The grand playmaker: every so often TIE sits down with its old friend, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, to talk about the world. As always, he doesn't disappoint.

• Position: The World

What to Make of the French?

I've always believed that fundamentally Charles de Gaulle was trying to restore French pride after World War II by attempting to build a French empire in opposition to the United States. The heart of his whole approach was an attempt to put some strength back into the French psyche, and to create the old France again if he could from a nation that had never recovered from the costs of World War I. The French had fought themselves practically to the point of total exhaustion, never recovering from it either physically or psychologically again. They were really a pathetic performer in the Second World War. And basically de Gaulle succeeded.

De Gaulle's actions irritated a lot of people. He needed America in order to achieve his goal, and he was perfectly prepared to play the game at our cost, including booting us out of France and taking France out of NATO, all the time knowing perfectly well if anything really disastrous happened America would have no choice but to help anyway. But in the long run de Gaulle's actions came at a real cost to the alliance, and to U.S.-French relationships. But he took a country that didn't deserve the position it had and he made it into something.

Of course, this has led to some real problems ever since. The French now have a view of themselves they don't deserve. Nobody remembers that the French have a veto in the UN Security Council only because of the largess of the United States and the United Kingdom, and that they had a role of the occupation of Berlin only because the United States and the United Kingdom were prepared to give it to them. Thus, the French now occupy a position in the UN that their specific gravity doesn't give them any right to.

And now French President Jacques Chirac has grossly overdone it. He made a terrible mistake in opposing the United States over the Iraq situation because now France's real worth is showing in ways that it had not before. France played it as part of that long-term strategy--but I think de Gaulle would have played it quite differently. Chirac and the French nation saw this as an opportunity to take the French-German partnership and try to form it into the nucleus of a Europe in opposition to the United States, and the Germans for a while played the second fiddle to this operation. The Germans are now having second thoughts, and Chirac really made a mistake by telling the East Europeans to shut up and behave themselves. While the East Europeans want into the European Community, they sided with us over Iraq because they know why it is they're free, and because they know in the long run that a Europe centered on France and Germany just isn't enough.

If there was a rationale behind French and German opposition to the Iraq war other than this intestinal reaction, it was the idea that here was a chance to add another building block to Europe--in opposition to the United States--with France as the senior partner and Germany as the junior partner. Of course there were the commercial concerns, though I don't argue that those were really part of the real reasons for opposition.

How the United States Should Behave As a Superpower

That gets me back to a fundamental point. We Americans must understand that once we became the world's only superpower, under almost any circumstances when we decide to take a controversial position and particularly when we decide to use force, most of the rest of the world will automatically reject our decision simply because they will feel jealousy, concern that we are going to be unwise as they think we Americans always are, and disdain because we throw our weight around and we're unsophisticated.

Balanced against the more legitimate concern about our tendencies toward unilateralism and impatience with consultation is the fundamental fear of the American imperial tendency. This preemptive war becomes an element of American foreign policy. As the world's only superpower, nobody can really stand in our way, and now that there's no Soviet Union for the rest of the world to be scared about, they are scared about us.

Rating Tony the Tiger

Prime Minister Tony Blair has shown remarkable courage. He honestly believes in what he's done. Also, try to imagine a British prime minister turning his back on the connection between our two countries. He would have been able to manage it in public relations terms at first, because obviously his own Labour Party and probably the body politic in the United Kingdom would have supported him because they didn't like the war...