That job, in fact, changed on Sept. 11. Blair knew America would “put its entire strength into dealing with the perpetrators,” he said in an interview last week. And he knew Britain would join the battle: “I don’t really see how you can see it any differently.” Perhaps more quickly than any other statesman besides Bush himself, Blair saw his world changing–and acted. He quickly became de facto secretary of State of the coalition. He speaks to Bush about twice a week. But he is no lapdog. Downing Street coordinates its movements and messages with the White House but is not controlled by it. In the process, says Philippe Moreau Defarges of the French Institute for International Relations, “Blair has essentially imposed himself as the leader of Europe since the attacks.”
With evangelistic fervor, Blair has seized the day not just in Europe. Speaking as a European and backed by American clout, he has been instrumental in keeping the coalition together. Right before the bombing began, he shifted the focus of his shuttle diplomacy. Two weeks ago he dropped in on Pakistan and India, hoping to soothe Afghanistan’s nervous neighbors. Last week he hopscotched across the Middle East as opposition to the bombing rose up in the street and rattled the palaces of Arab leaders.
The news was not good. True, in Cairo, President Hosni Mubarak said Egypt stood “united and tough” against terrorism. And yes, a senior British official assured reporters that when Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman met with Blair, he agreed with the prime minister that “the ‘Al Qaeda doctrine’ is a perversion of all the true teachings of the Islamic faith.” But Blair’s people were papering over the underlying message: the coalition was faring badly in the souks and universities of the Arab world and indeed in all countries with large Muslim populations. “The leaders are with us,” said the British official, but they all have a “genuine problem” with popular sentiment and unrest. That became obvious when Blair scrubbed a trip to Saudi Arabia last week. His aides said the visit was simply “logistically impossible.” But the Arab press reported that the Saudi royal family, worried about the impact of the bombing, begged off.
Blair’s team saw much of this coming and adjusted accordingly. He can do so nimbly, for he runs his patch of the war with an inner circle of half a dozen people. Having taken care at home to say the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam, he now took his message beyond Britain–most dramatically a few days after the Qatar-based satellite-TV channel Al-Jazeera broadcast Osama bin Laden’s latest threats against America. Blair summoned an Al-Jazeera correspondent to Downing Street to get his own line out: “This is not about the West versus the Muslims. We do not want revenge, we want justice.”
He followed up that gambit with an even riskier one: taking an anti-bin Laden message directly to the terrorists’ supporters. Blair’s strategists reckon that Arab and Muslim leaders cannot do that without offending their own people. So last week Blair wrote an article sent to all British diplomatic postings in Muslim countries, with instructions “to place in local media.” It read in part: “The tragedy is that Osama bin Laden is cynically exploiting people’s faith to divide East and West, Muslim and non-Muslim. He and his supporters are inciting murder in the name of Islam and undermining the interests and welfare of Muslim communities across the globe.”
This strategy reflects Blair’s resolve. “We have to win this war on every front, including the battle for hearts and minds,” he said. As the propaganda war suggests, Blair’s approach to terrorism is risk-filled and hard-line. Yet it has caused little consternation among his European allies. For now, anyway, Blair benefits to some extent from the moral authority history has bequeathed to Britain. “Can you imagine the reaction abroad if a German Defense minister said, ‘We’re at war now’?” said Henning Riecke of the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Blair’s approach is also unsurprising. His resolve is typically steeled by a crisis that he can define in moral terms. The world got a taste of this during the war in Kosovo. Blair was the only leader within NATO who seriously considered sending in ground troops. He sought to explain his hawkishness in what came be known as his “Just War” speech. The actual title–“The Doctrine of International Community”–more clearly explains Blair’s mind-set. Having embraced the philosophy of communitarianism as a student at Oxford, Blair believes that as members of the international community, we have the same responsibilities abroad that we have to our local communities. In the case of Kosovo, that meant stopping ethnic cleansing and stopping Slobodan Milosevic.
In the case of the atrocities of Sept. 11, the Blair Doctrine, as it should be called, means stopping terrorism and stopping Osama bin Laden. Blair spelled this out during his speech to the Labour Party. “Round the world,” he said, “11 September is bringing governments and people to reflect, consider and change… There is a coming together.” As countries unite in coalition to fight terrorism, he said, “the power of community is asserting itself.” If Blair seems at peace with this new war, it is because he believes that it, too, is a just war. Given his prominent role in waging it, we can only hope there’s more of the prophet in him than the naif.
