The French and International Affairs
That said, however, the current administration’s demonization of France has generally been beyond the pale. Yes, they have said some pretty awful things about us, but it is remarkable to me how so many tough-talking hawks reveal that they are so damned sensitive about cactus bouquets from a country about which they purport not to give a hoot. (“They said mean things about us! Let’s screw up our relations with Europe as a consequence!”) It might make them feel good, but as global politics, it is pretty dumb. There was almost no way that we were going to get Chirac and his fellow Gaul obstructionists to come along. But a more adroit administration could probably have kept much of the opposition under wraps and most of the vitriol to a minimum.
This is why I find two recent articles especially interesting. The first comes in today’s Washington Post, David Ignatius argues that the Bush administration is pursuing rapprochement with the French. This strikes me as good news, even if, it yet another example of the scuzzy politics of the Bush campaign, the Republican hatchet wielders excoriated Kerry for suggesting this exact course of action. As Ignatius reports, “One strategist who is familiar with the transition plans for Europe prepared by Kerry and Bush advisers in October says he was struck by how similar they were in describing the challenge: Both plans recognized that there was a crisis in transatlantic relations that had to be repaired soon after the election." They may be hypocrites, but the Bush administration higher ups are doing the right thing if this is the course they pursue.
The second story, which I find even more telling, has to do with French intervention into the rapidly escalating nightmare in the Ivory Coast, or, for you Africanist Francophiles, Cote D’Ivoire. According to the Mail & Guardian, Jacques Chirac vows to keep troops in the former French colony to prevent it “from sliding into anarchy or fascism” and he ‘condemned the ‘questionable regime’ of the country’s president.”Chirac is right. French intervention in this case is noble and proper (of course, the instability of a former French colony is at least partially the result of colonization, but no matter – go read some Basil Davidson if you’d like a primer.)
But one has to ask the question: Doesn’t Chirac grasp the rich irony attendant in this story? France sees chaos and instability in a country that could descend into fascism and anarchy. He condemns the current leaders of that country for running a “questionable regime.” And he intervenes militarily. Now while I will admit that the case for French intervention is solid, it does make one wonder: Why, then, the outsized outrage over our intervention in Iraq? It is one thing to object. It is another thing to object so shrilly that it helps damage international relations. It is yet another thing again to decide that one’s own intervention is good and laudable (even if in this case it is) so soon after condemning the interventions of others.
My purpose here is not explicitly to compare the situation in Cote D’Ivoire and Iraq. It is, however, to point out that the lost art of diplomacy, in which countries persuade one another, the powerful do what they have to do and the weak accept what they must, need not have disappeared in the last few years. The French and American leadership bear equal responsibility for how things have gone between us. If the current indications that we will have a meeting of the mind are true, this is good news for the globe. It is just too bad that the Bush administration chose to condemn Kerry’s patriotism and ability to govern for suggesting precisely this sort of eventuality in the recent campaign.