Tony Blair was over-optimistic about what would follow the postwar international system, writes Philip Stephens
The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux.
Soon they will settle again. Before they do let us reorder
this world around us.
- Tony Blair, October 2nd, 2001
Few were as prescient as Tony Blair in anticipating the geopolitical earthquake that would follow September 11th, 2001.
As he predicted, the terrorist attacks on America's homeland have swept away the postwar international system. But the British Prime Minister was over-optimistic about what would follow.
The ruins of the old order have buried the once-gleaming designs for its replacement. Mr Blair's European policy is going the same way.
America has transformed itself from the status-quo superpower of the 1990s into a revolutionary hyperpower. Then, the US was content to police the world. Now it intends to remake it in its own image. The original isolationist reflex of the Bush administration has been elbowed aside by the unilateralist one. The post-war bargain that legitimised US leadership has been shattered. In response, Europe has divided between its Franco-German core and an Anglo-Spanish periphery.
Britain and France stand on the brink of a rift as bitter as the one that followed the retreat from Suez in 1956.
All this has left Mr Blair's political future in peril. He seems as determined as ever to join George W.Bush in a war to remove Saddam Hussein. But, like the rest of us, he cannot predict the course or the consequences of the conflict.
It is startling to hear those closest to him declare that, if things go badly, the coming days and weeks could overturn his premiership. But that precisely is what is being acknowledged in 10 Downing Street.
A leader always respected more than loved by the Labour Party, Mr Blair faces another massive House of Commons rebellion. Barring the passage of a second UN resolution - and France seems more certain by the day to exercise its veto - there will be resignations from the government. Mr Blair cannot be sure that he will survive. Nor can he be confident that even a quick military victory against Iraq will properly restore his authority.
So the talk is at one moment of Mr Blair's complete resolve, at another of "a huge gamble", of "dice-rolling", of French "perfidy" and of a bitter struggle over the future direction of Europe.
Who knows whether the government's lawyers will say Britain can go to war without another UN resolution? Who can predict the political dynamics at Westminster if, say, more than 200 Labour MPs rebel?
There is more at stake for Britain, though, than the fortunes of even so formidable a leader as Mr Blair. The crisis over Iraq is sweeping away the principles that have guided its foreign policy for the past 40 years.
Written in the aftermath of the Suez debacle, these said that Britain must never again choose between its Atlantic ally and its main European neighbours.
Britain's influence with the US, this sacred foreign policy doctrine declared, depends on active engagement in Europe; a leading place in Europe on its privileged access in Washington. To choose between them was to throw away Britain's role as a pivotal power.
Choosing, though, is precisely what Mr Blair is doing. Marching in step with George W.Bush comes at the risk of the most significant breach with France for more than 40 years. To make this still more painful, the British choice is being made by the first prime minister since Edward Heath to have been genuinely convinced that the nation's "destiny" - Mr Blair's chosen word only last autumn - is as a European power.
Those around the Prime Minister deny that Britain's much-vaunted bridge to Washington has now all but collapsed into the Atlantic. Most European governments are with Mr Blair, they say. Once the war is over, much of the rest of the continent will take the same Atlanticist path.
But we have been here before. In the aftermath of Suez, Germany's Konrad Adenauer remarked that the construction of Europe would be France's revenge on Britain for buckling under US pressure to withdraw from Egypt.
Britain's response was the ill-fated attempt to build an alternative, peripheral European Free Trade Area. Both sides were the losers. They will be again.
For as long as the US was a status-quo power willing to respect the post-war settlement, Britain could maintain, albeit sometimes awkwardly, its balancing act. Once Mr Bush decided in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, that the US was no longer prepared to be shackled by multilateralism, there was bound to come a moment when the choice was unavoidable.
Yet if the present crisis carries eerie echoes of Suez, it is also replete with ironies. Mr Blair and Jacques Chirac share the same ambition to constrain American power. They want a US willing to temper its unique primacy with respect for the wishes and judgments of its allies and for an international rule of law.
The divide is over tactics. The British Prime Minister believes that the US must be chained into the international system now.
Mr Chirac has concluded that the system is not worth saving if it is so blatantly an instrument of American hegemony.
Back in December, Mr Blair told a visitor to 10 Downing Street that the Anglo-French "soft-cop, hard-cop" routine had worked: the US had taken the UN route.
But that had been a happy accident. Once Mr Bush set a date for the invasion of Iraq, Britain and France had to choose. Mr Bush will win his war. Mr Blair and Mr Chirac will both be losers.
- (Financial Times)