Bloodless Coup

Take one for the team Butters (uh, Blair)

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s cover story on Tony Blair in the June 2004 issue of The Atlantic doesn’t cover a lot of new ground. But it does stress a point with interesting implications for international relations theory. George Bush leading the United States to war against Iraq can be explained by a number of familiar explanations. At one level it can be seen as a leading status quo power fighting a preventive war against a revisionist state. At another level it was a war based on the images, perceptions, beliefs and perhaps even the personality traits of the decision-making team in power in Washington. Other explanations deal with the status quo power wanting to maintain its strength in a region that is seen as being of vital interest, or in the maintenance of access to a vital resource. But what of Tony Blair’s decision to go to war? Why did he choose to take the United Kingdom into the war?

According to Wheatcroft Blair decided to do this in early 2002 because he felt that the United States fighting a unilateral war would be more damaging to international security than leaving Saddam Hussein in power. This has some interesting implications. First, it would seem to suggest that at least in the short term the recent writings encouraging the United States to be more cautious in its foreign policy lest it create a rival in Europe may be excessively dire. Blair’s support is indicative of the fact that at least in the U.K. there are likely to be leaders who will do what they can to prevent a fissure between the Americans and their current allies. But it is also abundantly clear that not everyone in the upper echelons of the political establishment in the U.K. feels that way, and a change in who resides on Downing St. could have greater implications than most Americans realize on the way that the world perceives American foreign policy.

Secondly, it raises the point of just how important legitimacy and trust are in international relations, and their key roles in establishing the possibility international cooperation. Among the few things that have (marginally) protected the Bush administration from its zealous efforts to run itself into the ground through unilateralist policies are actions pushed by Blair: the formation of the “coalition of the willing”, Blair’s frequent, moving comments about human rights abuses under Saddam Hussein, and the fact that Blair appears to have forced the Bush team to go to the United Nations. In and of themselves these might not seem like much – speeches, buying off some poor countries, spectacularly revealing the lack of political muscle that the world’s superpower has diplomatically under President Bush’s policies – but they gave something for supporters of the United States to latch on to. They showed that the United States wasn’t entirely throwing aside the world order it had largely built up over the last several decades, and provided political cover for those who felt like Blair but feared supporting an intensely unpopular United States. These were steps that the inept Keystone Cops in DC could build upon when a few key players who thought they were in charge finally realized that they could not remake Iraq in their image on their own by mid-2004. Going to the United Nations in 2002 and 2003 might have seemed a political mistake in the eyes of some, but it was likely very important in creating the possibility for the support of the United Nations that we are currently seeking.

Of course that Blair’s support was unusual among the leadership of the world’s leading states shows that many others do not feel the same need he does to foster American hegemony, and reinforces just how isolated the United States has become. It could be argued that in such an environment (an environment that seems here to stay while George Bush is in the White House) Blair is even more important. This suggests that while much IR scholarship focuses on state interests, we should always remember that state interests are perceived through human minds, and that the beliefs and perceptions of the individuals who run states have profound policy implications. It also provides another example of states choosing to go to war not so much because of a perceived threat as because of a strong desire to maintain the status quo and the alliances and norms associated with it. That Blair was willing to risk his own leadership on behalf of maintaining an international political structure that George Bush seems to be at best ambivalent to, and at worst hostile to, is a striking contrast.