Over There

NOT MANY PEOPLE will be pleased by Philip H. Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro’s Allies at War: America, Europe, and the Crisis Over Iraq. Americans will not like reading just how much this country’s image has deteriorated in Europe’s eyes. Europeans, especially the Germans and the French, will complain about the book’s account of their irresponsible behavior. Republicans will scowl at the depiction of the Bush administration’s ham-handed approach to transatlantic relations. And Democrats will complain that the book does not assign enough blame to the White House for the current state of affairs.

All that, however, is precisely why every one of them should read Allies at War. Divided into three sections, the book opens with an account of the state of transatlantic relations before the debate over Iraq. The next section, the heart of the book, is a week-by-week account of the unfolding crisis in those relations as the war with Iraq approached. And the book ends with a brief section on what should be done to repair the damage to the alliance in the war’s wake.

The first section’s point is that relations have not been healthy for some time. The underlying trends–cultural, strategic, domestic, military–had been headed south well before Bush took power. Even the Clinton administration, according to Gordon and Shapiro, was “caught between the desire to preserve the alliance and the unique global responsibilities and enormous military power of the United States.” Long before the 2000 presidential election, Paris was in the business of labeling the United States with derogatory titles such as “hyperpower.” Yet as bad as the trend lines were in transatlantic relations, Gordon and Shapiro argue that the crisis was not inevitable. Political decisions and poor judgments on both sides of the Atlantic turned a situation that would have been difficult in any case into an open breach between allies–the likes of which had not been seen since the Suez crisis of 1956.

On Washington’s part, the mistakes were large and small. Not the least of these, I believe, was the discontinuity between America’s military and diplomatic strategies. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 required Saddam to give a complete and accurate description of his weapons programs, past and present, to the U.N. by December 8, 2003. He didn’t. But because the Pentagon was not ready to go to war, this “material breach” of the resolution was allowed to stand. The United States and its allies drew a line in the sand only to back up two steps. Combined with the less-than-effective diplomatic effort by Secretary Powell to get a clearly worded resolution, the effect was to give hope to the war’s opponents that war could be avoided and allow them time to rally their side into firmer opposition.

But perhaps the most significant mistake Washington made was relying on a leadership model Gordon and Shapiro describe as: “If you build it, they will come.” Experience with alliance relations during the Cold War and the Balkans conflicts had led many foreign-policy analysts to think, reasonably enough, that the key to getting our allies on board was decisive American leadership at the start. But in the absence of the Soviet threat or chaos on Europe’s back door, would the model work? Further complicating matters was the fact that war in Iraq (as opposed to the war in Afghanistan) was understood to be a war of choice, of preemption. Not surprisingly, this was a bridge too far for the European public.

That said, according to Gordon and Shapiro, the damage to the alliance would have been a lot less if Germany and France had behaved differently. In the case of Berlin, it’s clear that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder–behind in the polls in August 2002–decided to pander to German voters by staking out an antiwar position regardless of the damage it might do to the alliance. His “declared refusal to support the use of force against Iraq even if authorized by the U.N. Security Council was, simply put, irresponsible. It went against everything German foreign policy had stood for since the founding of the Federal Republic.”

As for Paris, the expectation both here and in President Jacques Chirac’s own government was that France would take its normal pound of flesh from the Americans but not, in the end, stand in Washington’s way. And, indeed, as Gordon and Shapiro reveal, as late as the first week of January, Chirac was secretly sending advisers to the United States to discuss potential French military contributions to an Iraq operation. But, sometime shortly after that, in meetings here and at the U.N., the French revealed their hand: Regardless of whether WMD were found in Iraq–and hence, regardless of Security Council Resolution 1441–France would not go along with a war in Iraq. French policy would be “containment” or nothing.

For all the talk of American unilateralism, then, it was Schröder and Chirac who, regardless of U.N. resolutions, alliance needs, or even comity among E.U. partners, were determined to follow a policy of their own design. As Gordon and Shapiro note: “Of all of the members of either NATO or the European Union (a total of 23 countries), only the governments of France, Germany, and Belgium made active efforts to stand in Washington’s way.”

Allies at War ends with a perfectly reasonable account of why the transatlantic alliance should still matter to Americans and Europeans, what still ties us together, and what the common agenda–terrorism, Afghanistan, Iran, post-Saddam Iraq–should be in the months and years ahead. But like a couple involved in a bitter divorce proceeding, the idea of a serious reconciliation in the aftermath of Iraq seems quite distant. It’s possible, of course. And, undoubtedly, it’s something to be wished for.

Yet bad blood from the fight over Iraq persists; the underlying cultural and strategic divisions have not been overcome; and the lack of interest on the part of both Americans and Europeans to defer to the other’s sensibilities remains largely unchanged. Although a major point of Gordon and Shapiro’s analysis is that more sensible political leadership on both sides of the Atlantic could have prevented this crisis, it is a real question whether even sound statesmanship can now do much more than prevent similar crises from arising in the future.

Gary Schmitt is executive director of the Project for the New American Century.