France Overestimates Its Mideast Role

Now that it has been more than two weeks since the last terrorist bombing in Paris, the terrorism debate has given way to a more fundamental interrogation on the validity of France’s Middle East policy.

Is France the victim of the divergence between its ambitions and its abilities? Has its overreaching been aggravated by successive policies that combined excessive shrewdness with insufficient will? Can the Middle East fit France’s ambition to transcend a purely regional role when it has turned out to be an area of high vulnerability even for the superpowers?

The Middle East always has been for France a region of interest and influence, and this is not the first time that France’s policy there has caused political trouble at home.

Always Great Britain’s junior as a colonial power in the Middle East, France was humiliated at the end of World War II when the British pushed the French out of Syria and Lebanon. In 1956, during the Suez crisis, both France and Great Britain were humiliated when the dual veto of the superpowers exposed the anachronistic character of such a colonial venture in the region.

Excessive ambitions such as those demonstrated in 1956 were too often accompanied by a tradition of unbalanced stances. During the Algerian War, a common anti-Arab position led France to an overly close relationship with Israel. Once liberated from the Algerian albatross, France under President Charles de Gaulle sought to reestablish its influence in the Arab world, a prerequisite for reestablishing its influence elsewhere in the Third World.

From an unbalanced pro-Israeli position, France shifted to an equally unbalanced pro-Arab one. Curtailing its close relationship with Israel, France became after 1967 the first European country to establish a special relationship with the Arab world, by providing military assistance that had before mainly benefited Israel, as part of a globally ambitious arms-sales policy.

After 1973, another element, oil, reinforced the pro-Arab dimension of France’s policy. While defending the principle of Israel’s right to exist, France stressed, under President Giscard d’Estaing, the centrality of the Palestinian national question, and after 1977 maintained a policy of aloofness concerning the peace process initiated by President Anwar Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem. France successfully drew the European Community toward this orientation, yet European unity failed to influence events in the Middle East.

France’s particular friendship with Iraq in the mid-1970s was aimed at procuring profitable markets and cheap, albeit not secure, oil supplies. This rapprochement with Baghdad--which led France to go so far as to build Iraq a nuclear reactor, which then was destroyed by the Israelis--also had the advantage of allowing a Western presence in a country that had become seemingly too dependent on the Soviet Union. The elegant, Kissingerian division of spheres of interest between the French in Baghdad and the Americans in Tehran did not survive the fall of the Shah in 1978 and the subsequent military ambitions of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein.

A policy that was initially meant to provide France with a secure energy source eventually evolved into a situation of physical insecurity, first for the French forces in Lebanon, then for French citizens at home, as the waves of violence spread out of the Lebanese quagmire.

France’s Mideast policy has in reality suffered from three sins: a lack of modesty, a lack of balance and a lack of firmness. France should have refused to listen to the seductive call of interested “sirens” (Palestinians, and so forth) flattering us into playing a role that did not fit our means. By trying to seduce France and Europe, these forces merely wanted to exert indirect pressures on the Americans, knowing full well France’s limited capabilities.

This lack of modesty, this tendency to overestimate national means and under-estimate challenges, was aggravated in its negative consequences by a manipulative diplomacy that too often used shrewdness as an excuse for capitulation, and led to many unfortunate meetings, such as the one in Crete between Col. Moammar Kadafi and President Francois Mitterrand.

This combination of vanity and weakness proved devastating. The proclaimed need to maintain contact with the radical element of the Arab world led too often to a policy of compromise that played an important role in the recent selection of France as a choice target of the terrorists.

Recent events, at least, have the merit of opening the debate on France’s Mideast role. It is highly significant that at the very moment France seems bogged down in the Middle East, it is capable of showing its decisive influence in Francophone Africa.

But the Middle East is not Africa. The Mideast stakes are infinitely greater and the required military might incomparable. The present debate on France’s Mideast policy has the merit of breaking a taboo. The British process of disentanglement from the Middle East might have had negative consequences for the West, but it had positive results for Britain. France should not abandon the Middle East but it should seek a new role based on clarity, balance and modesty.