Great Game
Kevin links approvingly to Emma’s interesting post about French motivation in opposing the invasion of Iraq and “how the game of nations is played.”
However, I’m afraid I think her assessment is entirely too cynical. Yes, Chirac is a snake and nations act out of their own interests. Much more than principle or morality, by necessity and because we are humans, always goes into foreign policy. Nobody with any brains is arguing that France is acting purely out of altruistic love of the Iraqi children or entirely because they have a moral objection to war. That would be a silly and naive position.
But, neither can it be discounted that France is a democracy and Chirac is responding to the will of his citizens. Perhaps public opinion is irrelevant to him, but one cannot prove it merely by assertion. There is every reason to believe that Chirac would find himself under the kind of pressure that Blair is under and has decided to take a different tack based upon his personal self-interest, which is how the system is actually designed to work. It’s hard to see that Chirac was particularly free under those circumstances to decide the issue based solely upon France’s oil interests in the mid-east or his ambition to lead the EU, even if he wanted to. If he were acting out of economic self-interest alone, Chirac would have held out for the best deal and then played ball. That is certainly what the Bush administration expected to happen.
I also think she gives short shrift to the notion that the “Old Europe” experience of the last century has left them with a genuine suspicion of grand global plans like the starry-eyed neocon dream of Pax Americana and that assessment does have some basis in morality. (Certainly, the German position is undeniably rooted in its moral culpability for WWII.) They all see their own security in terms defined by two world wars fought on their own soil and they rightly mistrust propagandist phrases like “benevolent hegemony.” Yes, that is “self-interest” but it isn’t necessarily cynical and it isn’t necessarily a hypocritical stance that would change if the players were different.
In other words, it’s not naive to believe that there is a mix of genuine democratic principle and hard edged self-interested realism in France’s position. That position, after all, is mirrored by far more countries than ours is and most of them do not have interests in Iraq that make it the least bit worth their while to side against the United States. Indeed, it cannot be seen as in the self interest of any individual nation. The U.S. is a powerhouse, both militarily and economically and there is little to be gained by a country like Chile or Mexico defying us on a war in a far off region in the world.
It is not believable to me that this large collection of democratic countries throughout the world are lining up against the US out of calculated individual self-interest alone. There are selfish motives involved in each, to be sure, but they are responding to their people and taking a big gamble that their collective power will serve to check what seems to be a very aggressive U.S. foreign policy doctrine. It’s a ballsy move that makes no real sense if there is not a deep seated feeling amongst these players that the US must be put on notice that we do not have unfettered support for these global ambitions.
That global alliance of the unwilling simply cannot be explained as another Great Game.
