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March 7, 2003 4:10 p.m. War, At the Movies Foreign policy on the screen.

was talking to a French diplomat recently. No, seriously, I was. Stop laughing.

In order to spare him the grief that would inevitably rain down upon him were it to become widely known that he didn't slap me, I will conceal identifying details. Anyway, he's a very smart guy and very concerned about all of the things you'd expect him to be concerned about. When we got into our disagreements about how the world works, he made a strong case for what he calls "passive realpolitik" — it sounds very intellectual if you say it with a French accent.

The thinking behind the phrase is common on both sides of the Atlantic. Take the world as you find it. You can't change people. Assume the worst. Earth is a dark and dreary place and you pocket your winnings where and when you can. Don't ever bet big on optimistic scenarios. We live in an oasis, let "them" kill each other. Applied to the Arab and Muslim world, this outlook says "they" can't change. The best you can hope to do is manage the problem, but don't be a fool; don't try to solve it. Don't stick your neck out. Better to work with reliable thugs than with unpredictable idealists. Bribe bullies to leave you alone. Israel's real crime, for example, is that makes trouble for us. After all, the people who hate Israel don't mind dead Arabs or occupied countries. They don't care if Syria occupies Lebanon. They don't care if Saddam kills Iraqis. Israel is an inconvenience to the Westerners who want to go along and get along, because suicide bombing and war are just what "those" people do, and Westerners should know better.

Regardless, putting the inconvenient issue of Israel aside for a moment, it would be dishonest of me not to note that passive realpolitik is a very conservative and intellectually consistent way to look at world affairs. The international arena is a state of nature. Thankfully, realism went by the wayside during the Cold War as it became abundantly clear — to Reaganite conservatives, at least — that the Cold War was, first and foremost, a moral struggle. Reagan's rejection of détente and realism was at the core of our victory in the Cold War. I still think there's a role for realism where it comes to means, but if you don't have idealism in mind in terms of ends, you'll end up letting the world pull you in a direction not of your own choosing, to paraphrase Hayek. Being friends with sons-of-bitches in order to spread freedom and fight tyranny is entirely defensible; being friends with SOBs because it's convenient is immoral.

Now, I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty — everybody turn to page 716 in your Grotius Reader. Instead, I want to talk about movies.

I have a habit of asking, "What if this was a movie?" I've written about this before. The basic idea is to ask how we would boil down the facts of a given situation into a two-hour movie. This system doesn't really work for domestic policy all that often. "Lock Box II: 'Just when you thought it was safe to go back into entitlement reform…'" just doesn't glide off the tongue. But it does work pretty well in terms of foreign policy. You take a set of facts and think about turning it into a script, and you ask yourself a series of questions: Who would be the good guys and who would be the bad guys? What facts tell you the good guys are who you think they are? What facts will best communicate that to the audience? If it's hard for you to make the good guys into the good guys, why is that? And so on.

What got me thinking about this was the review of Tears of the Sun — the new Bruce Willis movie — in today's Washington Post. Stephen Hunter — my favorite movie reviewer — begins thus:

"Tears of the Sun" offers one of the greatest never-happened-but-should-have moments in movie history. An African death squad is in the process of destroying a village for the crime of belonging to the wrong tribe. They are shooting the men, raping and mutilating the women and getting rid of the kids any way that's convenient. They're laughing, they're drunk, they're having the time of their lives. But then they run into one very teed-off U.S. Navy SEAL team.

The pleasure of that moment is profound if subversive: Even you highly evolved, post-national pacifists out there will probably enjoy the spectacle of highly trained American commandos with suppressed weapons moving through the glades and lanes with the grace and purpose of athletes and — pffft! pffft! pffft! — serving up justice in 9mm portions, hot and steamy.

According to Hunter, Tears of the Sun is an explicit denunciation of America's refusal to do anything about the genocide in Rwanda. Hunter infers this, but it seems a safe assumption. Even if it's not, he makes my point. If you were an American director or producer and you were told to make an American film about America's role in the Rwandan genocide, you couldn't do it. As children were hacked to death and women raped in front of their husbands, you'd have to flash back to the United States and show Bill Clinton talking about mending but not ending affirmative action. You'd have to show Newt Gingrich saying a few words about giving laptops to inner-city blacks. You might find some noble comments about stopping genocide from Bob Dole, who's better on this sort of thing than most people realize. But in the end, you couldn't make the movie in an American way without rewriting the story into a fictionalized version — with Bruce Willis and his modern-day cavalry pffft! pffft! pffft-ing their way through the jungle.

A European director, on the other hand, could take the real facts and make a perfectly dreary Euro-noir film. He might follow, say, a Tutsi family who hopes to be saved by the Americans only to be disappointed at the last moment as the U.N. dickers. He could show Bill Clinton receiving word of the building slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and humane Hutus, only to demand that the U.N. peacekeepers sheltering Tutsi be withdrawn. He could then show Clinton explaining to the Rwandans that he hadn't known what was going on. And, with perfect dark irony, he could show how the Rwandans were happy to get that much of an apology from a Western leader, because in their dreary lives they expect no better. In fact, they've recently named a street after Clinton for his heroic admission that he could have done more.

Americans don't like gloomy movies. When the Dutch film, The Vanishing, was remade for American audiences, they had to change the dreary ending. (It didn't save the American movie from awfulness, by the way.) Sure, we have films like Paths of Glory and a host of Vietnam films. But they are exceptions to the rule. Indeed, Paths of Glory was supposed to have a happy ending: Kubrick managed to get the novel's original dreary one through only by sneaking the script past studio execs. With only a few exceptions, even our Vietnam movies tend to be morality tales — not nihilistic sighs, the way foreign war films are. Even Black Hawk Down, which in reality should have been a fatalistic film — the soldiers set out to "make a difference" and are ultimately heroes simply for surviving — was massaged into an ambiguous affair.

Now, I don't think just boiling everything down to a movie script is a great way to think about foreign policy. But I do think it can be an instructive exercise, because, in the most grossly generalized terms, movies tend to reflect the character of the cultures that produce them. Europeans can leave a theater intellectually or aesthetically satisfied by a film that treats evil like inconvenient rain — a problem to be avoided or dealt with but, ultimately, beyond your power to do anything about. Americans prefer to see cinematic evil as a problem to be solved. Maybe we can't stop it everywhere or for all time, but we don't turn our backs to it either. We're not fools, we're just not fatalistic.

Of course, foreign policy isn't a Hollywood pitch meeting. But I ask you: Look at Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Look at the torture, the brutality, and the invasions of his neighbors. Look at the government-trained rapists and the women they plied their trade against. Look at the gassed Kurds, the tongueless men mutilated for suggesting that Saddam wasn't Saladin. Sure, look at the big picture. Look at America helping Saddam and looking the other way. But also look at how America learned from its mistakes, even as the Europeans continued to look on Saddam's Republic of Fear as an opportunity to make a few bucks. Take in all the facts and imagine how you would turn it into a movie. And ask yourself: Who would be the good guys? Who would be the bad guys? And, how would you like it to end?