As the second Gulf War begins, we peer through the sandstorm, straining to discern the outline of the new world beyond. Like most new worlds, this is actually a mix of old and new. American officers sit at computer screens guiding e-bombs to disable Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's command equipment thousands of miles away by means of electro-magnetic pulses. The inter-galactic fight scenes in Star Trek look like nineteenth century realism by comparison. But then I watch British footsoldiers in Kuwait preparing for hand-to-hand combat. A sergeant-major urges one young squaddie to bark elemental cries of hatred as he stabs and stabs again with his bayonet at a stuffed dummy of the enemy, tossing him in the desert sand. In its essence, this scene could be the eve of Agincourt in 1415 -- one man being psyched up to kill another by forcing sharp steel through his guts.
So also with the politics. There is something rather new -- the leadership of the US feels so confident of its own overwhelming military power and moral rightness that it will march into the most explosive region in the world with just one effective ally -- or two, if you count Australia. And something very old -- the UN diplomacy of the run-up to war finally came down to a conflict between Europe's oldest adversaries, England and France. As at Agincourt in 1415.
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Over the last few weeks, the geopolitical West of the Cold War has collapsed before our eyes. The twin towers of NATO and the EU remain physically intact, but not politically. No one can know what the shape of the new world will be. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in his magnificent speech to the British parliament on Tuesday, "History doesn't declare the future to us so plainly." But we can already see three broad ideas competing for the succession to the cold war West. I'll call them the Rumsfeldian, the Chiraco-Putinesque and the Blairite.
The Rumsfeldian idea -- if idea is not too dignified a word -- is that American might is right. It's right because it's American. The US is a city built on a hill. America is the only hyperpower. This is a unipolar world. The land of the free is under attack from international terrorism, the new international communism. It has a duty to defend itself. Anyway, it will end up spreading democracy to places like Iraq, and thus make the world a better place. If some allies want to come along to help, that's fine. If they don't, then you find "work-arounds," as US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld said when it seemed that American forces might have to go in to Iraq without even British troops to support them. Meanwhile, you carry on offending all your potential allies with clumsy remarks.
The Rumsfeldian vision is half-right and therefore all wrong. It's probably true that the US can now win most wars on its own. But it can't win the peace on its own. And victory in the "war against terrorism" is all about winning the peace -- in Iraq, in the wider Middle East, and beyond.
The Chiraco-Putinesque idea -- if idea is not too dignified a word -- is that American might is, by definition, dangerous. Jacques Chirac believes that it's unhealthy for any single state to have so much power, but it's particularly dangerous if that state happens to be America (rather than, shall we say, France). A unipolar world is therefore unacceptable. France's mission is to construct an alternative pole. That counter-pole is Europe, which, in Gaullist geography, includes Russia. In other words, Eurasia. The diplomatic battle over the last few weeks, with the Franco-German-Russian(-Chinese) continental alliance pitted against the American-British-Spanish(-Australian) maritime one, made me think again of the war of super-blocs in George Orwell's 1984. He called them Eurasia and Oceania.
The Chiraco-Putinesque vision is half-right and therefore all wrong. It's true that it's unhealthy for any single power -- however democratic and benign -- to be as preponderant as the US is today. Take a domestic analogy -- would it be good for American democracy if the White House could override Congress and ignore the Supreme Court on any issue? But for France to make common cause with a semi-democratic Russia (the butcher of Chechnya) and a wholly non-democratic China in a diplomatic campaign which brought temporary succor to Saddam is not the brightest way to move towards a multipolar world. Anyway, you never will unite Eurasia against the US. As we've seen, even in this crisis roughly half the governments of Europe put transatlantic solidarity before their grave doubts about the wisdom of the US President George W. Bush administration's approach to Iraq.
That leaves Blairism. Blair's idea is that we should re-create a larger version of the cold war, transatlantic West, in response to the new threats we face. What he calls the "coming together" of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism should frighten us as much as the Red Army used to. Europe and America must stick together to defeat it. Yes, Europeans should worry about US unilateralism, but, he told the House of Commons, "the way to deal with it is not rivalry but partnership. Partners are not servants but neither are they rivals." Last September, Europe should have said to the US "with one voice" that it would "assist" Washington confront the dual threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, provided the US went down the UN route and restarted the Middle East peace process between Israel and Palestine. Whatever happens now, Europe and America should work together as partners and, wherever possible, they should do so through the international institutions of the post-1945 world.
Blair's idea is completely right. The trouble is the execution. Blair himself made two major mistakes over the last year. The first was not to do more last September to try to bring Europe to speak "with one voice." Instead, he became almost a part of the internal administration argument in Washington, while neglecting Berlin and Paris as they swung together in an anti-war waltz. The second was to forget that partnership also involves sometimes saying "no." One has the feeling that Blair is that kind of very decent Englishman who will always say no to drugs and never say no to Washington. The two mistakes are closely related. If you have a stronger European voice, it's more credible that you might say no -- and hence less likely that you'll have to.
I remain unconvinced that this particular war at this particular time is legitimate, necessary or prudent. I now hope against hope that our victory will be swift, that Saddam's evil regime will collapse like a house of cards, and that the consequences in the Middle East will be positive -- for Iraq, across the rest of the Muslim world and in the peace process between Israel and Palestine.
However, I am totally convinced that the Blairite vision of a new postwar order of world politics is the best one currently available on the somewhat depressed market of world leadership. It follows that it would have been a major setback, not just for Britain but for the world, to lose him over this war. The trouble is, of course, that to realize the Blairite vision you need Paris and Washington to sign up to it. With French President Jacques Chirac in one place and Rumsfeld in the other, the chances don't look good. But in the sandstorm of war, all the old cards will be shuffled anew.
Timothy Garton Ash is a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
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