Sarkozy won't win over Europe by looking like Blair - by William Pfaff
It is difficult to see what France's new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, expects from his effort to reconcile France with the United States, which so far has seemed rather confused.
Early in his campaign to succeed Jacques Chirac as France's president, he described Iran as the greatest threat to contemporary international society. That seemed to align him with the United States, reversing France's previous policy. During the last two weeks, he and his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, have provoked controversy in France and internationally -- above all in Germany -- with their comments on Iran. Kouchner innocently started it by saying that war with Iran is the "worst" thing that might happen in this situation, and governments had to acknowledge that possibility. Presumably he had in mind a U.S. attack on Iran, but made it sound as if France might go to war too.
If Sarkozy wants to lead Europe, he'll have to accomplish that with what he does in Europe, not in Washington. Why reintegrate a moribund NATO, whose other members are dropping out of its ill-conceived mission in Afghanistan, and which has just been forced by lack of allied support to abandon its plan for a permanent intervention force? Whatever the future of NATO, it's no longer an alliance of supposed equals, in which France could expect to flourish. It's Team U.S.A. now, and it's not winning.
1 comment:
It never was a "team of equals" and it is more and more "the Pentagon's toolbox" as one American diplomat, L/ Wayne Merry called it
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