France’s diplomacy. Cocorico? Or the chickens come home to roost

Date: 19/04/03

After a meeting in Russia of Europe's three leading opponents of the war in Iraq, France's president has most to lose

THE headlines have been disquieting: “Washington intends to make France pay”; “Chirac, king of peace without a crown”. Indeed. Now that America has toppled Saddam Hussein, President Jacques Chirac's anti-war stand seems not just irrelevant but, increasingly, also damaging. After all, America's deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, told American senators last week that France “is going to pay some consequences” - a threat, in the present economic gloom, that French business takes seriously.

So what is Mr Chirac to do? One answer is to repeat that the Franco-American disagreement has always been more about the means than the end. After Baghdad fell to America's troops, Mr Chirac issued a statement “rejoicing, as in all democracies, at the collapse of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.” A second answer is to consolidate what has become known as “the peace camp”, hence the two-day summit last week in St Petersburg with Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. And a third answer is to step up the diplomatic pace, hence the three-day sprint at the end of last week by France's foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, through Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

And what will all this add up to? President Bush is said to take political slights personally, which may be why he and Mr Chirac had not spoken to each other for two months until the French president rang up on April 15th. Given the climate in Washington (the sensationalists of Fox News are not alone in describing Mr Chirac as a “weasel”), it may be some time before America forgives France for its threat to wield its UN veto against war “whatever the circumstances”. Mr Wolfowitz suggests that France and the other peaceniks, if they want to repent, should write off the debts owed them by Iraq; France's may be as much as $8 billion. “I hope, for example, they'll think about the very large debts that come from money that was lent to the dictator to buy weapons and to build palaces and to build instruments of repression.”

The pessimists, in French terms, are similarly worried on the diplomatic front. The peace camp looks more like an alliance of convenience than of conviction. Mr Schröder's opposition to war in Iraq helped him win re-election last September. Similarly, Vladimir Putin's hostility to the war is surely dictated, in part at least, by pragmatism: not only is Russia, with a large Muslim minority, bordered by unstable Muslim countries, but Mr Putin's generals are keen that post-cold-war Russia does not become too subservient to its new American ally. Strip away the rhetoric and it is plain that, though the St Petersburg trio (the summit was originally planned as a Russo-German one) can agree easily enough on the need to involve the United Nations in the administration of Iraq, they do not see eye to eye over redressing the transatlantic balance.

Mr Schröder's government, for example, is noticeably trying to get back into America's good books. Meanwhile, whatever the disagreement over Iraq, Mr Putin continues to see friendship with America as being more important to Russia in the long run than friendship with France.

Arguably, the same can be said even of the Arab governments that have just welcomed Mr de Villepin. France has been promoting the Arab-Israeli peace process, arguing that the “road map” agreed on by the European Union, the United Nations, America and Russia should be published quickly, and followed up by an international conference in Paris. But for all the eloquence of the foreign minister's pleas in Cairo, the Arab regimes know that it is America that calls the shots, both metaphorically and - witness Iraq - literally.

So is France's policy simply a waste of time and misjudged effort? Mr Chirac's critics say that he has alienated America, damaged relations with Britain and imperilled the future of the UN Security Council, NATO and the European Union. Moreover, by insulting the pro-war countries of central Europe, he has given credence to the notion advanced by Donald Rumsfeld, America's provocative defence secretary, of “old Europe” and “new Europe”. Worse still, says one embittered member of Mr Chirac's own party, he has done so not for France but for his personal popularity.

That may be too harsh. Mr Chirac's distaste for war with Iraq may have been genuine; his desire to involve the UN is shared by most of the world's leaders; and so, too, his conviction that a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an urgent necessity to forestall more regional instability and more anti-western terrorism. Indeed, on many matters, from the plight of the Palestinians to a putative “regime change” in Syria, the apparently pro-American British are still in tune with the supposedly anti-American French, as was clear from last week's trip to Paris by Mr de Villepin's British counterpart, Jack Straw.

Alas, sincerity and realism are not always the same thing. Mr Chirac's problem is that because France wilfully alienated an America that was always certain to have a military victory in Iraq, France will find it harder to play a role in building peace. That, of course, assumes that a peace will be found and will be lasting. If not, the world will be worse off - and Mr Chirac will have been belatedly justified.

Feature looks at the position of France in the world after the Iraq crisis.

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