A Commentary on Sarkozy in Washington

[Errigal]

Sarkozy in Washington
Paris, November 6, 2007

French President Nicolas Sarkozy keeps himself in the news. His American trip to Washington was preceded by a lightning visit to Chad to rescue some of the people being held in connection with a bizarre expedition by volunteer French firemen from the provinces, supposedly to help orphans of the Darfur war.

Before that, his former wife Cécilia rescued the Bulgarian nurses held in Libya. Even before was Sarkozy’s dramatic one-man campaign to rewrite the European constitutional treaty and get it passed.
The French electorate seems bemused by their new “hyperactive” president’s Zorro-like impulses, but nobody is that much the wiser about what real change he will make in French foreign policy. The Washington trip is supposed to provide illumination on that.


He said when he was elected that he wanted to rebuild the Franco-American alliance, ending what he regards as the sterile anti-Americanism of previous policy. He proposes a French return to full participation in NATO. He has named Bernard Kouchner, the “French doctor” -- the man who first demanded that national sovereignty should not block humanitarian interventions in countries where there is cruelty, crime, or indifference to human suffering. This, of course, was one of the rationalizations for the American invasion of Iraq, which Kouchner supported, at least initially.

All this goes against a certain tradition in France of fairly cynical “realism” in foreign policy. Renewed American alliance has considerable sympathy in France. However the realignment of France with the U.S. on Israel-Palestine, and on Iran, with its suggestion in the latter case that an Iranian effort to build a nuclear bomb will bring bombs on Iran, does not easily fit with Sarkozy’s simultaneous commitment to end the splendidly unilateral authority of French Fifth Republic presidents to decide France’s foreign policy.

He says foreign policy should be debated in parliament, and has promised not to authorize any French military engagements that do not have wide public support – which an attack on Iran certainly does not, in France.

The new president requested a major foreign policy assessment from Herbert Védrine, a former Socialist foreign minister, which reached the impeccably Gaullist conclusion that French international influence is closely connected to its nonaligned foreign policy.

This is a matter of basic debate in (and out of) France. Many people around Sarkozy belong to the school of opinion that says supporting the U.S., so as to become a close and valued ally, is the only way for France to have international influence, because (in one version) the U.S. is so powerful that it inevitably will have its way, so why make trouble, or (second version) the U.S. is right on all the major issues and should be supported.

The American scholar and frequent commentator on French affairs, Ezra Suleiman of Princeton, recently wrote of Sarkozy’s supposed intention to exercise international influence through influencing the United States, saying that this is ambitious and risky, but also that if France fails in establishing this close relationship with Bush, and more important, with Bush’s presidential successor, France will end up “an isolated dwarf” in international affairs.

Suleiman also admits that this was Tony Blair’s ambition: to influence the U.S. by becoming its closest ally in Iraq, which ended in national as well as personal humiliation for Blair and Britain. But he says that was because Bush is Bush -- ungrateful and arrogant – and that as a new American president takes office in little more than a year, Sarkozy should try to become his or her close and influential friend.

This is a very American argument, which Sarkozy and his entourage seem to accept. It assumes that Bush’s unilateralism, interventionism, and messianism (all the world must become democratic for there to be peace) is his own policy and that of a little band of neoconservatives, supported by a sinister Richard Cheney, all soon to be out of power. Their successors will be different. It will be back to the good old days.

This seems to me deeply questionable, and a considerable gamble for France, not because I think the whole American political class has become infected with Bushism and interventionism, but because Bush was a grossly exaggerated expression of certain continuing policy assumptions in Washington, held by Democrats and non-Bush Republicans.

Both are convinced of the permanence of war against “extremism” (another way to say “the war on terror”), and believe in the necessity for American global security leadership. One has only to listen to the U.S. presidential primary debates to hear these ideas expressed in one or another way.

It’s common for convinced Atlanticists to make this argument about the need to be America’s close ally to have any influence on world affairs, and then – incomprehensibly – to cite as proof the UN Security Council confrontation between France and the U.S., in 2003, that deprived Washington of UN endorsement for its Iraq intervention.

The defeat didn’t stop Washington from doing what it wanted to do, but it was France that emerged with globally enhanced influence. It certainly was not Tony Blair’s Britain, or the “new Europeans” who sent their troops to join the “coalition of the willing,” and afterwards were sorry. The whole significance of the affair was a demonstration of the truth of Védrine’s Gaullist argument.

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