Why We Fight - for

Why We Fight - for France and Germany - I was sitting in a local bookstore last night, talking politics with a small group of other people. Most of them were of the Volvo-Driving Perpetually Concerned class. One of them said "Well, we can't go to war - it'd alienate our allies".

Words failed me at the moment - or maybe it was tact. I didn't want to pick a fight at a bookstore when the point of the evening wasn't talking about world events.

Beyond the straight Ann Coulter line - "Who cares about our so-called 'allies'?" - though, a larger point started to form.

France and Germany "oppose" this war only to the point of having to get involved.

Andrew Sullivan expands on this point: The economic fruits of this war affect them, if anything, more than they do the United States - they are more dependent on middle eastern oil, and on having a reliable supply.

So once again, it's the English-speaking peoples versus the despots. And there's a reason for this. Terrorism is a far greater threat to countries founded on liberty. Terror's ability to cripple free societies, their travel and communications, their limited government, their cherished personal liberties, is felt far more keenly in the English-speaking world. That's why the civil liberties enthusiasts on the right and left are both right and wrong. Right to defend what they defend. Wrong to think that John Ashcroft is a greater threat in this respect than al Qaeda.

Statist and dirigist societies, on the other hand, with freedom less of a priority than among their liberal, English-speaking allies, cope with terrorists by ratcheting up police powers, making all sorts of concessions to the enemy, and muddling through. It's not so big a threat to their customary way of operating. Ditto with foreign threats. For most of the last century, France responded to external pressure in classic Gallic fashion: superficial remarmament, diplomatic ballet, appeasement, and, if necessary, tactical surrender or accommodation. And since the last war, Germany has placed superficial peace above all other priorities - whether defeating terror or accommodating Communism. When you don't have a deep tradition of internal freedom or inviolate national sovereignty, and when the external threat doesn't appear to be imminent, this kind of society instinctually avoids war. That's especially the case now. It's clearly the hope of France and Germany that the English speaking powers will bear the brunt of Islamist terrorism. By ducking out of the fight, they think they can avoid trouble once again, see the U.S. and the U.K. damaged, and make what best they can of the aftermath.

It's classical Macchiavellianism - let your opponents bleed themselves white. It saves you the trouble of having to defeat them yourself.

It's almost like Judo - letting your opponent use his strength against himself. If it works, that is.

Sullivan his his finger on it again, in an earlier post on the same topic:

So let's recap: vast gaps in his declaration to the U.N., discovered plans for a nuclear capacity, chemical warheads found that are unaccounted for, no real interviewing of scientists by U.N. officials. But the French are just pleased as punch. Do they have any proposals to make such inspections actually work? A vast increase in the number of inspectors, perhaps? Nope. Do they intend to support the military pressure on Saddam with their own troops? Nope. Germany has specifically disavowed such a course of action - ever. I'm left with the impression that they don't want to do anything serious, but they don't want anyone else to do anything serious either. Paris and Berlin know full well that the chances of the inspectors actually finding what Saddam has spent so much effort concealing is next to zero. And they also know that by delaying the potential war until the autumn, they will help keep the U.S. economy depressed (investment being crippled by uncertainty) and help the growing appeasement movement gain more strength. By then, war will become an even greater political risk for London and Washington, which is, of course, part of the Europeans' plan. Schroder and Chirac want regime change - in Washington and London, not Baghdad. And they are using every ounce of their diplomatic influence to achieve that. You see? They can get off their butts now and again, if they need to. The time is surely coming, alas, when the U.S. and the U.K. will have to acknowledge that these European powers are now de facto allies of Saddam. Because they sure as hell aren't ours.

These are the people that spawled Macchiavelli, that invented Realpolitik, that managed to gain control of much of the world even though they had a tiny fraction of the world's population. Playing enemies against each other is part of the job.

And "enemies", in this case, is exactly how we're seen, in the larger sense. We need to keep that in mind.

Posted by Mitch at January 23, 2003 06:33 AM