The New Republic (I know, I know, but the article was good) just ran a column by Peter Beinart on the Iraq war's tragic hero: Tony Blair. Like all tragic heroes, Blair's flaw (supporting the invasion) was rooted in his greatest strength (a belief in human rights and global governance). More interestingly, the article gives telling excerpts from his recent foreign policy speech in Washington that are
subtle criticisms of the Bush Administration.
The
column (requires subscription) starts by tracing the development of Blair's worldview, starting in the late 1990s:
He began developing it in the late '90s--in the wake of the East Asian financial crisis and the Kosovo war. In those two disparate events, Blair saw a common thread: interdependence. Thailand's corrupt banking system had almost helped spur a global financial meltdown; Slobodan Milosevic's aggression threatened to destabilize southeastern Europe. For Blair, the lesson was that, in a globalized world, countries export their problems--often across continents.
This view led Blair to back Bush's war cry. Blair, unlike Bush, actually believes in spreading democracy and enforcing human rights standards. That's why he pushed for ground troops in the Balkans while Clinton was still squemish, and sent British troops to stop hand-lobbing death squads in Sierra Leone. Helpfully, Beinart notes the difference between the Bush Doctrine and the Blair outlook:
First, for Bush, the lesson [of September 11th] only applied to terrorism (and, relatedly, to weapons of mass destruction). Second, for Bush, interdependence only flowed one way. In the war on terrorism, the Bush administration began aggressively demanding that other countries change their internal behavior. But, led by sovereignty-obsessives like John
Bolton, it still rejected any suggestion that interdependence required changing how the United States governed itself.
Then, we finally get to see Blair's frustration with his junior partner's arrogance. In a speech at Georgetown, Blair notes the problems that have developed in the wake of the Iraq invasion, the inability of the international community to save Darfur, and the troubled unilateralism of Bush:
And then Blair turned the knife. "What's the obstacle" to such efforts [at building effective international institutions], he asked? "It is that, in creating more effective multilateral institutions, individual nations yield up some of their own independence. This is a hard thing to swallow. . . . But the [alternative is] . . . ad-hoc coalitions for action that stir massive controversy about legitimacy or paralysis in the face of crisis. No amount of institutional change will ever work unless the most powerful make it work."
Tony Blair believes in multilateralism. In a book I recently looked through, meetings between Blair and Bush were often disrupted by Cheney, who disagreed with Blair's focus on gaining UN approval. Unfortunately, it looks like Blair will be leaving office in about a year, and a less exciting leader, Gordon Brown, will be taking over. Also, if the Labour Party continues to have political problems (they were creamed in the last local election and, to a lesser extent, in the last general election) then the Tories will take over again.
One final quote on Al Gore:
And [Blair's vision] dovetails nicely with the ideas of a more contemporary American liberal: Al Gore. Few remember it anymore, but, in the 2000 campaign, when Bush was talking about leaving other countries alone, Gore laid out a foreign policy doctrine called "forward engagement"--in which the United States would try to solve problems as close as possible to their source, before they metastasized into global threats. Blair ended his Georgetown speech by calling for "progressive preemption"--which means essentially the same thing.