France's Game: French opposition to the U.S. is not about Iraq but about who runs the world

Time Magazine ^ | Monday, Mar. 24, 2003 | CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

[yonif]

What is it with France? It is one thing to oppose American policy on Iraq. Germany, China and many others have done so. France, however, has gone beyond mere opposition. France has been bent on organizing a worldwide coalition — a coalition of the unwilling — to stop the U.S., not just lining up other major powers like Russia but even sending its Foreign Minister on a tour of Africa to persuade three members of the U.N. Security Council to vote against the U.S. and ensure an American defeat.

Why? The usual reasons apply — France's enormous Iraqi oil contracts and enormous unpaid Iraqi loans that would vanish with Saddam Hussein. But they don't suffice to explain such an ambitious enterprise. There is another reason, far more powerful. The Iraq crisis, and the roiling uneasiness in the world about U.S. policy, have provided France with an opportunity for the ultimate grand stroke — an attempt to actually break the American monopoly of power in the world. This is geopolitics at the highest level, and the French, who have been banished from the game for a good half-century, cannot resist the lure of playing it again.

France is not trying to contain Iraq. After all, it spent the 1990s at the U.N. relentlessly trying to undo containment of Iraq. France is trying to contain the U.S.

In 1991, the bipolar world of U.S.-Soviet domination collapsed. At the time, it was assumed that the new world would be multipolar, with the U.S., the European Union, Japan, Russia and a rising China sharing power and balancing one another.

That did not happen. What emerged instead was a unipolar world, the U.S. bestriding the globe like a colossus, more dominant in every field of endeavor — economic, military, diplomatic, cultural, even linguistic — than any other nation since Rome.

This the French cannot abide. We Americans marvel at the polls showing how many people consider George W. Bush a greater danger to the world than Saddam Hussein. Yet the President of France himself flirts with this demonology when he tells TIME, "Any community with only one dominant power is always a dangerous one." Translation: American power in and of itself is a global menace.

"This is not about Saddam Hussein, and this is not even about regime change in Iraq or ... missiles or chemical weapons," explains Pierre Lellouche, a conservative Parliament member and former foreign-policy adviser to Jacques Chirac. "It's about whether the United States is allowed to run world affairs."

Chirac does not imagine that he will create a military bloc to confront the U.S., as did the Soviet Union. What he is trying to establish is something only slightly less ambitious: an oppositional bloc, a restraining bloc, a French-led coalition of nations challenging the hegemony of American power and the legitimacy of American dominance.

It was Charles de Gaulle who first charted this course. He tried to break away from the U.S. by, for example, ordering American troops out of France and withdrawing from the military structure of NATO. But during the cold war this was not realistic. The Soviet threat loomed. Today, with the Warsaw Pact dead, France can safely make its reach for grandeur.

De Gaulle said he was motivated always by "a certain idea of France." Nostalgia for that exalted status, hunger for imperial gloire, is what animates French policy today. France does not expect to rival America but to tame it, restrain it, thwart it — and to accept the world's laurels for having led the way.

Not only would this make France leader of the global opposition. It would also restore France to what it sees as its rightful place as leader of Europe. Which is why the great subplot in the Iraq drama is the fate of Tony Blair. Blair represents precisely the alternative vision — Churchillian vs. Gaullist — of accepting and working with American leadership in the world. Chirac's U.N. stand has caused Blair huge political difficulties at home, where much of his own Labour Party opposes him on Iraq. If Blair can be politically destroyed, France will have demonstrated to the world the price of going with America — and defying France. Other players — such as the East Europeans, whom Chirac has already rudely threatened for supporting the U.S.--will have to think twice when deciding whether to go with America or the French-led opposition.

Dean Acheson famously said, "Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role." France too lost an empire but has found its role: giant killer. Remaker of the post — cold war world. Leader of the global anti-American camp.

Heady stuff. And Iraq is the least of it.

[Kay Soze]

Yeah but France will now never get paid the tens of Billions its owed by the Iraq that WAS headed by the FORMER dictator Saddam!!

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

And as Bush has pointed out yesterday only US and private (i.e. those that stood with us) will reconstruct Iraq!

[RummyChick]

i love this photo and wish someone would do a little alteration to it

so representative of what we face

[sam]

"President Bush should call for France to be eliminated from the Security Council and replaced by India."

And India announced today that they will not allow overflights or refuelling of aircraft from any country participating in the war!

[Stultis]

bump

[Jorge]

I still believe France's opposition was to avoid being found to be the biggest supplier of banned materials to Iraq. I really look forward to the US exposing their duplicity.

I tend to agree. But to be exposed by a nation whose power and affluence they resent and envy is twice as humiliating for the French.

[jigsaw]

Well then, maybe we can replace France with Fiji.
Heck, I'd replace France with the mafia. I'd trust them more.

[CommandoFrank]

President Bush should call for France to be eliminated from the Security Council and replaced by India.

President Bush should call for France to be eliminated.(Period. End of sentence!)

[RecentConvert]

Too much importance is being given to non-entity France.

[Romulus]

Interesting, perceptive article. But here's the problem: just as Americans are pariots and put their own country's interests first, shouldn't Frenchmen be patriots and put their own interests first? Shouldn't we all have a preference and allegiance to the respective countries and cultures that bore and nourish us?

Speaking as an American, I don't want to rule the world. In fact, I emphatically do not want to rule the world. And I can certainly understand why the world does not want to be ruled by America, and why some see a strategic need to block the USA from overplaying its strength. I'm not saying the Frogs are fine fellows; just that it's a funny old world and sometimes people need to be told "no" for their own good.

Absolute power is a scary thing, especially when it's vested in a government one has never voted for and especially when it has contemptuously dispensed with the quaint concept of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."