Designated driver diplomacy.

• Author: Hulsman, John C.
• Position: French foreign policy

IT HAS been rightly noted in literally hundreds of articles that the Iraq debacle has underscored not just the specific incompetence of the Bush Administration, but has revealed, more generally, the built-in failings of the neoconservative movement itself. Lost in neoconservatism's colossal crash is the fact that two other, far more successful European ways of working with America also withered in Iraq's aftermath, leaving the transatlantic relationship without a coherent modus operandi.

SINCE THE Suez crisis of 1956, when the United States humiliated (rightly, in my view) its colonial allies Britain and France, these two leading European powers have come to embody the dueling methods of dealing with their difficult American ally. Both Britain and France proceeded from Suez with the strongly held view that the Eisenhower Administration had been wrong to stop their efforts to humble Nasser's Egypt. From that supposed mistake, both London and Paris feared that, left alone, Washington would continue to make such grievous errors. However, in setting a template for how to deal with America, the French and British came to diametrically opposed views.

With the Suez wound still fresh, President Charles de Gaulle founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958 with a very clear idea in mind as to how the Americans should be engaged. Put simply, Gaullism's response to America goes like this: "The Americans are crazy; we must always try to act as an honest broker strategically to counter their excesses. To do so, we must have a relatively equal seat at the table if they are to take our concerns seriously." With the crises in Algeria and French Indochina underscoring the decline of French power, de Gaulle quickly came to the conclusion that only a French-led Europe would give Paris the power necessary to retain a seat at the great-power table. In one form or another, such diverse characters as de Gaulle, d'Estaing, Mitterrand and Chirac have followed this basic tenet of French foreign policy. However, its declining relevance was revealed for all to see during the Iraq crisis.

Iraq revealed an inherent danger in de Gaulle's elegant view. If France proves itself incapable of creating a fairly coherent pole of power, its challenge to American primacy will prove little more than an annoyance to Washington. Rather than gaining America's grudging respect, Paris will merely be alienating the sole remaining superpower--thereby drastically limiting its global influence, which is the last thing any French president wants to do.

Yet this is what actually happened in terms of Iraq. The hidden diplomatic story at the heart of the conflict is that while European public opinion was fairly uniformly against the invasion, European governments split almost down the middle, with Aznar's Spain, Berlusconi's Italy, Kwasniewski's Poland and Blair's Britain all siding with President Bush, while Jacques Chirac and Germany's Schroder led European governmental opposition to the war. Far from achieving the unity the Gaullist strategy required, Chirac went on to make things worse, famously telling the new East European members of the European Union, who largely supported the White House, that "they had missed a good opportunity to shut up." This was not the rant of some deranged mind; rather Chirac, in his frustration, was acknowledging that the Gaullist dream of European unity, that the EU was a ticket for France back to great-power status, lay in ruins. He could (and did) annoy America. But he could not prevent the invasion, or play a major role in the Middle East. Worse, he had exposed the death of a fifty-year-old French foreign-policy strategy.

SOMETIMES ANECDOTES (be they partly...