August 31, 2002
Vichy France
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| One of 100s of markers in Paris. "Here fell..." |
It's a foreign policy mood these days and if you're working on anything else, you're not working on what's interesting. Sad but true, and one consequence is that everything is political.
It is political, for example, that your father just bought a gas-guzzling Porsche because the recession's got the price way low. We are about to fight a war for gasoline and here he is switching his Honda for a Boxster. For example.
More to the point, it is political that I am sitting here in France in the midst of what some would describe as a great national security crisis. I wouldn't describe it that way. But it happens to be, no less, that war planning is happening and anniversary plans are being drawn for the loss of the World Trade Center.
It's one thing that Chirac has just given a speech opposing any American unilateral action on Iraq, but it is another in the context of French foreign policy. The socialist government's foreign minister was fond of picking fights with Bush and his team, and the new center-right foreign minister will apparently be charged with the same. It is an issue of pride and not policy, as is evident, since nationalist credentials come from resisting the hawks in Washington both in Paris and in Berlin.
Americans, however, don't much care about European positions, as they don't much care about South American positions, except only in the context of the Old World Order -- an order constructed around NATO and the critical strategic theater of Europe that dominated the Cold War. That's why Europe mattered then, but not vitally as material contributors to an arms-based military strategy and rather as the likeliest site of conflict.
When France resists American policy, the resonance is not with the Cold War standoff where France never came into play nor was France ever an unfaithful ally. Forgetting this faithfulness, however, American critics unfailingly look to World War 2 to find fault in French strategy.
If a strategy is called unwise, the French are impuissant cowards -- rolled over by tanks. If a strategy is called short-sighted, the French are myopic fools -- whose Maginot line was idiotic. If a strategy is called aggressive, the French are collaborators at Vichy -- as bad as Nazis. If the strategy is called reckless, impulsive, racist, unilateral, selfish, or anything else, then again the French are ingrates for wasn't it Americans that landed at Normandy?
The summary line is: the French (Europeans) are wimps and collaborators with the Nazis. Is it true? Consider how it crops up and consider Tony Judt's somewhat naive attribution of the view to the just a few mean-spirited hawks:
Powell notwithstanding, the realist (some might say cynical) consensus in the administration was that since America's allies are irrelevant to its military calculations and have no political choice but to tag along, nothing is gained by consulting them in advance or taking their sensitivities into consideration. In its crudest form this conclusion was well summarized, once again, by Charles Krauthammer:
Our sophisticated European cousins are aghast. The French led the way, denouncing American simplisme. They deem it a breach of manners to call evil by its name. They prefer accommodating to it. They have lots of practice, famously accommodating Nazi Germany in 1940.... We are in a war of self-defense. It is also a war for Western civilization. If the Europeans refuse to see themselves as part of this struggle, fine. If they wish to abdicate, fine. We will let them hold our coats, but not tie our hands.
It is typical of the ugly mood in parts of Washington today that Krauthammer omits to mention not only that France lost 100,000 men in six weeks of fighting against the Germans in 1940, but also that the United States maintained full diplomatic relations with the evil Nazis for a further eighteen months, until Hitler declared war on America in December 1941.
Posted by amol at August 31, 2002 12:08 AM