David Chandler apparently has something against France and Bernard Kouchner. In his most recent article, he argues that France has become more gun-ho than the United States. However that in this case, Kouchner’s and France’s readiness to whack Iran is nothing more than bravado for they know full well that they won’t be the ones doing the whacking. Sugary excerpt:
In fact, the foreign policy pronouncements of the new French government of Kouchner and Sarkozy have striking parallels to that of Blair and his foreign minister Robin Cook’s incoming Labour government in 1997. Kouchner, like Blair before him, is able to make grand statements of foreign policy mission in the knowledge that responsibility will have to be taken by someone else – the United States.
For Kouchner and the new French Sarkozy government, it appears that US problems in Iraq and divisions over Iran are an opportunity to stake a claim of French leadership. Like Blair’s approach to the Kosovo crisis in 1999, this activist foreign policy depends on the fact that the US has already talked up the threat and is the only country with the capacity to carry out the threats that are made by others.
[…] Kouchner’s confidence in taking a warlike stance over Iran stems from irresponsibility rather than responsibility. Free from any final decision-making - or any substantial military role if there is a conflict - Kouchner’s warmongering rhetoric can only increase the tensions in the region, further destabilising the relationship between the US and Tehran. Rather than a moral or ethical stand, Kouchner’s position seems both craven and parasitical, both exploiting the US position and willing to risk thousands more lives in a region already torn apart by Western grandstanding.
Chandler is partly right to argue that France believes that they can take advantage of the Iraq war to become a bigger force on the international scene. However, something deeper is going on here that has everything to do with the ways mighty powers use force for the argument that Kouchner made by talking about using force wasn’t a Idealist argument, but a Realist one. He implied that there might not be any other way to solve the Iranian crisis than war and this fact makes diplomacy unnecessary for any compromise would be unacceptable. Charles Bremner tries to explain to France’s new tough approach and has an interesting answer:
Unlike President Chirac, with his sanguine view of a multipolar world, Mr Sarkozy believes that the biggest international danger at the moment is the threat of a confrontation between Islam and the West. In his first big foreign policy speech he said: "We would be wrong to underestimate the possibility of this happening: the affair of the (Danish) cartoons of the Prophet was a warning sign of this."
If Bremner is right, then the rest of Sarkozy’s term will be anything, but annoying for he seems to believe into tough talk, but the question is whether he is ever going to be willing to do something that looks bad on camera and that makes him unpopular such as taking the initiative in the name of his vision of the world to take action alone or rather alone with the United States.
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