The Modern Gladstone; A fresh look at Blair's activist compunction.(Tony Blair)(Book Review)

Byline: Andrew Nagorski

There's a huge irony in the uproar over the no-show horror weaponry in Iraq. As Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens points out in "Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader" (265 pages. Viking ), the British prime minister would have been happier arguing the case for war on humanitarian grounds. For Blair, "ending the tyranny in Iraq was a moral cause fully in accord with the teachings on just wars of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas," Stephens writes.

Although Stephens set out to explain Blair to American readers, his new biography has generated headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. Among its juicier assertions: Blair told close aides that Jacques Chirac was "out to get him" because the French president believed he was usurping his role as Europe's leader; and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, in the words of a Blair aide, was a "visceral unilateralist" who "waged a guerrilla war against the process" of trying to win Security Council support for action against Iraq. All of which makes for a fascinating read, but risks obscuring the larger issues Stephens's artful portrait raises.

The largest is what constitutes multilateralism and unilateralism. Stephens portrays Blair as someone who believes in forging broad international alliances. That's why he and his team were infuriated by Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose to-hell-with-everybody-else approach undermined their efforts.

But it doesn't take a lot of reading between the lines to see Chirac's behavior as evidence that European leaders often cloak personal and national agendas in multilateralist garb. Beyond the Blair-Chirac tensions, Stephens could have mentioned other parts of the record. For all his invocations of the ...