Although Stephens set out to explain Blair to American readers, his new biography has generated headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. Among its juicier assertions: Blair told close aides that Jacques Chirac was “out to get him” because the French president believed he was usurping his role as Europe’s leader; and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, in the words of a Blair aide, was a “visceral unilateralist” who “waged a guerrilla war against the process” of trying to win Security Council support for action against Iraq. All of which makes for a fascinating read, but risks obscuring the larger issues Stephens’s artful portrait raises.
The largest is what constitutes multilateralism and unilateralism. Stephens portrays Blair as someone who believes in forging broad international alliances. That’s why he and his team were infuriated by Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose to-hell-with-everybody-else approach undermined their efforts.
But it doesn’t take a lot of reading between the lines to see Chirac’s behavior as evidence that European leaders often cloak personal and national agendas in multilateralist garb. Beyond the Blair-Chirac tensions, Stephens could have mentioned other parts of the record. For all his invocations of the international community, the French president famously told prospective EU members that they had missed an opportunity to “shut up” when they backed the United States on the eve of the Iraq war. And Chancellor Gerhard Schroder made it clear that Germany wouldn’t back action against Iraq even if the U.N. mobilized behind it, abandoning a postwar German foreign policy that had always resisted any go-it-alone approach.
In other words, the world doesn’t split neatly into European multilateralists and American unilateralists. In fact, Stephens’s depiction of Blair as the modern-day successor to William Gladstone, the 19th-century Liberal prime minister who espoused “ethical internationalism,” makes clear why Blair feels compelled to act–in Kosovo, Iraq or elsewhere–even without the U.N. mandate he’d prefer to have. In many ways, this echoes the Wilsonian streak in some of George W. Bush’s pronouncements, like his call for a democratic transformation of the Middle East. The difference is that Bush often appears to be only going through the motions when he appeals for international support for even the worthiest of aims.
Blair is as fervent as his American counterpart in believing that his country has a noble mission–a conviction grounded in strong Christian faith. As his government’s strategic defense review put it, Britain’s ambition is “to be a force for good in the world.” That’s a goal that sometimes cannot be reconciled with multilateralist concerns. The trick is knowing when the international community’s reservations are legitimate–and when they are an excuse for inexcusable inaction. Only “a leader of no little courage,” as Stephens sums up Blair, would presume to know the difference.
