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The Franco-American divide: getting worse,
David Ignatius
The Daily Star, 5/26/03
After Napoleon executed his royalist rival,
the Duc d’Enghien, in 1804, a French chronicler famously remarked: “It
is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.’’
That bon mot sums up what’s at issue in the debate over French policy
toward the United States. Is recent French anti-Americanism simply a
mistake a product of the grandeur and romanticism of President Jacques
Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin in their stand against
the US-led invasion of Iraq? Or is it something more serious the
culmination of a long-running Gaullist challenge to US power and
leadership?
There is growing evidence to support the latter view that we are
witnessing a deep Franco-American fissure and the start of a chilly new
era in relations between the two countries. To rephrase the famous
epigram: It is worse than a mistake; it is a policy.
The French and the Americans succeeded Thursday in patching things over
enough to avoid what would have been a messy discussion at the G-8 summit
that will begin June 2 in Evian, France. The UN Security Council voted
14-0 to approve a resolution that will end sanctions for Iraq and phase
out the oil-for-food program (as the US wanted) and provide some form of
oversight by a UN Special Representative for Iraq (as the French wanted).
But the new resolution is partly a fig leaf, critics argue; it avoids some
of the messy issues about Iraqi reconstruction for the sake of a
compromise that was backed by France’s key allies, Germany and Russia.
The French want to preserve a role for the UN, even a symbolic one, since
their only claim to global power is their status as a permanent member of
the Security Council. And the Americans need this appearance of
international harmony as much as the French do. Things haven’t been
going awfully well in Baghdad, and the Americans could use some
international cover.
US and French officials say privately, however, that this veneer of
pragmatism masks fundamental differences. To state it bluntly, Chirac’s
France rejects the interventionist global role claimed by George W.
Bush’s America. And Bush’s America finds France a pompous nuisance, a
country whose military power doesn’t match its ambitions and whose
views, in the end, don’t matter.
The G-8 summit at Evian is likely to illustrate this divide, whatever the
spin doctors say. Chirac is organizing the meeting as a not-so-subtle
celebration of French leadership on such soft-power issues as the need to
provide drugs for AIDS victims in poor countries. In a touch of this
symbolism, the French president is inviting the heads of 25 smaller
countries to join the Big Eight for a photo opportunity.
To American eyes, the Evian summit is being framed as an implicit
rejection of American hard-power leadership. “Chirac will use the G-8 as
a personal platform to grandstand and cater to the Third World,’’
predicts one US official.
American anger at France was reignited last weekend by remarks that de
Villepin made at Versailles to a foreign policy gabfest known as the
Bilderberg meeting. Though the gathering was supposedly off the record,
European and American sources have volunteered accounts of comments that
infuriated Americans there.
It was only because Chirac and Pope John Paul II opposed the American war
in Iraq that the world was able to avoid a Christian-Muslim “clash of
civilizations,’’ de Villepin reportedly said in response to a
question. At another point, he implied that if America had just made clear
from the outset that its goal in Iraq was “regime change,” then the
French might have been willing to go along.
Pique over the aristocratic style of the French foreign minister or the
vanity of the French president misses the point. Chirac is following a
traditional dictum of French foreign policy, namely: How do you maintain
and enhance France’s power in a world dominated by America?
The US response to Chirac’s manipulations, alas, seems overwrought and
ultimately unworthy of a superpower. For the White House to disclose that
Air Force One is serving “freedom toast’’ is at least as childish as
anything the French have done. And French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte
was right to demand last week that Washington stop winking at fabrications
about French policy on Iraq.
Still, Chirac’s riposte to America will almost certainly fail. Paris
lacks the military might to translate its ambitions into reality. And
while Germany and Russia may share French wariness of the Bush
administration, they are unlikely to underwrite Chirac’s continuing
defiance of Washington.
The French version of optimism these days is that things will get better
once Bush is gone from the White House. But in this, as in too many other
foreign-policy judgments, the French appear to be making a costly mistake.
David Ignatius, Paris-based syndicated columnist, is former executive editor of the International Herald Tribune
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |