In Praise and Pessimism of Multipolarity

Timothy Garton Ash has an interesting appreciation of Blair's brand of internationalism in today's LA Times. Ash got the Prime Minister on the phone and asked him "to give...a balance sheet of his foreign policy over the last decade. The essence of Blairism in foreign policy, he told me, is liberal interventionism." Ash digs through the history and lauds liberal interventionism in the cases of Kosovo and multilateralism, but in his rush to write off the "overwhelming red figure" of Iraq, he argues that to "describe it as a case of liberal interventionism is the greatest disservice anyone could do to the cause of liberal interventionism." That seems quite backwards: Liberal interventionism's great sin was to give us Iraq. If you want to redefine the approach in such a way that it won't abet such wars in the future, you have to actually do that, not just write off a conflict that easily sold on liberal interventionist grounds.

Looking forward, Ash writes:

Britain alone is no longer big enough to sway the hyperpower. What the U.S. needs is a friend big enough that Washington has to listen to it. That friend can only be a strong European Union, speaking with a single voice.

This seems an odd lesson to pull from the Blair years, given that Tony Blair obviously disagreed with Chirac, Schroeder, and other prominent European leaders. No conceivable EU could have stayed the British prime minister's hands during a moment of foreign policy disagreement. Moreover, George W. Bush didn't reward Blair's friendship with deference to Blair's policy priorities or efforts to favor Britain's agenda, but another president conceivably could have, and that incentive structure will make a unified EU all the harder. I find all this slightly dispiriting, as a strong, liberal counterweight would be a welcome addition to the world stage. But the EU will never be it, just as 52 North American countries all bound by trade agreements and a loose federation would've never seen President Howard Dean's sovereign country of Vermont going along with Texas's invasion of Iraq.