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David Adesnik, a research analyst in Washington DC, received his doctorate in international relations from Oxford.

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Saturday, October 26, 2002

# Posted 8:10 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

ONE WORD: FRANCE. While I sympathize with you, Josh, I think it's important to recognize that the anti-Milosevic coalition was broader than the current anti-Iraq front in that it included France, Germany and other European states. There was little concern with winning UN support because the world's great democracies were behind the mission. Now that the great democracies are divided, the UN has assumed a role as a forum for debate. Unfortunately, this has entailed granting excessive authority to the semi-dictatorial governments of Russia and China. But that is a price that European opponents of the American president are willing to pay.

Still, one should note a certain hypocrisy on the part of France, Germany and those other European states who now insist that UN validation is necessary before using force. Moreover, those nations did have a concrete security interest in the Balkan crisis (as opposed to the United States' ideological interest). Thus, it might be best to say that France, Germany, et al. don't believe that interest-based missions demand greater multilateralism, but that the United States behaves recklessly when its interests are on the line (cf. "the Cold War"), thus leading them to be suspicious of it.
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