Hezbollah’s military setbacks offer Paris a rare opportunity to play a major role in solving a major global problem
France, a tragedy of imperial rise and fall, is back in the big game.
Ever attentive to the outer world’s events, Paris got word of our war and decided to do something about it. “Let’s convene a conference,” said someone in the Quai d’Orsay, the 170-year-old Parisian palace of French diplomacy. Soon enough a date – next Thursday – was indeed set for yet another quixotic effort to pull Lebanon out of the abyss.
The planned gathering’s participants have yet to be officially announced at this writing, but analysts believe it will include Arab and Western government representatives alongside leaders of Lebanon’s religious sectors.
For its Lebanese participants, the conclave’s Parisian setting will surely constitute a welcome reprieve from the war that bedevils them as much as it bedevils us. Other than that, this umpteenth French attempt to mimic a superpower is likely to end up reflecting France’s journey from greatness through tragedy to farce. And that’s a shame, because events now actually offer Paris a once-in-a-century chance to play a major role in solving a major global problem.
The empire lived on
FRANCE’S IMPERIAL tragedy began even before its revolution, when it lost the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). “After us, the deluge,” said Louis XV after having lost in that conflict much of his intercontinental realm.
France’s imperial tragedy was multiplied the following century, when Napoleon sold to the US, for $15 million, a landmass more than five times the size of today’s Germany. Finally, last century, France was compelled to fold most if its remaining empire in a grand retreat sealed by Charles de Gaulle’s departure from Algeria.
The empire that once inhabited more than 5% of mankind and encompassed nearly one-10th of the planet had thus come to an end.
Even so, emotionally the empire lived on, as a source of both pride and frustration: on the one hand, people remembered that France was once the world’s leading superpower. On the other hand, they realized it had been militarily defeated, geographically marginalized, and politically dislodged.
Understandably, some were irked by this thought, an attitude that produced mistakes, like de Gaulle’s attempt to challenge America’s domination of NATO, or Jacques Chirac’s detonation of an atomic bomb in the Pacific in disregard of an outcry from Australia through Greenpeace to Japan.
The Middle East, too, was occasionally on this postimperial syndrome’s receiving end, most memorably in spring 1967, when France suspended arms shipments to Israel in an attempt to strong-arm the embattled Jewish state as a major Arab-Israeli war loomed.
Such imperial posturing only resulted in France’s humiliation: America’s domination of NATO proved unquestionable, and the attempt to bully Israel resulted in its decision to ignore France and unwittingly expose France’s irrelevance.
Now, as war rages between Gaza and Beirut, the postimperial syndrome resurfaced in two of its familiar forms: misfiring and farce.
The misfiring came when French President Emmanuel Macron said he would suspend arms shipments that Israel might use for waging attacks in Gaza. Embarrassingly, it turned out Israel does not import offensive weapons from France. As for what it does import, it adds up to less than an annual $40m., hardly a fraction of a multibillion-dollar military machine.
The farce was that shortly after Macron announced it, he reversed course, and his office said there was no embargo.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, France’s imperial greatness is history, but its empire is not fully gone, and its weight, if measured soberly and deployed wisely, can still be leveraged effectively, especially where Paris now so much wants to matter – Lebanon.
France's role in rebuilding Lebanon
STRETCHING FROM New Caledonia east of Australia to French Guinea north of Brazil, and even to some uninhabited islets west of Mexico, France’s overseas possessions are more than five times the size of Israel. Beyond these possessions lurk centuries of priceless international experience.
Yes, much of that experience was problematic and also immoral, but it did make France understand the world better than most other governments. That certainly goes for Lebanon, where France created the complex political system that functioned well, and produced a thriving economy, until the civil war’s outbreak in 1975.
Does this mean that France should now return to run Lebanon? Of course not. Lebanon’s political rehabilitation must be Arab-led, the way its civil war ended with the Saudi-brokered Taif Agreement of 1989. However, to get anywhere, a redesigned Lebanon will need military guidance and international support, which France can well deliver.
A redesigned Lebanon will have to rest on three pillars: military, political, and economic. The political imperative is to retrieve Lebanon from Iran’s bosom. Everyone understands that Lebanon has been the victim of a hostile takeover, whereby its Shi’ite minority – an estimated one-third of the population – was used by Tehran’s mullahs to hijack Lebanon’s government and turn its land into a tool of Tehran’s military adventurism and religious zeal.
Now, with Hezbollah bludgeoned, Lebanese leaders speak openly about the need to restore Lebanese politics, which has been so paralyzed that they couldn’t even install a president. The economy, once the Middle East’s financial hub, now stares at double-digit unemployment, triple-digit inflation, six-digit paper money and 12-digit foreign debt.
Then again, Lebanon’s restoration cannot begin with politics, or the economy. It will have to begin with the armed forces, a task that will boil down to all Lebanese militias’ disarmament and the Lebanese Army’s empowerment. Only then will Lebanon be able to have a credible government and a functioning economy.
France can make this happen. It has a real army, one that can build the Lebanese military from scratch, the way the British built last century Jordan’s fine army. Such a French-built army could help restore Lebanon’s freedom, tolerance, and vigor, and also a measure of France’s pride.
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.