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COMMENTARY
July 20, 2002
Tailgated
The tail wagging the dog of Europe has been lopped off. This would seem to be the best explanation for the much gentler European diplomatic tone towards the United States in the last few weeks. The change is most apparent so far only negatively: a break from anti-American rhetoric lasting even longer than the recent break between suicide bombings in Israel. A temporary respite that may lead to something more substantial. The tail in question was the French Left. After the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin was bounced by Jean-Marie Le Pen from the final ballot of the French presidential election eyes turned to the composition of the next French Legislature where the Socialists and their allies were then trounced. This allowed President Jacques Chirac to confirm an entirely new government of the centre-right including a new foreign minister to replace Hubert Vidrine a man whose visceral dislike of anything American (or Jewish) frequently interfered with his otherwise remarkably dubious judgement. Official anti-American posturing was largely a function of the French domestic political need to assuage such sensibilities on the Left. In turn German Italian Spanish and even British official pronouncements were crafted to assuage the official French need to assuage the French Left. Thus did the tail wag the dog. What is more the "moderate" Arab states have traditionally looked to the European example to determine just what they can get away with in resisting American demands. It was apparent that Secretary of State Colin Powell was making real progress Thursday lunching in Washington with the foreign ministers of Egypt Jordan and Saudi Arabia in getting them to endorse the vision of a world free of Yasser Arafat. On this diplomatic plane it can now be seen that the French Left was the tail wagging not only Europe but much of the rest of the world. Dominique de Villepin the new French foreign minister was previously President Chirac's chief of staff in the Elysee Palace. A career diplomat posted to Washington during the Reagan years he was the architect of Mr. Chirac's strategy to bring France decisively back into NATO and patch up relations between Washington and Paris at the beginning of Mr. Chirac's first term. These plans were in turn sunk by the victory of the French Left in the legislative elections of 1997. Now they are back with wheels on. Mr. de Villepin was incidentally the ultimate source for a news leak to the liberal Israeli daily Ha'aretz yesterday in which he rather gave the show away after recent talks with the U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. He was sufficiently unguarded to let his staff know that he believed the U.S. would make a major strike against Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad before not after the coming U.S. mid-term congressional elections; and that in his view most information to the contrary in particular reports of indecision and unpreparedness within the Bush administration is part of a disinformation campaign to preserve some element of military surprise. What was even more remarkable than this leak was the absence of outrage to accompany it. The French as other European governments are increasingly resigned to the inevitable in the Middle East: i.e. regime changes in Iraq and Iran and Syria and perhaps even in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere down the road. (President Bush's disowning of Yasser Arafat being a stage along this way.) In French geopolitical thinking the opportunities to create more open accountable even democratic pro-Western regimes in the region may now seem a plausible means to the end of relieving the immigration pressure on France and the rest of Europe at source. It is likely to prove more effective than the old French strategy which was to encourage heavy investment in the belief this would create "jobs and hope" in the region regardless of what monstrous regimes might happen to remain in power. For this is the fuel that has driven so much European scepticism about the motives and intentions of the U.S. -- Europe is choking on a huge tide of Islamic immigration almost all of it the consequence of the economic failure of Arab states and societies. To his credit Colin Powell has played the central role while grasping the nature of these European anxieties in bringing about a trans-Atlantic meeting of minds. What Europe fears is not regime change per se but whether the United States can engineer successor regimes in Iraq and elsewhere that will at least not be worse than what we have now. The trend to the right is not only French. With the unique and unrepresentative exception of the Czech Republic there has been a swing to the right in all recent European elections: alas not only to the moderate right but also to the extreme in several cases. This movement has been described as a cyclical swing and partly it is. But the swing is enhanced by a growing European consensus that in matters from immigration to foreign policy Europe must stick with the West. It is further enhanced by a tactical accident: for European "anti-globalization" forces now often find themselves voting the same way as traditional "liberals" (the European term for what we in North America call "economic conservatives") against the cancerous growth of the European Union bureaucracy. In other words a certain portion of the residual anti-American European Left finds itself stuck voting for relatively pro-American foreign policies. It's a messy world and it is prone to sudden paradoxical reversals. The most poignant one at the moment may be that the U.S. President everyone expected to be strong on domestic and weak on foreign policy continues to score successes abroad to balance failures at home. He has shown the surest hand in U.S. foreign policy since Ronald Reagan and the weakest in domestic congressional horsetrading since his father. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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