Some voices in Germany are growing louder in portraying the Merkel government’s inaction as a disaster

There will be an interesting diplomatic moment at the White House next month

muses John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune,

when President Barack Obama presents the Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian distinction, to Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Just what do you say at a state dinner honoring the leader of an allied country that, against the instincts and commitments of France, Britain and America, declined to vote in favor of a U.N. Security Council resolution to protect Libyan civilians in rebellion against the dictatorship of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi?

In February, before the Libyan uprising, the German U.N. abstention, and the allies’ efforts at interdiction, praising Mrs. Merkel’s embrace of liberty didn’t present a problem. Handing out the freedom medals for 2010 — Mrs. Merkel could not attend the event — Mr. Obama chose to quote her: “Freedom does not come about by itself. It has to be struggled for, and then defended anew, every day of our lives.”

Next month, the easy diplomatic course might be to toast Germany’s great democracy, its economic prowess and to let the rest lie — without any reference to a German strategic choice seemingly inspired by the government’s fear of the effect of Libyan intervention on a series of important regional elections this year.

But Mr. Obama’s dilemma is real. The postwar Germans, to their immense credit, are usually their own harshest critics. Should the president listen to them these days, some leading voices are becoming increasingly insistent in portraying the Merkel government’s inaction as a disaster.

Last week, Lothar Rühl, a former high-level Defense Ministry official, said Germany was now regarded in NATO as a “second-class” player

Oh, and for those of you who thought, who predicted — who knew! — that Barack Obama's replacement of George W Bush in the Oval Office would usher in a new golden era of mutual understanding and productive diplomacy, John Vinocur (who wrote about Germany's "hysterical" reactions a month ago) has this:

some Americans have heard complaints from Germans that they were insufficiently consulted as the Obama administration weighed — and hesitated, and then measured out — its military involvement.

Ach ja. Plus ça change… Read the entire original article, also to see how, in the final paragraph, John Vinocur manages to bring John Cleese and Fawlty Towers into the equation. As for us, we will let Kurt Volker, who served the Bush and Obama administrations as ambassador to NATO, have the final word:

As for Germany, Mr. Volker did admit to some surprise: “It didn’t do what Germany normally does — say ‘yes,’ and then not do much of anything.”

Here it is again, The German Question

The German Question is back, ponders John Vinocur.

In fact, it’s German Questions, plural, and fateful enough for Europe and the euro’s future to merit the capital letters.

…The German Question these days has other, considerably more biting formulations. Ulrich Beck, a sociologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the London School of Economics, offered two.

“Does Germany consider that the time has come to defend itself against Europe’s excessive clutches — the German model of success against its jealous European neighbors?” he asked. And: “Has the united Europe referred to in the German Constitution’s preamble stopped being the lodestar of the Germans’ vision of themselves and German politics?”

John Vinocur goes on to discuss the subject with four Germans "who represent deep political engagement in an integrated Europe" — former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt; Joschka Fischer, former foreign minister, Greens party chief and urban street fighter; Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a Christian Democrat and former chief of staff to Chancellor Helmut Kohl; and Hans-Ulrich Klose, the Foreign Ministry’s coordinator for German-American cooperation and a former Social Democratic leader of the Bundestag’s Foreign Relations Committee.

For them, doubts among its friends about Germany’s solidarity, accelerated since the beginning of the recession by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s perceived Germany First reflexes, can’t be a comfortable notion.

…A darker view came from Mr. Beck in an essay titled “German euro-nationalism.”

He sees a new kind of German economic unilateralism replacing its old multilateral creed. He believes an “intellectual nationalism” now exists in Germany that bridges right-left party definitions.

He wrote, “Chancellor Merkel has employed the European currency crisis to set the euro-zone’s financial policy switches in the direction of a German Europe.”

This, Mr. Beck argues, is a “Germany that no longer personifies the most European of Europeans. Rather, it is one that downplays its European duties and ties. It’s a Germany that has dredged up Europe’s German Question.”

John Vinocur concludes:

Clearly, Germany has changed from the country that, in exchange for German reunification, bartered away the Deutsche mark and the Bundesbank’s roles as de facto European reserve currency and Europe’s monetary arbiter.

The new, most pertinent German Question flows from this reality: How can the rest of the Europeans manage an unabashedly self-interested Germany — normal is what it’s called here — that they hardly imagined would emerge from the deal they signed in 1992 as the Maastricht Treaty.

Vinocur I: France and Germany Turning Down the Heat

In a front-page article in the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur notes that

France and Germany have been strikingly discreet about America's new troubles in Iraq, reflecting what appears to be their judgment that the country's instability threatens any positive development in the Middle East over the long term.

"No one has any interest in an American fiasco," the former French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, said Friday. That did not take in the schadenfreude of some French and German commentary, but it had the sound of an operative formula to describe a situation in which Washington's misery did not objectively equal Paris' or Berlin's gain.

In attempting to draw closer to the United States over the past months — the Germans actively, with American backing; the French in a less public mode — the two countries set courses for improving trans-Atlantic relations that would be destroyed by Iraq-related ironies or we-told-you-so's from ranking officials.

Besides, the French and Germans shared an absence of alternatives and an element of direct self-interest. With time, France and Germany's attempt to turn Europe against the United States in the run-up to the war has come to be regarded by strategists in both countries' capitals as a tactical mistake that resulted instead in a majority of the 25 European Union countries opposing the French-German drive for European pre-eminence.

In a Europe greatly weakened by its fractures over the war, and frightened now by terrorism on its soil, the error of trying to turn the Americans into the ultimate villains in Iraq while they are still the ultimate guarantors of European security was clearly not one the French and Germans would repeat.

In Germany, where a poll on Thursday found that 53 percent wanted the Americans to pull out of Iraq, the government had a rather different stance. Weeks ago, Defense Minister Peter Struck, in suggesting that a Spanish troop withdrawal would be unwise, said an American pullback would mean total instability.

Since January, while refusing to supply troops for Iraq, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's government has given its approval to the grand lines of a Bush administration initiative for the Greater Middle East, signed a German-American Alliance for the 21st Century that stresses common goals in the region, and, through Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, defined "Jihadist terrorism" as "the new totalitarianism" that constitutes the greatest threat to global security.

In France ... [Jacques] Chirac's opportunities to maneuver were limited. He is hemmed in by the reality that his surge in popularity at home during the 2003 Iraq debate has dissipated into his current grief-filled domestic political situation.

At the same time, he faces a series of encounters with President George W. Bush and other leaders at four major international meetings through the month of June — with sentiment in favor of righting the situation in Iraq unmistakably outweighing interest in doling out blame.

In a sense, Germany and France's options were also limited by the reality that it was no longer possible to justify countering American policy by the selective demonization of the Bush Administration.

Just as John Kerry had called on the new Socialist prime minister of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to reconsider his pledge to bring Spanish forces home from Iraq, the Democratic candidate's reaction on Thursday to the worsening military situation hardly let Europe off the hook from its faulty presumption that no unified American view existed on Europe's ongoing share of Iraqi responsibilities.

"No European country," said Kerry, "is made safe by a failed Iraq, yet those countries are distinctly absent from the risk bearing."

Perhaps remarkably, some French commentators appeared to be taking the idea to heart that assisting the Americans, however passively, in Iraq is the best alternative to chaos in the Middle East.

Le Figaro, in an editorial, said that since the United States was not going to clear out of Iraq, "France would be well advised to abstain from diplomatically harassing its ally on the question of the handover of power, and to stop continuously referring everything to the United Nations."

Vinocur's article ends with Le Monde's correspondent in Baghdad presenting a revisionist account of where France's excellent view of its own record stops in explaining how Iraq had gotten to where it was.

Without directly touching on it, the report presaged French discretion on America's grief of the moment.

It said: "Iraqis remain exceedingly critical of French policy. Contrary to what Europeans often think, the fact of having opposed the American occupation does absolutely nothing to boost the popularity of Europe or of a given country in Iraq."

"French policy over the past year is severely criticized," the correspondent continued. "It's impossible to find anyone, apart from a few out-of-work Baathist officials, who support the French position over the Iraq crisis."

Europe in for a letdown if it's counting on Kerry, says Vinocur

Via Instapundit and Just One Minute: the IHT's John Vinocur, who went to Oberlin, had an article to-day on a U. Michigan seminar (thanks, Mr. Minuteman, for the link) attended by ranking Dems and European diplomats. Vinocur has Senate Foreign Relations committee chairman Joe Biden making the following remarks:

Recalling that he had talked to six European government chiefs about the war, Biden caricatured how they would have done things better. "Blah blah blah, international cooperation," the senator mimicked. He added, in his own voice, "Give me a break, huh."

When Biden offered the possibility, beyond more civility, of a future in contrast to the Bush administration, it was in a plague-on-your-houses context. He said of the two, Europe and Bush, "You have fallen in love with international institutions to the extent that this administration has fallen in love with unilateral action."

For good measure, Biden threw in the view that the European Union will not have a unified foreign policy, and with it, the phrase, "I hope you do, I wish you well, but I see no evidence you're going to spend the money needed" to create a serious European military force either.

"Dirty white! Dirty Frenchman!" Anti-white racism has become a fact of French life

A FEW weeks ago, an esteemed civil rights organization asserted that anti-white racism has become a fact of French life

writes John Vinocur in his International Herald Tribune column.

The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism said that this did not involve specific discrimination of the kind confronted by Arabs and blacks, but held that anti-white racism “exists, and there are no taboos or hesitation about saying so.” 

The organization has become a co-plaintiff in an apparently racially motivated aggravated assault case involving an attack on a white male. According to press reports, the suspect was shown on a video surveillance tape wielding a broken bottle and shouting, “Dirty white, dirty Frenchman,” in French and Arabic. 

“Today,” wrote Pierre-André Taguieff, a sociologist and historian, “in certain ‘difficult neighborhoods,’ so-called poor whites are the primary victims of a majority of so-called poor non-whites. The rejection of whites is, in turn, encouraged by Islamist propaganda that is hostile to Muslims’ integration.” 

Obviously, the majority white population in France is not under siege. And the Muslims here (an estimated five million people, including citizens and the country’s largest immigrant group) continue to face various forms of prejudice and exclusion. 

But the anti-racism league’s stance gives substance to an intensifying antagonism at the heart of French society from years of failed integration — and to what is seen by large segments of French society as Muslim unwillingness to accommodate the law, customs and lifestyle of the majority. 

A survey published Oct. 25 by the Ifop polling organization underscores the clash. It reported that 60 percent of the French consider that “the influence and visibility of Islam in France” is too great, 68 percent believe that Muslims’ nonintegration is their own fault, and that refusal of Western values, fanaticism and submission are the words that best correspond to the idea they have of Islam. 

With the possibility of France entering recession next year, and alongside recent cases of murder and alleged plots by Muslim extremists, this amounts to real grief and tension.

Despairingly, both are compounded by the incapacity of successive governments to deal with the Muslims’ role in France with anything like decisive engagement.

First, no president here has ever made a priority of massive investment — call it high dosage affirmative action — in the newcomers’ future education and employment.

Second, no leader has ever sought to enforce specific standards for Muslim assimilation.

Those standards are not a vague, nonintuitive notion in France. They correspond to the secular character of the French republic, which promises freedom of religion for all, but also demands a complete absence of religion from the activities of the state — and bars the insertion of religion by anyone into those activities.

… Coming on top of greater Muslim alienation and more complaints about Islam from the white majority, the current government effort is the rough equivalent of the denial that often has been the reflexive response to issues involving everyday racism here since the end of French colonialism in the 1960s. 

Clearly, mumbling that the automatic equality attached to French citizenship and the fairness of French society are sufficient guarantees for Muslim integration is a dead incantation in 2012. 

It’s hard to be optimistic about France buying or charming back an estranged community that in some neighborhoods lives life as a partially parallel society. Many Muslims might ask, Why should I accept the values of the republic when I believe they function mostly in theory? 

An extensive affirmative action program, with clear school and job entry quotas might work, but it cannot come now without an accommodating and assimilating new face offered as a quid pro quo from the Muslim side.

 More Vinocur on racism in France…

A Miserable Precedent? In France's 1st Election Round, Extremism’s Total Promises to Beat Either Mainstream Candidate

The election in France on Sunday won’t decide its next president but will more likely offer a miserable precedent

notes John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune:

a success for a “Rejection Front” that combines the bleak compatibility of the extreme left and right.

Notionally at least, with the Left Front and National Fronts scores added together, the beyond-the-mainstream candidates’ total share of the vote could beat the individual first-round scores of either President Nicolas Sarkozy or the Socialist, François Hollande.

That doesn’t change the near certainty that Marine Le Pen at the far right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left’s distant shore get eliminated on April 22 while Hollande and Sarkozy advance to the final round two weeks later.

But if the Rejection Front (my designation) does as well as most polls suggest, France will have legitimized two political currents that spurn serious solutions for France’s economic grief, reject civility and common sense and variously propose regression through loony yet authoritarian economics, class warfare, class or racial prejudices, anti-Western instincts, and the politics of endless rage.

Sarkozy and Hollande are each projected to win between 26 and 29 percent of the votes cast in the first round among 10 contenders. That means that if parallel estimates hold for Le Pen (16 to 18 percent) and Mélenchon (around 15), extremism’s total beats either mainstream guy.

This isn’t a nerdy detail, but a miserable political signpost in an important and usually intelligent country struggling to retain influence in the world.

Mélenchon, who has Communist Party backing, infantilizes the French with promises of an “insurrection” that in the face of the country’s pledges of austerity would create 500,000 new places in public nurseries, 200,000 new low-rent apartments per year, total reimbursement of all individual health expenditure and tenured status for 800,000 public service workers now without permanent contracts. It is not clear how the Left Front would handle the costs (the health bill alone is estimated at €40 billion yearly), but Mélenchon has given a hint: confiscation of annual individual income above €360,000.

Mélenchon’s world-view goes hand in hand with his economics. He describes the United States as “the world’s primary problem” and wants the U.S. Sixth Fleet out of the Mediterranean. More: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is a hero, the Chinese invasion of Tibet was justified, and Cuba isn’t a dictatorship.

More on Mélenchon's s worldview: A French Presidential Candidate Vows to Valiantly Fight the American Empire and Bring the World Out From Under Its Domineering Shadow.

In a French political universe where no one need tell a significant percentage of the truth, dealing in fantasy is an easy alternative. The problem with Mélenchon is that his routine is showing it works in 2012 France. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the left-wing ecologist politician, has said, “He’s succeeded in restoring national nostalgia for old-time class conflict and statist tradition.”

While Mélenchon’s role in the Rejection Front refuses reality, Marine Le Pen’s National Front summons French instincts in the direction of bigotry and spite.

Read the whole thing but be sure not to miss John Vinocur's conclusion:

Through their complaisant maneuvering, Sarkozy and Hollande have reduced the stature of responsible politics in France and with it given both halves of the Rejection Front enough momentum so that, side by side, they may enter the National Assembly in June legislative elections. Leaving this likely indelible (and repugnant) trace behind, the quality of the French presidential race and runoff round beginning Monday has no place to go but up.

Change, Mutual Respect, and Russian-EU Relations: When the Obama administration stamps its foot, no one any longer snaps to attention

…“the Russians now have far more leverage in the U.S. relationship [with Europe] than they should”

John Vinocur quotes a former senior State Department official with responsibility for Russia (David J. Kramer) as saying in the conclusion of his International Herald Tribune article.

The United States used to call wayward members of NATO back to the reservation with a whistle or a shout. It decided what was deviation from doctrine, and that decision was pretty much law.

When the Obama administration stamped its foot this time, no one snapped to attention.

Rather, Germany and France, meeting with Russia in Deauville, northern France, last week, signaled that they planned to make such three-cornered get-togethers on international foreign policy and security matters routine, and even extend them to inviting other “partners” — pointing, according to diplomats from two countries, to Turkey becoming a future participant.

That can look like an effort to deal with European security concerns in a manner that keeps NATO, at least in part, at a distance. And it could seem a formula making it easier for Russia to play off — absolutely no novelty here — the European allies against the United States, or NATO and the European Union, against one another.

… As for the Obama administration stamping its foot, what it came down to was a senior U.S. official saying: “Since when, I wonder, is European security no longer an issue of American concern, but something for Europe and Russia to resolve? After being at the center of European security for 70 years, it’s strange to hear that it’s no longer a matter of U.S. concern.”

So, a follow-on burst of European contrition? I asked a German official about it. He spoke of German and French loyalty to NATO. And he said, “I understand there are American suspicions.”

“But,” he added, “the United States must accept that the times are changing. There are examples of it having done this. Why wouldn’t it accept our view in this respect?”

The official did not list them, but there are obvious factors explaining the French and German initiatives.

A major one is President Barack Obama’s perceived lack of interest and engagement in Europe. His failure to attend a Berlin ceremony commemorating the end of the Cold War and his cancellation of a meeting involving the E.U.’s new president has had symbolic weight.

… Consider this irony: the more Russia makes entry into the E.U.’s decision-making processes on security issues a seeming condition for deals the French and/or Germans want (think, for example, of France’s proposed sale to Moscow of Mistral attack vessels), the more the impression takes hold that the administration’s focus for complaint about the situation has been off-loaded onto the Europeans.

… When Mr. Medvedev bestowed Russia’s highest honors at a Kremlin ceremony on a group of sleeper spies who were expelled from the United States last July, a State Department spokesman turned away a reporter’s question with a “no comment.” Washington chooses not to say anything either about Mr. Medvedev’s support, repeated in Deauville, for Mr. Sarkozy’s plan, as next year’s president of the G-20 consultative grouping, to focus its attention on limiting the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

Prior to John Vinocur's article appeared an IHT editorial page column in which Roger Cohen appraised us that

France is in a quiet sulk. Nicolas Sarkozy is the most pro-American president of the Fifth Republic. He brought France back into NATO’s military command, rejected the de rigueur cynicism of French political discourse on the United States, and reached out to Obama. For all of which he got nothing. He must hear de Gaulle’s ghost at night whispering, “I told you so.”

In London, the British are shaking their heads. … “Beside the E.U., is there another bunch of countries anywhere willing to work as closely and permanently with the U.S. on almost all issues of global and regional concern?” asked Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador in Washington. “I wish Obama would say just that.”

Somewhat related is Virginie Malingre's interview in Le Monde with Alastair Cameron, who "est chargé des questions européennes au Royal United Services Institute, un think tank londonien spécialisé dans les questions de défense et de sécurité. Ce Franco-Britannique a fait ses études à Londres et à Paris, où il a travaillé quelque temps pour le ministère de la défense."

…on peut penser que la guerre en Irak a mis en évidence le déséquilibre de la relation. On a parlé de la Grande-Bretagne comme du "caniche de Washington"...

William Hague, le ministre des affaires étrangères britannique, et David Cameron, le premier ministre, ont tous deux dit qu'ils étaient les alliés des Etats-Unis mais qu'ils ne seraient pas "son esclave ". C'est une manière d'admettre que les Britanniques, ces dix dernières années, ont eu le sentiment qu'ils étaient trop souvent à la botte de Washington. De ce point de vue-là, la coopération avec la France sera la bienvenue. Mais, sur le fond, rien n'a changé.

Moscow has announced that the Arctic will become its “main resource base” by 2020, and plans for troops “capable of ensuring … security in region"

During a week when big ideas have their shot at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, it’s clear the Arctic isn’t getting its share

writes John Vinocur concerning "the worst-case Great Game perspective of guns, gas leaks and oil spills, tanker collisions and nationalist jostling". As John Vinocur explains, the (ignored) problem is that

the Russians … seem more in a rush than the Atlantic Alliance players to create their own kind of Arctic facts.

They have experience in the region, but hardly a resounding record as great stewards of the environment. Their claim to half of the Arctic as their own was described in Halifax as “extravagant” by a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker.

In 2007, they planted a Russian flag under the North Pole. This year, Moscow’s National Security Council announced that the Arctic would become its “main resource base” by 2020, and plans for troops “capable of ensuring military security in the region.” In October, a Russian admiral said that helicopter carriers the Russian Navy hopes to buy from France were earmarked, in part, for its Arctic fleet.

But this could be just woofin’. … All the same, said Mr. Volker, who is managing director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations, “The Russians know what they want. They’ve got an Arctic fleet, and incentives to bring people to settle in the region. They want to develop gas fields. It’s not military aggression, but an attempt to build a comprehensive presence.” Washington, he said, “has been a little slow to put the pieces together. And we’re the only country to have the resources and political weight that can get a handle on the development of the region.”

You Read It First on ¡No Pasaran!

…in trying to transmute the fog of [France's] runup to the war into glory, the book may provide more clarity than intended: L'Inconnu de l'Élysée, the country's top nonfiction best seller, while idealizing Chirac's role, brings unexpected new support to a thesis that France's government was not so much struggling to save humanity as looking out for Numéro Un.

Innumerable Frenchmen, -women, pundits, journalists lionized Jacques Chirac for "having the balls" to stand up to George W. Bush in the Iraq crisis (not least in our comments section), but as John Vinocur points out, the French government was flip-flopping all the way. As he says, "France's lurching pursuit of the best yield for itself in the runup left it totally short of what its leaders hoped their opposition would bring."

[The book] credits the idea that France maneuvered for months while considering whether to participate in an American-led invasion of Iraq. And it suggests that Villepin, after summoning the United Nations Security Council to rise in opposition against America, actually thought that France could not sustain its position and would "link up with the United States" before the war began in March 2003.

John Vinocur asked Pierre Péan about

Villepin's wobbling. He replied, "It's an ultra-sensitive subject, an essential subject, but one I didn't sort out. No one wants to talk about it today. It's a place where there was a problem."

No wonder; it's easier (including for Péan himself) to talk (and to crow) about principles, standards, and glorious times.

Fear and Loathing in France

John Vinocur and Laurent Greilsamer discuss fear and loathing in the French elections.

Update: Vinocur also has an IHT article translated in Le Monde about Ségolène Royal (the apostle of a nation of victims).

Roger Cohen goes on to say that France's frivolous campaign nears its overdue close.

This episode shows the entire French political spectrum locking itself into the depressing cavern of Chirac's political creed

Well, if you can't get a job (or a training course) in France, you can always get one in Algeria.

Panorama, meanwhile, has fullscreen panoramas of the CPE demonstrations (listen to those lovely French songs).

As for Laurent Greilsamer, he quotes (without naming the journalist) John Vinocur's International Herald Tribune article in his history of "manifestations … made in France."

It so happens that John Vinocur had this to say today:

Jacques Chirac is discredited, Dominique de Villepin, too, and with them, it seems, a certain France that told the world it could avoid change and, as exceptionalist as ever, escape immobility's ridiculousness in the process.

Absurdity certainly has caught up with this routine. There's never been a more incongruous political crisis than the country's present misery about relaxing employment regulations for young people: scores of thousands of them - a poll shows 76 percent of the 15- to 24 year-old age group aspire to the privileges, early retirement and ironclad security of civil service jobs - demonstrating for social conservatism on the historical turf of new dawns and revolution.

And rarely has upheaval on the streets led to more ridiculous political repercussions. Here, it has exposed a president who tried to save face for his prime minister by signing a bill changing first-job rules, then explained incoherently that a second measure would soon nullify the original's provisions, and finally turned over the repair job to a rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, who both Chirac and Villepin have long hoped to crush.

For some, this is a hoot. But ridiculousness can be sad, or even ominous. That's the direction this episode points to for the future because it shows the entire French political spectrum locking itself into the depressing cavern of Chirac's political creed.

This article of faith insists that if France will sample the idea of reform, just tasting, it won't willingly swallow real social change. In terms of getting- elected politics, the Chirac precept says that only a presidential candidate who refuses to talk about the necessity of risk, or how France gains through a smaller nanny-state or a freer economy, can inspire enough French trust to win election.

In a new book on the president by Franz-Olivier Giesbert, François Fillon, a Sarkozy ally, describes Chirac as "a psycho-rigid person who's convinced that France cannot tolerate any major reform. This comes to the great irritation of the left which wanted the right to do the job before it returns to power."

Vinocur Uses the John Kerry Postulate to Explain the Yes Camp's Dilemma on France's EU Constitution Referendum

In France, detractors dig in on EU charter

writes John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune as he proceeds to explain the John Kerry Postulate for informed guessing on voting behavior.

As far as the constitution is concerned, the president of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell, has described the real problem as a deep "malaise" in the French relationship with Europe. Most of all, it goes to a sense of lost French influence in an expanded EU, and to the absence of the idea that this new Europe ever could do anything again for France.

Minus any enthusiasm, the very particular weakness of the "yes" campaign lies in the fact that both its Gaullist and Socialist proponents have explicitly said nothing like a catastrophe is at hand as a result of a "no" vote.

Products of French politics' endless incantation on the country's capacity to exist autonomously, voters here just wouldn't believe it — or politicians trying to win them over pre-demonize them as irresponsible and unpatriotic.

So the "yes" camp is stuck with the path of reassurance, saying disasters don't loom whatever the result. That leaves black paint and trepidation mostly to the "noes" and their pitch that the constitution will kill the protection and support systems of the European Social Model.

The only safe play involving cataclysmic warnings by the "yes" people seems to be anti-Americanism. They admonish: don't dump the constitution and leave the world to the domination of the United States. But the "no" campaign's grab bag of dissident voices from the left and right have staked out that zone too, saying a "yes" vote officializes Europe as a vassal to NATO.

The second part of the John Kerry Postulate slides into place here.

In order to beat Bush, Kerry calculated he needed votes from the center. To get them, he promised that America would win in Iraq and do nothing that would look like a dishonorable pullout.

In spite all of the contrary rhetoric, this left Kerry largely not dissociable from Bush on the war.

In France, while the "no" camp warns that ratifying the constitution would put in place a cruel, hyper-capitalist Europe, stripped of its social safeguards, the "yes" proponents reassure voters that nothing irreparable will happen if they say no. The Postulate Part II argues that when you're talking about something grand or ominous, and you validate your opponent's position by saying (or tacitly accepting) it is not fatal, you lose again. (See Kerry on Iraq.)

Identifying the exact meaning of a French rejection of the constitution — its "no" vote would seem to derail the European ratification process — is perilous because so much of the French political establishment has put itself in the position of saying it ain't no big deal.

On balance, though, rejection would almost certainly diminish French influence.

A less reliable France could hardly enchant Germany or continue to serve Europe as quite the same central counterbalance across the Rhine.

At its least reassuring, a "no" vote would come within the context of the view of a group of German political scientists who have warned since the Iraq war that Gerhard Schröder is trying to steer Germany's economic and foreign policy in the direction of strictly national interests.

In their increasingly nervous search for effective rhetoric, some of the pro-constitution folk — unable to talk about a disaster for Europe, or dare say a word about losing a handhold on the Germans — have turned to invoking Charles de Gaulle.

He would have voted "yes" in the referendum, they claim.

The fact is, as he threatened and on schedule, de Gaulle resigned from office in 1969 the day after his project for French regional restructuring was voted down in a national referendum.

In terms of France and its politics' eternal call to grandeur and vision, or of Chirac, who has not laid his job on the line to save Europe's constitution, that seems long, long ago.

Is Clint Eastwood the Embodiment of America?

Before a foot has even been shot, Clint Eastwood's new picture is "headed for the maw of political controversy"

writes John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune.

Eastwood has been there often enough since his Dirty Harry cop movies. In those days, Clint and the films' fight-back message got called dementedly violent, even proto-fascist. Now, respected and rich, there is more of an instinct to let the political stuff roll off his back, like the current accusation that Million Dollar Baby is pro-euthanasia.

But the flag-raising-at-Iwo-Jima movie, with its seeming premise of American triumphalism, is another story. Making it in the context of the slog in Iraq confronts Eastwood with creating a film that, regardless of what he puts into it, precasts itself as a metaphor.

Read the following sentence and ask yourself if Eastwood is not, somewhere, somehow, the embodiment of America:

Underestimated, dismissed much of his life, and because of it thinking faster and more slyly than most everybody he talks to, Eastwood was ahead of the curve, of course.

Vinocur continues about the man who played the "squinting Dirty Harry — the cop who enraged the left by saying it's as morally reprehensible to submit to violence as to create it":

Actually, Eastwood describes himself as a social liberal and a fiscal conservative ("If there are anymore"). That means he's not against abortion and is not waiting alongside Mel Gibson for the apocalypse. It takes no tortured construct to think of him as a guy out of blue-collar Oakland with real concern about the injustice and humiliation in his country, and a conviction that on the global scale of what's fair or good, the U.S.A., plus or minus, checked and balanced, is still the world's strong suit.

…So here he is at 74, hating thesis movies, but ready to make a picture about a moment of American glory that will say a lot, if by indirection, about what kind of place he thinks the United States is now.

(A Cyrus Weisburg contributes an update from Helsinki (third letter down))

(While we are on the subject of Hollywood, take a moment to read what Alejandro Amenábar proposes to do with his Oscar (third paragraph).)

"It's because of its support for the struggle for freedom, rather than in spite of it, that the Bush administration is loathed" in Old Europe

You've heard how it isn't the U.S. military, or George W Bush, who brought down the bloody dictatorship of Saddam Hussein while ensuring elections in Iraq but (in the immortal words of a French government spokesman) the international community, haven't you?

Well, now it turns out that it wasn't Uncle Sam, or Ronald Reagan, who brought down the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, ensuring freedom to the masses of Eastern Europe, but the Helsinki Agreements!

John Vinocur has more in the International Herald Tribune about the ever-so-decent-and-trustworthy European realists who are always carping about Bush's alleged lies, the administration's liberties with the truth, and America's wishful thinking. (In his column, Vinocur notes, among other things, that "the Helsinki precedent was impotent to stop the Jaruzelski military regime's crushing of Solidarity in 1981" and that Gerhard Schröder displays "serious discomfort" with the F-word [freedom] except when it concerns emancipation "from the United States".)

On the final day of his visit last week to near-friends and kind-of continental allies, George W. Bush shook hands with a European who told him in no uncertain terms that he appreciated the role of the United States "doing a lot of things in the world."

Mikulas Dzurinda, the prime minister of Slovakia — a rather new, very small country with realities that include a border with Ukraine, a contingent in Iraq, and insecurities about its own eternal independence — said Slovakia "supports the policy of the United States based on advancing freedom and democracy."

Bush may have thought, finally a guy who wants to get the message. Three days earlier in Brussels, … Bush used the word "freedom" 22 times. There was no bludgeon in its delivery, but the president was telling Europe the United States owed it consideration and respect — although in the parameters of an American foreign policy he defined as advancing freedom in the world.

Perhaps because he did not catch the Schröders or the Chiracs rising to replicate his vocabulary, Bush upped the ante in a shorter talk here. My Freedometer clocked the president at 17 mentions of freedom or liberty, one in each paragraph of his text. A grateful-sounding Bush said of Dzurinda, "the prime minister understands that those of us who are free have a responsibility to help free others in order to make ourselves more secure." …

A French reporter, who may have thought she was teeing up a sarcastic hole-in-one for Jacques Chirac, asked him to comment on Bush's "march towards freedom." Chirac chose the grand manner instead, saying he didn't see how anyone could not be receptive to a plea for freedom. After all, he recalled, liberté, égalité, fraternité.

But Gerhard Schröder? The F-word, as best as I could hear and read in Brussels and Mainz, did not come out of his mouth, although he has talked in recent years of Europe's emancipation from the United States. If Friedrich Schiller wrote magnificently of freedom in the Germany of the late 18th century, freiheit now has a leaden sound for the government there.

…In Brussels, in Bush's presence, the Belgian prime minister, after a nod in liberty's direction, offered the world a reading of history that went straight to the throat of both America's role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and Bush's views of spreading freedom.

The Soviet Union imploded, [Guy] Verhofstadt said, to a large extent through the pressure of the Helsinki Agreements. No mention of NATO. Exit the United States' staring down the Soviets as the essential element in Europe's remaking.

Decoded, the argument raised to both the level of sacrament and Europe's doctrine for the future the old West German approach to dealing with oppression and potential aggression, awkwardly translated as "change through rapprochement." It advanced, as if fact, the idea that it was not the Americans but the Helsinki Accords of 1975 (a kind of rule book for détente, legitimizing Russia's western borders, but hardly ever getting a Western newspaper past the Berlin Wall under its reputed liberalizing provisions) that really freed the Slovaks, Poles, Romanians and so on.

This surely is not the vision today of Eastern Europe, like the Poles, who raged when both Germanys, east and west, winking at Russia, scorned the Solidarnosc freedom movement. But it is becoming the not-so-subterranean justification in Germany for its caution about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine last year, and its frequent contempt for Bush's arguments on attaining freedom in the Middle East. [In related news, Poland's president met with his French counterpart on Monday.]

The fact is, Schröder, who fought against a United States daring to counter Soviet missiles in the early '80s (with the same vision he later summoned to argue against German reunification or creating the euro), may well have caught onto something in the German psyche and historical experience that prefers stability to freedom — and that he thinks can be made all of Europe's.

An article late last year in the Berliner Zeitung, no pal of the Bush administration, pointed to it, saying Michael Moore's ranting about Bush aroused far more excitement in Germany than the Ukrainians' struggle. "Why so cool?" it asked. "Does it have to do with the Germans themselves? West Germany was much more about stability than freedom." …

Looking at Germany and Bush last week, the German daily Die Welt went as far as writing, "You almost get the impression that it's because of its support for the struggle for freedom, rather than in spite of it, that the Bush administration is loathed." And it offered a bet that hatred for America would subside sooner in the Middle East than in Europe.

"Democracy and freedom are on the march"

Clinton Offers Little Sympathy to Europe's Bush-Bashers

In this week's installment of his weekly column for the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur describes how a decent American disappoints Europe.

With Europeans lining up and shelling out to read Bill Clinton, he turns out to be a guy who insists on reminding people that two-thirds of the Democratic Party in Congress voted George W. Bush the specific powers he needed to make war in Iraq. Then, piling it on, he goes and says that France and Germany wrongly made light of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

No Michael Moore, this Kid from Hope. And for some Europeans, including a few who invested massive sums in serializing or publishing his autobiography, My Life, not much support either from Clinton for the political notions they may have thought they were buying into with the book or from the Clinton interviews that have accompanied the package.

For Der Spiegel, the Hamburg newsmagazine that has never found an American president subtle enough to match its tastes, this was clearly a problem as it completed its second installment of extracts. In its table of contents last week, it announced a conversation with the former president about "Bush's Iraq debacle."

In the headline over its interview, it promised Clinton's take on "the Disaster of the Bush Administration in the Iraq War."

As it turned out, the single time the word "debacle" came out of anybody's mouth in the Q-and-A, it belonged to the Spiegel people asking Clinton questions. The former president verbally sprinted in the other direction.

It was this kind of whoosh: Clinton said his successor was now moving toward a turnaround in Iraq that might take two to five years to achieve. In Clinton's view, sovereignty was being returned to the Iraqis, a new UN resolution had been passed, and the Iraqis were freeing the Americans from having to decide on everything. …

Although you couldn't tell from the magazine's promotional material or headlines, Clinton also took pains to recall why the Democrats had backed Bush's request for war powers and, with it, to criticize the French and German attitude at the time, which he said would not have supported the use of force even if Saddam had refused to cooperate with the United Nations.

Clinton told Spiegel that whatever the state of the Iraqi Army, he didn't agree "with the German and French position that Saddam never did anything that he wasn't forced into" and "didn't constitute a threat."…

This is a long way from the line of anti-Bush Europe's current decent American, Michael Moore, who repeatedly thanked the French and the Germans for their Iraq stance while promoting his film attacking the president.

In fact, for Europeans irritated these days by anything that sounds like an American's support for a non-capitulationist view of the United States' self-interests, Clinton's approach may have come as disappointingly as John Kerry's when he pounced on José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero's Spain for pulling its forces out of Iraq, and urged the Europeans to share the mission's risks and burdens.

The issue here is not Bush, whose admirers in Europe are squad-sized rather than legion. It is rather that Clinton's bottom line on America's world role — like that, as well, of virtually all the mainstream foreign policy players in Washington — may not jibe with the America that Spiegel, or Le Nouvel Observateur in France, another investor in his memoirs, or many of their readers, say they want to love.

"Bill Clinton was a great president," the French magazine wrote. "A cool president for a cool epoch. When the Net-economy propelled growth and melted unemployment. When the American hyperpower didn't deviate into autistic unilateralism." … In fact, Clinton specifically told Spiegel that when it must, America has to be able to deal with events alone (although acting in cooperation with friends is obviously preferable). …

[Here's another of Vinocur's Reality checks.]

Because there is considerable concern among European politicians and the media of being seen as anti-American rather than anti-Bush, which is as easy here as kicking a can, the publication of the memoir looked to some as a good chance, via Clinton, to be publicly counted among the Friends of a Well-Behaved America.

The most conspicuous revisionist among these was Hubert Vedrine, who as French foreign minister spent considerable time saying that Clinton's America was a country indulging in "inadmissible" unilateralism. This, he said, had to be contained by other countries working together to save the world's "mental identity."

France's task in gathering blocking groups to hold Clinton's America in check was of such importance that, like Marcus Aurelius laying out Stoic principles for political action, or Che Guevara defining the revolutionary struggle from the Sierra Maestra, Vedrine actually made up a list of five precepts (like having solid nerves and perseverance) for the undertaking.

Now, with the book out and Bush's defeat a possibility, Vedrine describes Clinton as a president "who succeeded wonderfully on all levels" and who made the American "hyperpower" both "likable and seductive." In contrast to Bush's, he suggests, Clinton's world was a pleasure to deal with.

But this goes only so far. Vedrine rejected Clinton's assertion accompanying the book's publication that Yasser Arafat's unreliability had been the essential cause of the failure of the Camp David accords between the United States, Israel and the Palestinians.

"Clinton is loading this on Arafat because, however brilliant Clinton is, he remains an American politician," Vedrine said. "He's a bit constrained on this point."

Nudge-nudge. Vedrine is not only saying that dark forces, which he is too discreet to name, run American Middle East policy, but that Clinton was not being forthright about a critical moment of recent history.

This is a French vision, like others in Europe involving American motivations on various subjects, that even when larded with flattering phrases essentially demeans Clinton and other presidents, or presidential candidates, for defending American notions of what is both just and in the interest of the United States.

If Clinton, from his spotlight of the moment, persists these days in saying a lot of things some Europeans would prefer not to hear, the explanation may come down to his being, very irretrievably, like Bush or Kerry, just another American. The U.S. Census Bureau's latest figures count 282,421,906 of them.

Vinocur III: Zapatero's Rewards for Rejoining "the Community of the Just" Are Hardly of the Earthly Kind

I remember very clearly what a Spanish socialist party official said prior to the bombings in Madrid, when it seemed clear that José Maria Aznar would win the Spanish elections. What had Spain gotten from its role alongside Uncle Sam and Britain? Miguel Angel Moratinos (Madrid's future foreign minister) asked rhetorically. His own answer: "We've gotten nothing."

Anytime a national leader follows U.S. policy (whether it's Blair, Berlusconi, or whoever), it seems that opponents always ask what good the nation got out of it, suggesting that whatever the case might be, it is nothing or at least nothing tangible. The implication is that U.S. leaders are a criminal lot, or that their policies are at best misguided, and anybody following them have sold out (hence, the ubiquitous poodle/vassal charge).

As it happens, one country did get something out of its support, and although it may not seem like much, it — along with the simple knowledge of living up to one's obligations to one's friends (i.e., fraternal nations) and being in the right along with them — fills some Danish hearts with pride (albeit of the quiet kind).

What nobody ever seems to ask is what leaders who follow those opposed to Uncle Sam get out of that.

Still, the International Herald Tribune's John Vinocur provides an answer in his weekly Politicus column (which will probably start becoming a mainstay on this weblog).

The detoxed Spain of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, it was pledged, was going to rush back into the family-like warmth of the European Union, and rush home its troops from Iraq. In a whoosh, it would rejoin the community of the just, and end what the new Socialist government called the country's miscast role as superpower-adjunct of the Americans.

Promise keepers, the new guys did what they said they would in their first full week on the job. For which they got something short of an international standing ovation.

The big hello from Europe on Thursday in Luxembourg was an EU decision that overrode the self-characterized Good Spain's vote in favor of subsidies and blocked scores of millions of euros in potential payments to support Spanish production of cotton, tobacco and olive oil.

The big embrace from the forces of global moral leadership was mostly silence — and a statement from the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace saying it did not share the thinking behind the new Spanish government's decision to begin immediate withdrawal of its troops from Iraq.

The big show of understanding and solidarity from John Kerry, the man Zapatero said he would go to America to campaign for, was a comment marking disapproval of the pullout and noting that European countries with a view on Iraq needed to share in the risks and burdens of its stabilization. For good measure, if the difference between U.S. Democrats and Zapatero Socialists wasn't clear, the Democratic candidate for president described Israeli attacks on Hamas leaders as justified.

Beyond Spain's borders, for all the government's rhetoric and its lionizing by Spain's leftist press, there was no novice's state-of-grace for Zapatero. Instead, his government learned of its non-hero status in cash-conscious EU give-and-take, and seemed at least to some to fall over itself in haste to get out of Iraq before the United Nations might complicate its cover story for not staying.

Interestingly, it fell to the Vatican to point out first in Europe one of the troubling things about Zapatero's withdrawal. While Germany, which clearly did not approve, chose the coldness of declining to speak to the issue at all, Renato Cardinal Martino, president of the peace council, commented, "The new Spanish government is trying to keep its electoral promises, but there's a time for fulfilling them."

No stooge of the Americans, having accused them of humiliating treatment of Saddam Hussein after his capture, the cardinal insisted that leaving Iraq implied abandoning it to civil war, and possibly to an Islamic fundamentalist regime. Then he stuck the needle in. He said, "It isn't wise to rush the United Nations, knowing that it won't assume its responsibilities for the Iraqi situation before June 30."

That appeared to be exactly the Zapatero government's problem. A diplomat who served for four years in Spain said that it appeared the UN Security Council would pass an enabling resolution, that it would get a key role in Iraq, and that Spain saw an onrushing embarrassment in the new circumstances because they resemble those Zapatero set out for his troops to stay on — UN political and security control of Iraq after June 30.

Indeed, Zapatero's pullout announcement came on April 18, a Sunday. Two days before, the UN special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, had unveiled a plan to establish a caretaker government to replace the Iraqi governing council. ...

Although they are no longer talking the same language, Kerry and Zapatero appeared to get snarled in the same predicament: George W. Bush's new willingness to offload large parts of the United States' burdens to the United Nations.

For Kerry, this pre-empted a chunk of his argument that the best means for America to deal with Iraq is through internationalization. For Zapatero, it forced him to keep an election pledge in a way that raised questions about how acute Good Spain's sense of responsibility was going to be as an international grown-up.

As for the Bush Administration, according to another diplomat, it told Zapatero's foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, that the decision to withdraw was a blunder. The language actually may have been harsher. In a dispatch from Washington on Sunday, Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, foreign editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote that congressmen he spoke to last week regarded Zapatero as a modern day Neville Chamberlain.

Zapatero, you silly afrancesado. Don't you realize that the reward for being in the ranks of the just is exactly that? Being in the ranks of the just.

There is no reward for following Paris and Berlin. Being
el caniche de Chiraque is reward enough in itself! It is reward enough to know that you are as naturally intelligent, as naturally peaceful, as naturallement solidaire, as naturallement lucide, as naturally humanistic, and as naturally filled with wisdom as the French lovers of peace.

Vinocur II: Danish Leader Feels the Heat

In his Politicus column, the International Herald Tribune's John Vinocur writes about another Bush ally who "simmers in [the] political stew of Iraq", although he doesn't have to bid for a second term until late 2005.

Your poll numbers ain't great. Unemployment is up. Your troops hunker down in Iraq at the edge of harm's way.

You can bring the boys home. You can goose the economy, loosening the cash taps now, paying later. You can blame the classic midterm blahs. You can even fine-tune a safe, vote-getting issue at home, while going the international statesman route (a speech on world affairs plus photo-op'ed consultations with a global big-hitter.

Pick one from column A, another from column B. Or none of the above. Or just soldier on.

To the extent politics can replicate a board game, these are, very schematically, the current circumstances of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark.

Atlanticist, visitor to the Bush White House, first non-Socialist leader of his country in almost a decade, belligerent in Iraq with 510 combat troops, a pocket battleship and submarine in the American-led war effort, Rasmussen, like Tony Blair in Britain or his counterparts in Poland, has hit a rough patch.

Last week, it got choppier with a fired military intelligence officer saying Rasmussen had lied to Parliament about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — a charge denied by the Danish Intelligence Service, which said the prime minister hewed to its analysis of the weapons' probable existence, yet one held up now as government untruthfulness by the opposition Social Democrats. ...

In one sense, and with fairly heavy irony, Rasmussen's visit to [Jacques] Chirac (they could easily have been joined by Gerhard Schröder) served to demonstrate that European political discomfort hardly discriminates these days between supporters and opponents of toppling Saddam. ...

A visitor talking to Rasmussen between lunch and speech provided the stick and the sand. The prime minister was asked if the example of the defeat of José María Aznar in Spain, a like-thinker on Iraq and America's security role, and the victory of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the new Socialist government chief, scared him.

The answer came out slowly, but three times. No, once. Again, no. And once more, as if to dispel any wisp of doubt, even his own.

Elaboration followed in precise, complete sentences. "I think it's of crucial importance to help a new Iraq government in developing a free, modern Iraq," Rasmussen said.

"We shouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of security problems in the short term. We should remind ourselves that there are a lot of extremists groups which are interested in blocking the process leading to democracy. They fear a situation in which Iraq could be a bright example for the Arab people, a bright example of how democracy could flourish in the Middle East."

No flutter here. Rasmussen did not mention Zapatero by name, but emphasized that the only condition attached to the maintenance of the Danish force would be a request as of July 1 from the new Iraqi political authority — not a United Nations-linked element as is the case with Spain.

Now, wouldn't it be interesting if some journalist carried out an investigation to find out exactly in which ways Zapatero has been rewarded for his valiant and heroic efforts to betray American leaders and rejoin what might be called the community of the just?

Update: Denmark Stands Tall and Walks Right

France's Sale of the Ultramodern Mistral Warship to Moscow: A massive transfer of sensitive military technology by a NATO ally to the Kremlin

The French government is facing pressure from the U.S. over the sale of two warships to the Russian navy

reports Fox News,

amid reports that Paris plans to push ahead with the controversial deal.

Despite broader efforts by the U.S. and Europe to isolate Moscow over the intervention and unrest in Ukraine, French President Francois Hollande said he plans to go through with a $1.6 billion deal to build warships for Russia, NPR reported.

No Pasarán has been on this subject for the past four years. Indeed, with rare exceptions, I do not think that any American newspaper or blog had until now written anything of consequence about what amounts to as a massive transfer of sensitive military technology by a NATO ally to the Kremlin on Obama's watch — France having decided to sell Russia its ultramodern helicopter transportation ship (to the horror of, among others, Georgia).

We linked story after story about the Mistral — many of them written by the most conservative pundit in the entire New York Times organization (far more so than David Brooks), the International Herald Tribune's Paris-based John Vinocur. It would have been important for Americans (all Americans, not just conservatives) to understand, pre-Syria and pre-Crimea, to what degree the idealistic Obama White House had already then been deficient (or appeasing) in its relations with the Russian bear.

The money quote comes in the French defense minister's January 2011 excuse:

In Lisbon, I heard Barack Obama tell Dmitry Medvedev: "You're not just a partner but a friend." You can not blame France for delivering boats to a friend.

There you have it: that says all about Obama's idealistic foreign policy in a nutshell, doesn't it?!

A French contempt for Obama's zigzag about Iran: Obama's pastels-and-wispy-brushstrokes rendering of reality

Fed up with U.S. waffling, France may be ready to take a harder line on Iran

writes John Vinocur in a piece entitled "France Covers Obama's Middle East Retreat" appearing in the… Wall Street Journal. (Question: has the most conservative commentator of the New York Times been fired, now that the name International Herald Tribune has been relinquished?) .

In an interview with the Associated Press on Oct. 4, Barack Obama depicted Iran as a country living with sanctions "put in place because Iran had not been following international guidelines, and had behaved in ways that made a lot of people feel they were pursuing a nuclear weapon."

For French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, that was a pastels-and-wispy-brushstrokes rendering of reality. Two days later, in an interview with Europe 1 radio, Mr. Fabius drew a darker, edgier picture. "As we speak," he said, Iran keeps the centrifuges turning that are needed to make enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. But Iran is also pursuing a second, separate track toward atomic weapons with the construction, at Arak, of a heavy-water reactor producing plutonium.

That project might take "around a year" to complete. And "if it is completed, you won't be able to destroy it," Mr. Fabius said, "because if you bomb plutonium, it will leak." At that point, he said, for "the Americans, the Israelis and others," there would no longer be adequate sanctions to stop Tehran.

He gave no hint of who those "others" might be. But here was the French foreign minister talking about a possible military engagement against Iran in a more forceful manner than anything summoned so far by the U.S. president. Mr. Fabius was not advocating a strike, volunteering eventual French participation, or indulging in simple Obama-bashing. But he was expressing a kind of French contempt for the U.S. administration's evasive vocabulary about the Iran endgame.

 … Camille Grand, the director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, argues that this France is different. Think of its first-in role in Libya, its successful military operation against al Qaeda in Mali, its readiness to strike Syria alongside America—at least until Mr. Obama's reversal, which left French President François Hollande "flabbergasted," according to Le Monde.

Writing for the World Today magazine, Mr. Grand describes a France that is troubled about the dwindling prospect of Western countries "enforcing" peace and security. "This more interventionist and Atlanticist France," he says, "sees U.S. leadership often lacking resolve, hesitant, tempted by strategic retrenchment."

It's a view that jibes with France's experience with Mr. Obama's erratic policy. Last October, the White House contacted both France and Britain to say that America would move to an interventionist position on Syria akin to theirs after the November U.S. election. Pfft. Both French and British officials told me that after being kept in the dark for two months, they learned in January this year that the White House plan was dead.

A French official also said that in a discussion on Mali in October 2012, former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta promised, referring to an eventual French incursion, "Whatever you need, ask me. You'll get it."

As it turned out, the White House overruled Mr. Panetta, according to the official. The administration actually asked France for cash in exchange for tanker aircraft to support French forces when they entered Mali in January. Once the $50,000 per hour charge for planes to confront al Qaeda had become a news story, it was dropped.

This waffling entrenched French doubt about the Obama administration. In relation to Iran and Syria, Mr. Fabius went on the record in July asking if the "international community" couldn't stop Bashar Assad —and the "international community" obviously hasn't—then "where's the credibility of our assurances Iran will not get nuclear arms?"

Last week, I asked an Élysée Palace official about the solidity of two parts of the notional French position: One, that the Iranian mullahs must officially "renounce" their nuclear-weapons ambitions, and two, that they must make an unmistakable "strategic leap" that would demonstrate they are not trying to retain options that could possibly lead to making a bomb.

The official said: "To have credibility on security issues like Iran you must be firm and consistent, and not zigzag," choosing a kind of semi-polite international code word to describe Mr. Obama's course on Syria.

But French diplomacy is not the U.S. Congress, which has been demonstrably tougher than the White House or France on sanctions (and possibly other alternatives) to punish Tehran's endless defiance. …