their opinions and modifying its policies based on what they said. In a sense he was right, but he missed the fundamental truth: the reason we don't treat allies that way is because we don't have to. Real allies don't have so divergent an opinion of the ultimate destination so that such situations even arise.
It wasn't that Schröder agreed with the destination but had different ideas about how to get there; it's that Schröder actually disagreed with where we were trying to go. That means he isn't actually an ally, for all practical purposes. The reason we were ignoring his advice is that his advice was considered inimical to us, and that doesn't happen with allies.
There's a different meaning of "ally", effectively a de jure meaning, which is people who have signed treaties of alliance with one another. It is at least on surface possible to refer to Germany and France as allies because of the existence of various treaties between them and us, though it's not clear the extent to which those treaties are even worth the paper they're printed on any longer. (Certainly the NATO charter is now effectively waste paper, after the Article V debacle.)
In a sense this is a conflict in semantics similar to how the word "agreement" can be used. When do you have an agreement with someone? In one sense it's when you have a contract. But in a different and more fundamental sense it's when you actually agree; hence the term. And a contract which isn't actually based on any fundamental agreement is usually not very successful.
Equally, real allies don't suffer from the kind of squabbling that Germany and France have seen in their relations with the US, because they share sufficient overlap in grand purpose so that such squabbling is seen by everyone involved as self-destructive and something to be avoided. The ultimate reason that Eisenhower was able to operate a unified command in WWII was that the British and American officers hated the Germans more than they despised each other.
Yes, I'm exaggerating. There were some really bitter disagreements between the Brits and Americans, but there was also a great deal of camaraderie and a lot of friendship. But the point is that even in cases where there were bitter disagreements, the consequences of failing to agree (i.e. the risk of actually losing the war) was sufficient so that they'd eventually come to some sort of compromise. They disagreed about a lot, but they agreed about even more and what they did agree about was more important.
You can't actually have an alliance without that degree of shared purpose, and there isn't one now between us and a lot of our "allies". Indeed, it's interesting that when you see that term used, most often it's being used to refer to nations who don't really have a shared purpose and are trying to deflect us. The nations I see most commonly referred to in the news as allies are Germany, France and Saudi Arabia. The UK will be referred to as a close ally, because it is impossible to ignore the qualitative difference between how the UK's alliance with the US works as opposed to the purported alliance with Germany and France.
And it is nearly always the case that France or Germany or Saudi Arabia are called allies within the context of an article which reports on the latest manifestation of the deep disagreement between them and us about what we're trying to accomplish in this war. Which is to say that they're referred to as allies in articles which prove that they aren't, really. They're referred to as allies as a way of attempting to shame the US into changing its fundamental goals. It's yet another way of flogging the Yanks.
I certainly don't think of Germany and France as enemies. The world is not so black-and-white, with everyone either an ally or an enemy and nothing in between. Life is much more nuanced than that. But there's a lot of distance between simply being friendly, between distant cooperation, and true alliance. That is much closer and is based on deeply shared values and interests, and with respect to Germany and France there aren't really any which are substantial. Certainly there do exist areas where we agree. But the disagreements are more important, and that's critical.
In the course of political evolution, we've reached the point where the US disagrees on a fundamental level with France and Germany about nearly every deep and substantive point of philosophy. Whether it's highly centralized bureaucratic control (we're agin it) or socialism (that, too) or the use of military force in diplomacy (they're agin it) or dedication to freedom of expression (they're agin it) or tax policy (they think that taxes should be as high as possible), or what should be done about Israel (they're agin it ) or indeed what should be done about damned near anything, it's hard these days to find any important issue on which we agree with them. And they sure as hell don't agree with us about what we're trying to accomplish in this war: they want "stability" among the Arab nations; we want to destabilize the lot of 'em.
What basis is there for an alliance? What, exactly, is the grand shared goal on which a real and true alliance would be founded? And when are we going to stop calling nations "allies" when no such basis exists?
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