S.’s Email Continued

Poor France. So long as the old bipolar world was engaged in high-stakes nuclear poker, its independent force de frappe gave it leverage with both East and West. Though without much conventional strength, the French nevertheless could warrant respect from the Soviet Union since, in theory, they had the power to take out Moscow. Despite having a pitiful conventional deterrent, France was nevertheless courted by the United States as a strategic bulwark against the rising nuclear arsenals of China and Russia.No longer. In today’s world, except along the Pakistani-Indian border and in North Korea, there are no real reasons for the club of nuclear powers to go to war with one another. Instead, deterrence against rogue regimes and terrorist enclaves — which cannot be nuked, or threatened with nukes — means deploying special operatives and costly conventional forces of which France is pitifully short. It can blow up the planet with its few hundred aging missiles, but it wouldn’t have been able to deal with the menace of a rag-tag Taliban in Afghanistan even if al Qaeda had smoked the Louvre.The demise of the Soviet Union also created this strange thing called “Old” and “New” Europe, as all of a sudden half a continent was transmogrified not merely from enemies to neutrals, but in fact to rather close friends. All those American characteristics that so bothered sophisticated Western Europeans — our deep distrust of socialism, our embrace of religion, our emphasis on free will and individualism, our very brashness — in fact endeared us to the newly liberated Eastern Europeans, who faulted us not from the left, for our knee-jerk anti-Communism, but rather from the right, on the grounds that we did not use force earlier to fight Stalinism in 1947, 1956, and 1968.But nowhere is the ghost of the Soviet Union more evident than in the Middle East. And the changed circumstances involve much more than the end of tolerance for conniving right-wing despots looking to prevent commissars from controlling the world’s oil supply. We have gained some flexibility — with perhaps more to come — from the idea that Russia is now itself a vast oil exporter and in some ways serves our interests in lessening the world’s dependence on Gulf oil. Today’s Russians want to sell more of their own petroleum, not take over that of others.The Arabs fought four major wars against Israel — in 1947, 1956, 1967, and 1973 — but none since. Why? Have the leaders of Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq come to their senses, and thus entertained kinder and gentler notions about the Jewish state? Or was it instead that there was no longer a nuclear Russia around to threaten the United States on about day four or five of such conflicts, warning us to call off the Israelis lest they park their own tanks in Cairo or Damascus?Surely the absence of such a nuclear patron explains the present reluctance of conventional states to attack Israel. Tel-Aviv’s neighbors accept that there is nothing between their own aggression and a humiliating defeat except their own degree of military prowess — or rather lack of it. Mr. Arafat and his clique can deal with Mr. Sharon or Mr. Bush — or nobody. Quite literally, in the post-Cold War tumult, there is no one else left in the region with whom to barter and banter.