U.S. and Soviet Images Shift in France

In the East-West confrontation, images are as important a part of reality as the objective factors, such as the arms race. On this count the Soviet Union lately has fared better than the United States. Here in France the combination of Reykjavik and the Iran arms scandal has helped revive an old negative image of the United States. At the same time, the Soviet Union is enjoying a new and more positive image under the impulse of an energetic and dynamic leader who is beating Ronald Reagan at his own game of public relations.

In the early 1980s America’s regained assertiveness and nationalism reassured Europeans. Reagan looked young in spite of his age, compared to the gerontocratic Soviet leadership. The Soviet Union had just entered Afghanistan, and the two superpowers were engaged in a major test of will and diplomacy over Euromissiles.

America’s strength and determination were welcomed by a Socialist France that had to prove its reliability as a partner in spite of the communist presence in the government. French-U.S. relations thrived for a few exceptional years, but now are entering an accelerated process of dissatisfaction, disillusion and erosion.

France’s refusal to allow its air space to be used at the time of the U.S. raid over Libya reopened in America emotional wounds that were only superficially closed. As seen from the United States, the selfish, shortsighted French could not be relied on; they had stooped to oil pressures in the ‘70s, and now in the ‘80s were being accommodating to terrorists (not unlike the Americans themselves).

On the French side, disillusion came later and was less emotional, but maybe more profound. France’s security depends on the United States, not the reverse; one cannot allow emotion to get in the way. But the combination of Reykjavik and the Iran affair was most disturbing--a daring, unprepared diplomatic venture and a self-defeating, bureaucratic one. In Reykjavik, Reagan gave the impression of joining the “revisionists” who are trying to define a world beyond nuclear deterrence, and, in the name of morality, to undermine the stability based on a balance of terror.

Beyond the traditional French fear of superpower domination there was also a specific strategic apprehension that the benefits of the Euromissile diplomatic victory would be lost in a new military imbalance in Europe. More specifically, there was fear that French nuclear forces would in one way or another be counted in any future negotiation.

The Iran arms-for-hostages deal could only confirm the uneasiness growing here since last fall. Not only were the Americans unpredictable, amateurish and adventurist, but also their diplomacy was unreliable, incompetent and a captive to their democratic and bureaucratic processes.

This latest scandal is producing hard questions among America’s allies--the French in particular, with their concern for raison d’etat in foreign policy. Is there a fatalistic warp in America’s foreign policy-making? Is U.S. diplomacy doomed to inefficiency by the very fact that it is the product of one of the most complex democratic systems in the world? The intricate checks and balances between the executive and Congress, the sophisticated but suicidal games within the executive, could at most fit an isolationist America. They do not correspond to the foreign-policy needs of the world’s leading power.

France is linked to the United States by common interest and a geography of values centered on a common democratic ideal. But the very vicissitudes and requirements of democracy lie at the root of most of the existing dysfunction of the alliance.

The return to a more traditional image of the United States here, characterized by a certain dose of condescendence and irritation, would be less preoccupying if it was not occuring at a time when the Soviet image is also, in a more subtle manner, transforming itself.

Because the French intelligentsia had to make up for its long infatuation with “the motherland of socialism,” the French were more negative toward the Soviet Union than were most of their European partners in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This phase of discovery of the “evil nature” of the Soviet Union gave way slowly in 1984-85 to a phase that could be characterized as one of “banalization of evil.” The Soviet Union was not going to improve its human-rights record, or moderate its world ambitions, or open its society. But since there was little that could be done to influence the processes going on in the Soviet Union, France felt that it was better to resign itself to the inevitable, to adapt, to resume dialogue and to attempt normalization, as the United States already had begun to do.

Today that premise is entering a new phase. Polls suggest that the French are not impervious to the new Soviet image offered by Mikhail S. Gorbachev. What if at long last something was happening? What if glasnost meant something? What if a new treatment of artists and dissidents was more than a propaganda trick? Could there be less centralization in Gorbachev’s call for democracy in the party? At a time when the Iran fiasco revealed the underside of democratic behavior, some might be tempted to make much of Soviet changes.

By essence public opinion is volatile, and images are easily influenced. It is difficult to distinguish between the trendy and the trend. But for all those who believe in an alliance forged between nations that share a common democratic ideal, recent trends are worth worrying about, even if their significance should not be exaggerated. Ultimately each side knows how to recognize its foes and its friends. Whatever his shortcomings, superficiality and incompetence, Reagan has contributed to the renewal of Americans’ morale and national self-confidence. Whatever his imagination, “openness” or talent as a public-relations man, Gorbachev will not transform a totalitarian regime into an open society.