Developing Any Multilateral Policy Requires Not Insulting Faithful Allies
by Charles Ganske

In a recent debate for the Democratic candidates in Wisconsin, Senator Kerry was asked by reporter Craig Gilbert, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Do you have any degree of responsibility having voted to give him (President Bush) the authority to go to war?” Kerry’s reply to the question included a telling phrase, “what we did was vote with one voice of the United States Congress for a process—the process was to build a legitimate international coalition, go through the inspections process, and go to war as a last resort.” Kerry’s use of this phrase prompted pundit Andrew Sullivan to ask in the New Republic magazine, “Was the Clinton Kosovo war the product of an ‘illegitimate coalition’? Is Kerry now saying that only UN-sponsored coalitions are henceforth kosher? What signal does this send to those many countries who did join the coalition?”

Kerry’s remark at this forum was not the first time he has dismissed the contributions of the nations that joined the United States in toppling Saddam Hussein and reconstructing Iraq. In comments published in the Des Moines Register on March 9, 2003, Kerry declared, “The greatest position of strength is by exercising the best judgment in the pursuit of diplomacy, not in some trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and extorted, but in a genuine coalition.”

Just in case there was doubt that Kerry had changed his mind since the end of the Iraq war, he repeated the charge in a December 2003 interview with Rolling Stone, “The President made a series of promises of promises to us—number one, that he was going to make every effort possible to build a legitimate coalition. He did not—he built a fraudulent coalition.”

Kerry’s repeated statements on the issue of allies beg critical questions. What exactly constitutes a ‘legitimate coalition’? Kerry supported the NATO campaign against Serbia under Milosevic in 1999, in which the U.S. acted without the support of the United Nations Security Council. So we hope it is safe to assume that the Senator does not believe that a legitimate coalition requires a UN mandate. But what exactly does he mean?

The next question is how a President Kerry intends to win more support for American foreign policy abroad by insulting those governments that have stood by us thus far.

There are now 10,000 troops, representing several European allies, under Polish command in southern Iraq. The Poles for their part have not been able to obtain the same privileged visa-free status that French and German travelers now hold to enter the United States. This remains State Department policy in spite of the fact that France and Germany, unlike Poland, are known to have terrorist cells operating on their soil.

Polish companies have found lucrative reconstruction contracts scarce in the new Iraq. So the Senator’s charge of a coalition of the ‘bribed’ doesn’t fit the facts, though such charges are heard loud and clear by the opposition in Warsaw. Indeed, they ask reasonably: why should we stick our necks out for Uncle Sam when there is so little quid pro quo, and the opposition party in America accuses us of being stooges? All of this comes on the heels of strains in Poland’s relations with its new EU partners, and sneering comments in major German publications referring to Poland as ‘America’s Trojan donkey’ within the E.U.

Then there is the small matter of what could happen in the future if a President Kerry decided that military action had become unavoidable, and sought the support of the European Union.

If France and Germany were to oppose the U.S., Kerry’s Administration would find itself without friends among Europe’s ‘medium sized’ powers, Spain, Italy and Poland. Sending the none-too-subtle message that Warsaw and Rome should have deferred to their betters in Paris and Berlin is hardly going to win back support from the two largest nations at the heart of the EU, and in fact is more likely to earn their contempt. They would correctly perceive that Kerry sacrificed the principle of ‘Presidents, Prime Ministers come and go’ in favor of pandering to a miniscule element of the American electorate, while being challenged by Governor Howard Dean.

Within Germany, this principle was invoked by opponents of Chancellor Schroeder in 2002, after he made opposition to a war Germany had not been asked to participate in the centerpiece of his campaign. Now it is Chancellor Schroeder’s government which may be on its way out, and the opposition Christian Democrats who urged a quiet, behind the scenes dissent towards Washington may yet reap the benefits.

Kerry’s calculus thus makes little sense even from the standpoint of mending fences with Paris and Berlin.

The Bush Administration has sent American troops to operate alongside their French counterparts to restore order in Haiti, and hosted Chancellor Schroeder to discuss Germany leading the NATO peacekeeping effort in Afghanistan. France also has quietly, according to the U.S. Central Command’s website, contributed troops and airlifts to ongoing NATO operations in Central Asia.

Kerry’s defenders may cry foul, pointing to the alleged vilification of France by the Bush Administration in the run-up to war in Iraq. While this ‘an eye for an eye’ argument might satisfy partisans, it does nothing to address the question of whether the nation will in fact have a less ‘’ideological’ foreign policy, as Senator Kerry argues is his goal.

Politics of course has never ‘stopped at the water’s edge,’ and vigorous and even fierce debate is historically the American way of foreign policy making.

But if there is to be hope for ‘moving on’ to a new bipartisan foreign policy, the debate must not be poisoned by insults directed against both the governments that supported the Bush Administration in Iraq and those who did not.

–From the May 2004 Austin Review