Diplomacy Bites

Where's George Herbert Walker Bush when the world needs him?

Tim Cavanaugh | March 13, 2003

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"These [anti-U.S.] demonstrations are really marginal demonstrations," the French leader said. "You shouldn't give too much credit to these demonstrations. They do not reflect a so-called natural aversion of such-and-such a people in Europe to the president of the United States or to the U.S. people as a whole."

Mr. Chirac said the bond between America and Europe is "an increasingly important relationship, and it would be the sign of shortsightedness to refuse to acknowledge that."

Boy, doesn't that seem like a long time ago! Bush's distaste for dealing with foreigners makes an uncomfortable fit with an interventionist foreign policy. Whatever new security doctrines of pre-emption and unilateralism the administration may be proposing, only a fool goes into the world without friends, let alone allies. (In fact, even the administration's notorious September 2002 National Security Strategy acknowledges the need for coalitions.)

What foreign policy victories the administration has won lately have been strictly of the monkey's paw variety. The eight "New Europe" countries sent their letter of support a few weeks back, but since then little has come of this new alliance. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for example, has not been heard from at all recently, no doubt watching Blair's implosion and wisely staying close to the ground. The U.S. (actually, the UK) has apparently succeeded in winning security council votes from the francophone countries in Africa, but is the point of this diplomacy to despoil France of its post-colonial friendships or to build support for a war with Iraq?

The policy failures, on the other hand, have been enormous in their scope and import. We have not merely aggravated old wounds with France and Germany. Where Blair is concerned, we're undermining the man who is essentially our only real friend in this fight. We are preparing to send American forces into a postwar situation where any number of neighboring countries would be happy to, say, pass out rocket launchers to local zealots or send a truck bomb into a Marine barracks (and not, as the argument goes, because those governments are al Qaeda supporters who will hate America under any circumstances). If the polls are to be believed, Bush will even be alienating the majority of his own electorate if he goes to war without UN approval.

As Bush Sr. notes, it's not too late to repair the damage. The first step would be to give Tony Blair an out, to admit (internally) that the "deadline for war" is an artificial number that the United States can, with no damage to its reputation, revise indefinitely—in fact, to admit that time is on our side, and that a show of patience at this point might actually help to build the case. Then George W. Bush might want to get out of Washington for a while, and see that the bureaucratic timetable on which this war is perched fits in with nobody's conception of wise foreign policy. Who knows? Saddam Hussein, for all his deceptions, has proved remarkably tractable these past few months (a point for which hawks are ironically unwilling to take the credit they deserve, since admitting threats work diminishes the case for war). He might become even easier to budge if he were facing the more credible threat that a real coalition can present.

But more important than the fate of a tinhorn dictator is undoing the damage Bush's relentless antagonism has wrought around the world—a fact that really does make life more dangerous for Americans at home and abroad. Maybe we can't make the rest of the world love us, but we can at least spend some time making sure that they don't hate us.