Conservatives love ripping on the French. In the aftermath of 9/11, when W was building his coalition to go to Afghanistan and then Iraq, the French were famously reticent – which bade many conservatives to start referring to The French as “cheese eating surrender monkeys”, among other things.
(As we’ve noted in the space in the past, this is also a reference – largely mistaken – to World War II. As illiterate as Liberals are about history, let it not be said that some conservatives don’t have their blind spots as well).
Conservatives who criticize the French are blinded to the key fact that the French stance was not a bug – it was a feature.
In 1986, the great military historian Edwin Luttwak wrote the classic, seminal book “The Pentagon and the Art of War”. In the book, Luttwak affixed the blame for five straight American military debacles (Vietnam, the Mayagüez incident, Desert One, Reagan’s Lebanon operation and the successful but sloppy and costly invasion of Grenada) to the fact that America had no strategy – or, rather, an underlying strategy that was entirely based on refighting a worldwide conventional war, like World War II.
In short, America’s defensive posture did not have a clear goal that related to the world we were in in the 1980s, and our military was not built, equipped or trained to accomplish the things it did face.
The military and our government – in large part through the auspices of the Goldwater Nichols legislation in the late 80s, fixed that – for the time being, anyway. The well oiled US military and diplomatic machine that shipped overseas in 1992 to crush Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was largely a product of Goldwater Nichols.
Fast forward 20 years – the last 13 of them at war. We have no strategy for dealing with the current situation that faces us in the Middle East; the president says so, and for a change, I believe him.
Do you think the president, or John Kerry, or for that matter Hillary Clinton can answer what our “national interest” is in northern Iraq and Syria right now? Much less how to pursue it?
Say what you will about the French – but they always have a clear-cut, well thought out idea of what “French national interests” are. When the French regained their sovereignty in 1945, Charles De Gaulle – a military man – sought to never, ever repeat the rudderless miasma of all French policy in the thirties – and the achieved it, and left a legacy that has largely honored that ideal.
Forget about Barack Obama’s “red lines” drawn in dry erase marker; French national interests are circumscribed with thick, high contrast black lines.
If something takes place outside that thick, black line? The French don’t care, and won’t waste time, blood or treasure on it.
Something slips across that thick black line?
The French deal with it. Sometimes they deal with it via means that would offend American sensibilities, to say nothing of legalities; diplomatic muscle, paying proxies to do very, very dirty work, helicopters full of commandos or a well-placed sniper bullet or a battalion of the Foreign Legion debouching from airplanes to push the offenders to the other side of the black line – dead or alive, they don’t much care.
Thing is, America has defined its national interest behind thick black lines, and made it stick, in the past; the Monroe doctrine was a good example. Manifest destiny and it’s Jacksonian undercurrents are, perhaps, examples we might be a little less proud of.
Defending the nation and its vital interests is one of the very, very few legitimate reasons to have a government at all; the free market does just about everything else better. Especially in America. Or at least it did.
But in this area, the French have it all over us.
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