Part Two of Important Tony Judt piece:
2.
In recent weeks both these American fables about Europe have been folded into an older prejudice now given an ominous new twist: intense suspicion of France and the French. France's procrastination at the UN has brought forth in the US an unprecedented burst of rhetorical venom. This is something new. When De Gaulle broke with the unified NATO command in 1966, Washington—along with France's other allies—was annoyed and said so. But it would not have occurred to American statesmen, diplomats, politicians, newspaper editors, or television pundits that France had somehow "betrayed" America, or that De Gaulle was a "coward" and the French were ungrateful for the sacrifices Americans had made on their behalf and should be punished accordingly. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all respected De Gaulle in spite of his foibles, and he returned the compliment.[14]
Today, respectable columnists demand that France be kicked off the Security Council for obstructing the will of the US, and they remind their readers that if it had been left to France "most Europeans today would be speaking either German or Russian." Their colleagues in less-restrained publications "want to kick the collective butts of France" for forgetting D-Day. Where are the French when "American kids" come to rescue them, they ask: first from Hitler, now from Saddam Hussein ("an equally vile tyrant")? "Hiding. Chickening out. Proclaiming Vive les wimps!" Part of a "European chorus of cowards." As a new bumper sticker has it: "First Iraq, then France."[15]
American vilification of the French —openly encouraged in the US Congress, where tasteless anti-French jokes were publicly exchanged with Colin Powell during a recent appearance there—degrades us, not them. I hold no brief for the Élysée, which has a long history of cynical dealing with dictators, from Jean-Bedel Bokassa to Robert Mugabe, including Saddam Hussein along the way. And the Vichy years will be a stain on France until the end of time. But talk of French "surrender monkeys" comes a touch too glibly to American pundits, marinated in self-congratulatory war movies from John Wayne to Mel Gibson.
In World War I, which the French fought from start to finish, France lost three times as many fighting men as America has lost in all its wars combined. In World War II, the French armies holding off the Germans in May–June 1940 suffered 124,000 dead and 200,000 wounded in six weeks, more than America did in Korea and Vietnam combined. Until Hitler brought the US into the war against him in December 1941, Washington maintained correct diplomatic relations with the Nazi regime. Meanwhile the Einsatzgruppen had been at work for six months slaughtering Jews on the Eastern Front, and the Resistance was active in occupied France.
Fortunately we shall never know how middle America would have responded if instructed by an occupying power to persecute racial minorities in its midst. But even in the absence of such mitigating circumstances the precedents are not comforting—remember the Tulsa pogrom of May 1921, when at least 350 blacks were killed by whites. Perhaps, too, Americans should hesitate before passing overhasty judgments about "age-old" French anti-Semitism[16] : by the end of the nineteenth century France's elite École Normale Supérieure was admitting (by open competition) brilliant young Jews—Léon Blum, Émile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, Daniel Halévy, and dozens of others—who would never have been allowed near some of America's Ivy League colleges, then and for decades to come.
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It is deeply saddening to have to restate these things. Perhaps they are of no consequence. Why should it matter that Americans today think so ill of France and Europe that America's leaders sneer ignorantly at "Old" Europe and demagogic pundits urge their readers to put out the ungrateful Eurotrash? After all, French anti-Americanism is an old and silly story, too; but it has never seriously impeded transatlantic relations and grand strategy.[17] Are we not just seeing the compliment returned, albeit at an unusually high volume?
I don't believe so. The Americans who laid the framework for the only world most of us have ever known— George Marshall, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and the presidents they served—knew what they wished to achieve and why the European–American relationship was so crucial to them. Their successors today have their own very different conviction. In their view Europeans, and the various alliances and unions in which they are entwined, are an irritating impediment to the pursuit of American interests. The US has nothing to lose by offending or alienating these disposable allies of conven- ience, and much to gain by tearing up the entangling web of controls that the French and their ilk would weave around our freedom of movement.
This position is unambiguously stated in a new short book by Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, The War over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission. Both men are Washington-based journalists. But Kristol, who once gloried in the title of chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and is now a political analyst for Fox TV, is also the editor of The Weekly Standard and one of the "brains" behind the neoconservative turn in US foreign policy. Kristol's views are shared by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and others in the power elite of the Bush administration, and he articulates in only slightly restrained form the prejudices and impatience of the White House leadership itself.
The War over Iraq is refreshingly direct. Saddam is a bad man, he ought to be removed, and only the US can do the job. But that is just the beginning. There will be many more such tasks, indeed an infinity of them in coming years. If the US is to perform them satisfactorily—"to secure its safety and to advance the cause of liberty"—then it must cut loose from the "world community" (always in scare quotes). People will hate us for our "arrogance" and our power in any event, and a more "restrained" American foreign policy won't appease them, so why waste time talking about it? The foreign strategy of the US must be "unapologetic, idealistic, assertive and well funded. America must not only be the world's policeman or its sheriff, it must be its beacon and guide."
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What is wrong with this? In the first place, it displays breathtaking ignorance of the real world, as ultra-"realist" scenarios frequently do. Because it confidently equates American interest with that of every right-thinking person on the planet, it is doomed to arouse the very antagonism and enmity that provoke American intervention in the first place (only a hardened European cynic would suggest that this calculation has been silently incorporated into the equation). The authors, like their political masters, unhesitatingly suppose both that America can do as it wishes without listening to others, and that in so doing it will unerringly echo the true interests and unspoken desires of friend and foe alike. The first claim is broadly true. The second bespeaks a callow provinciality.[18]
Secondly, the Kristol/Wolfowitz/ Rumsfeld approach is morbidly self-defeating. Old-fashioned isolationism, at least, is consistent: if we stay out of world affairs we won't have to depend on anyone. So is genuine Wilsonian internationalism: we plan to be at work in the world so we had better work with the world. A similar consistency informs conventional Kissinger-style realpolitik: we have interests and we want certain things, other countries are just like us and they want certain things too—so let's make deals. But the new "unilateralist internationalism" of the present administration tries to square the circle: we do what we want in the world, but on our own terms, indifferent to the desires of others when they don't share our objectives.
Yet the more the US pursues its "mission" in the world, the more it is going to need help, in peacekeeping, nation-building, and facilitating cooperation among our growing community of new-found friends. These are projects at which modern America is not markedly adept and for which it depends heavily on allies. Already, in Afghanistan and the Balkans, the German "pariah" state alone provides 10,000 peacekeeping soldiers to secure the ground won by American arms. US voters are famously allergic to tax increases. They are unlikely to raise the sort of money needed to police and reconstruct much of Western Asia, not to mention other zones of instability where Kristol's "mission" may lead us. So who will pay? Japan? The EU? The UN? Let us hope that their leaders don't look too closely at Kaplan and Kristol's sneeringly unflattering remarks in their regard.
Some of what the authors have to say about past failings is on target. The UN, like Western Europe, vacillated shamefully over Bosnia and Kosovo. The Clinton administration, like Bush senior before it, turned away from humanitarian crises in the Balkans and Central Africa. If the US under Bush junior is now resolved to fight brutal tyrants and armed political psychopaths, so much the better for us all. But that certainly wasn't the case before September 11. Back then American conservatives were disengaging from the international sphere at dizzying speed—who now remembers Condoleezza Rice's contemptuous dismissal of "nation-building"? Why should America's friends place their trust in this newfound commitment and expose themselves to violent reprisals on its behalf?
No reasonable person could object to the hot pursuit of Osama bin Laden. And there is a case, too, for military action against an Iraq that refuses to disarm. But to extend these into a mission statement for open-ended and unimpeded American actions to transform the condition of half of humanity, at will and in the teeth of international dissent; indeed, gleefully to anticipate, as Kristol and Kaplan and others do, the prospect of such international opposition—this sounds too much like a practice in search of its theory. It is also vitiated by one uncomfortably hard nugget of bad faith.
"Israel" has one of the longest index entries in this little book. "Palestine" has none, though there is one lonely reference to the PLO, listed as an Iraqi-supported terrorist group. Kristol and Kaplan go to considerable lengths to emphasize the importance of Israel as an American strategic partner in the new Middle East they envisage, and they offer as one justification of a full-scale war on Iraq that this would improve Baghdad's relations with Israel. But nowhere do they evince any concern for the Israel–Palestine imbroglio itself: a rapidly burgeoning humanitarian crisis, the single greatest source of instability and terrorism in the region, and a festering object of disagreement and distrust between the two sides of the Atlantic. The omission is glaring and revealing.
Unless Kristol and his political mentors can explain why an ambitious new American international mission to put the globe to rights is silent on Israel; why the newly empowered American "hegemon" is curiously unable and unwilling to bring any pressure to bear on one small client state in the world's most unstable region, then few outside their own circle are going to take their "mission statements" seriously. Why should the US administration and its outriders care? For a reason that the men who constructed the postwar international system would immediately have appreciated. If America is not taken seriously; if it is obeyed rather than believed; if it buys its friends and browbeats its allies; if its motives are suspect and its standards double— then all the overwhelming military power of which Kristol and Kaplan so vaingloriously boast will afford it nothing. The United States can go out and win not just the Mother of All Battles but a whole matriarchal dynasty of Desert Storms; it will inherit the wind—and worse besides.
So please, let us stop venting our anxieties and insecurities in vituperative macho digs at Europe. Whatever his motives, French President Jacques Chirac has been voicing opinions shared by the overwhelming majority of Europeans and a sizable minority of Americans, not to speak of most of the rest of the world. To claim that he, and they, are either "with us or with the terrorists" —that disagreement is betrayal, dissent is treason—is, to say the least, willfully imprudent. Whether we need the Europeans more than they need us is an interesting question and one I shall take up in a subsequent essay, but the United States has everything to lose if Europeans fall to squabbling among themselves for American favors; our leaders should be ashamed of themselves for gleefully encouraging this.[19] As Aznar, Blair, and their collaborators wrote in their controversial open letter of January 30, 2003, "Today more than ever, the transatlantic bond is a guarantee of our freedom." This is as true today as it was in 1947—and it cuts both ways.
—February 27, 2003; this is the first of three articles.
Notes
[1] See, classically, Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (Norton, 1969).
[2] In the course of the 1990s the British steadfastly blocked efforts at the UN to implement military intervention against Milosevic, while French generals on the ground simply ignored orders, with the covert backing of their government.
[3] Anne Applebaum, "Here Comes the New Europe," The Washington Post, January 29, 2003. See also Amity Schlaes, "Rumsfeld Is Right About Fearful Europe," Financial Times, January 28, 2003, in which the author castigates Germans for lacking "vision": what the Americans did for ungrateful Germans in Berlin in 1990 they are now set to repeat in Baghdad.
[4] See The Economist, January 4, 2003.
[5] For Czech and Polish attitudes to war with Iraq, see The Economist, February 1, 2003. For Spanish opposition to Aznar, see El País, February 3, 2003. Spanish commentators are especially sensitive to the need for European unity, and Aznar is deeply resented for what is seen by many in Spain as his feckless action in signing the WSJ statement. Many of Aznar's own supporters regard it as insultingly insufficient for him to repeat, as he has taken to doing, that "between Bush and Saddam Hussein I will always side with Bush." But then Aznar has career ambitions: he is angling for future appointment to a senior international position, and he needs American and British support.
[6] See the survey of transatlantic attitudes in a poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the German Marshall Fund of the US at www.worldviews.org. For NATO member-state defense expenditures see La Repubblica, February 11, 2003. See also The New York Times, January 24, 2003. The antiwar views of a Central European diplomat were expressed in a private communication. Like many other politicians from former Communist Europe, he was reluctant to air his criticisms of American policy in public: partly from a genuine affection and gratitude toward America, partly out of apprehension concerning the consequences for his country.
[7] See Christopher Caldwell, "Liberté, Egalité, Judéophobie," The Weekly Standard, May 6, 2002. Some American commentators take their cue from a recent spate of books published in Paris, purporting to demonstrate that France's 500,000 Jews face a second Holocaust at the hands of "anti-racist" anti-Semites. The most hysterical of these pamphlets is La Nouvelle Judéophobie by Pierre-André Taguieff (Paris: Fayard, 2002), in which the author (who has written sixteen other books on the same topic in the past thirteen years) writes of a "planetary Judeophobia." Taguieff's mischievous scare-mongering was the subject of an admiring puff by Martin Peretz in The New Republic, February 3, 2003. In a similar key see also Gilles William Goldnadel, Le Nouveau Bréviaire de la haine: Antisémitisme et antisionisme (Paris: Ramsay, 2001), and Raphaël Draï, Sous le signe de Sion: L'antisémitisme nouveau est arrivé (Paris: Michalon, 2001). Drai's first chapter is titled "Israel en danger de paix? D'Oslo à Camp David II."
[8] See "Global Anti-Semitism" at www .adl.org/anti_semitism/anti-semitism _global_incidents.asp, and "ADL Audit: Anti-Semitic Incidents Rise Slightly in US in 2000" at www.adl.org/presrele/ asus_12/3776_12.asp.
[9] See "L'image des juifs en France" at www.sofres.com/etudes/pol/130600_imagejuifs.htm; "Les jeunes et l'image des juifs en France" at www.sofres.com /etudes/pol/120302_juifs_r.htm; "Anti-Semitism and Prejudice in America: Highlights from an ADL Survey, November 1998" at www.adl.org/antisemitism_survey/survey_main.asp.
[10] "C'est un fait, ces actes [antisémites] sont commis, pour l'essentiel, par des musulmans," in Denis Jeambar, "Silence coupable," L'Express, December 6, 2001.
[11] For an illuminating graph of the prejudices and allegiances of far left and far right in contemporary Germany, see "Politik," Die Zeit, January 9, 2003, p. 5.
[12] Adar Primor, "Le Pen Ultimate," Haaretz.com, April 18, 2002.
[13] See Craig Kennedy and Marshall M. Bolton, "The Real Transatlantic Gap," Foreign Policy, November–December 2002, based on the recent survey by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the German Marshall Fund. For fuller details see "Differences over the Arab-Israeli Conflict," www .worldviews.org/detailreports/compreport/html/ch3s3.html.
[14] At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, De Gaulle made unambiguously clear to JFK that whatever actions it chose to take, the US had France's unwavering support and trust.
[15] See Thomas L. Friedman, "Vote France off the Island," The New York Times, February 9, 2003; Steve Dunleavy, "How Dare the French Forget," The New York Post, February 10, 2003. What the French may truly have forgotten is how the US financed France's "dirty war" in Vietnam, from 1947 to 1954. But then since this is something American commentators also prefer to overlook, it tends not to figure on the "France owes us" charge sheet.
[16] Rejecting what he termed "[President Jacques] Chirac's...accusation" that the American Jewish Congress works in collaboration with the political leadership in Jerusalem, American Jewish Congress President Jack Rosen in July 2002 termed French attitudes "reminiscent of ancient anti-Semitic stereotypes of worldwide Jewish conspiracies." See www.ajcongress.org/pages/ RELS2002/JUL_2002 /jul02_04.htm.
[17] In a forthcoming article I shall discuss some recent books on French and European anti-Americanism.
[18] And corresponds to a widespread assumption in the US, that everyone else in the world really desires nothing more than to be American and come to America. This is especially inaccurate in the case of Europeans, who understand very well the differences between American and European society and institutions. Most people in the non-Western world would indeed like to experience in their own country the independence and prosperity that Americans enjoy in the US; but that is another matter and one that carries somewhat different implications for American foreign policy.
[19] It is entirely appropriate that when asked what he thought of Donald Rumsfeld's latest destructive efforts in this vein at the recent Munich conference of defense ministers, William Kristol expressed his unbounded admiration for the US defense secretary's performance. Fox Television News, February 12, 2003.
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