Thomas L. Friedman at the New York Times talks about France:
It’s time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.
If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq’s transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq.
Read it all, though it doesn’t say much that hasn’t already been written in this space, as well as many others. Clearly, France is a rogue nation. UN sanctions all around!
(Thanks to Merde in France for the pointer)
The EU is America’s enemy and will be her undoing, but those Romans will get theirs in the end though whether they be French, German or American.
Read the end of THE BOOK, the good guys win.
I expect David is joking to some degree about France being a rogue nation, or at least I hope he is. The fact is that Thomas J. Friedman is simply wrong about France becoming our enemy, although he may indeed be right about France no longer being an ally. France is a nation that has different interests than our own and has a perfectly understandable right as a sovereign nation to pursue them. I may regard those interests as inimical to our own, but that doesn’t make France an enemy. Nations become enemies only when their vital national interests become irreconcilable, as were those of the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, and we are a long way from that at present with France.
I am not defending those French interests, although I do empathize with them from a historical perspective. I am defending the sovereign right of France, only 70 years ago one of the world’s great powers, to pursue a foreign policy independent of the United States. The French are not pursuing evil foreign policy objectives, they have no designs on the territory of any other nation, although they are extremely jealous about their own backyard, and they have been a key player in the war on terrorism over the last 35 years. Carlos the Jackel and many others are now residing in French prisons and anyone who has visited France over the last 40 years, has seen submachine gun-armed soldiers and national police guarding every public building and transportation hub from the Eiffel Tower to the Chunnel station in Calais.
All of this is not to say that France is not an obstructionist power in the U.N. and in the European Union from an American perspective. They can be a pain in the ass for us and look to remain so. Perhaps some people in the French government even wish for an American failure in Iraq, but I don’t think that is in the interests of France and I strongly suspect President Chirac and his closest advisors know this. What they would like to see, as Mr. Friedman did point out, is a U.N.-sponsored, somewhat democratic and more benign Iraqi government, less influenced by American power with a greater role for France and the EU. They have a vested interest in a stable Iraq in a less volatile Middle East with guaranteed access to Iraqi oil. These are quite reasonable aims and very similar to our own; the difference being in how to obtain them.
The alliance between France and the United Sates came about because we were threstened throughout the 20th century by common enemies. In a sense, we are the victims of own success, because those common enemies from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Adolf Hitler to Ho Chi Minh to Soviet Commmunism are all gone from the world stage. That returns our relationship more to what it was in the 19th century, when relations were generally good, but frequently became strained over the pursuit of different national aims.
I am always the first to argue that France should be more appreciative of the American sacrifices in blood and treasure that saved France from her enemies, and I say this to Frenchmen all the time via the internet. However, the sacrifices were made for our own national interests as well as to secure the freedom of France. And we should not complain too much, if the France that we fought and sacrificed so much to free, does on occasion act like a sovereign nation. NATO was never meant to be like the Warsaw Pact. It is an alliance of sovereign states, not a slavish collection of satellites. As with all alliances, once the threat has been removed, as in 1763, 1815, 1918, 1945 and 1991, they rarely hold together in peacetime. That may be tragic, frustrating and a detriment to the establishment of anything resembling a new world order, let alone the Biblical Millenium, but it is the pattern of history. I suggest to David and Jericho as well as to Mr. Friedman of the Times that they accept this and settle down to play the long and Machiavellian Great Game with our French, German, Russian and Chinese friends. As Mr. Disraeli said of the British Empire in the last century, “We have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.” That is how the French look at things and so should we.