The Acts of a Friend and an Ally

On January 23, France blocked a proposed NATO-European Union meeting on terrorism because NATO "was not intended to be the world's gendarme."

So reports the Transatlantic Intelligencer. According to the Le Figaro report, the disgust with French obstructionism at NATO was so great that the meeting on Bosnia was likewise cancelled.

As far as John Rosenthal can tell from the usual searches,

the NYTimes did not bother to report this episode. Leave it to the Times, however, via its Parisian edition the International Herald Tribune, to find someone (William Pfaff) to identify the obviously extreme French position – i.e. one should not even talk – with the European position as such and, by way of some amazing non-sequiturs, to put the blame for the entire affair on – who else? – George Bush.

Update: It's still all the Americans' fault.

If "Russia is reawakening its nuclear arsenal and becoming authoritaiean and aggressive again" it's the Americans' fault!

In a letter to Jacques Chirac, former Prime Minister Michel Rocard brings up the tired, old mantra that tension with Moscow is due to "our ever-lasting distrust" and that, instead of following the Americans in their "mistake" of expanding NATO after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact "without speaking up" ("everybody approves, nobody discusses"), the organization ought to have been dissolved.