FRANCE: Under Sarkozy, Ever Closer to Bush

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Oct 3 2007 (IPS) - The announcement by President Nicolas Sarkozy that France wants again to be a full member of the Washington-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is further proof of Sarkozy’s eagerness to improve ties with the government of U.S. President George W. Bush.

France has been a NATO member since its creation in 1949, but has refused to put its military troops under U.S. leadership since 1966, when former president General Charles de Gaulle took the French army out of the military chain of command.

Sarkozy has now set two conditions for France to join NATO: an “improvement in the European defence policy,” and second, “that a place be made within the NATO’s highest echelons for French representatives.”

Without this, “there won’t be a French reintegration”, Sarkozy wrote in an editorial comment published in The New York Times Sep. 21. Sarkozy’s predecessor in office Jacques Chirac had demanded similar conditions in 1995 for full integration into NATO, without success.

But, as Jean Dominique Merchet, defence correspondent of the French daily Libération, put it, “France is already NATO compatible.” For the last ten years France has been participating in several NATO operations from Kosovo to Afghanistan, he said.

Besides, Merchet said, “France has adopted the same military processes as all other NATO members.”

However conditional Sarkozy’s offer, it was the latest in a series of statements from him or leading members of his cabinet suggesting an eagerness to mend diplomatic ties with Washington. Those took a dip in early 2003 when France refused to go along with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Over the summer, when Sarkozy spent several days in the U.S., he met Bush at his family home in Kennebunkport for an informal discussion.

Photographs of that meeting were widely circulated, indicating Sarkozy’s keenness to spread the word. Sarkozy declared that France and the U.S. have been “allies and friends for more than 250 years.” He was referring to French support for the U.S. revolution against colonial power Britain in 1776.

Later, on Aug. 27, Sarkozy told French ambassadors gathered in Paris that a nuclear-armed Iran was “unacceptable” to France. In this, Sarkozy joined U.S. ranks, and also broke with the position taken by his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who had suggested as late as last year that Iran’s move to nuclear weapons seemed “inevitable.”

Sarkozy said a joint diplomatic effort to deal with the regime in Tehran was the only alternative to “the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran.”

Sarkozy told the ambassadors that “I am one of those who think that the friendship between the U.S. and France is as important today as it has been over the last two centuries.”

He added that “allies do not mean aligned, and I feel perfectly free to express our agreements (with the U.S. government) as well as our disagreements, without complacency or taboos.” So far, he has not expressed disagreements.

On the contrary, in August, his foreign minister Bernard Kouchner toured Iraq. This was the first visit of a high ranking French official to Baghdad since the invasion. Kouchner, a member of the Socialist party until his appointment as foreign minister in May this year, was one of very few French politicians to have supported the invasion of Iraq.

In 2003, then president Chirac had threatened use of the veto in the UN Security Council to block a resolution from Washington seeking UN authorisation of the invasion.

But two years later, both countries joined forces to accuse the Syrian government of destabilising Lebanon. Last year they took similar positions in the Lebanon war with Israel.

Last month Kouchner said that the French army was preparing for “the worst” in Iran, suggesting that this time France would rally behind a U.S. war in the region.

Sarkozy has gone further in changing French priorities in the Middle East to focus, very much as the U.S. government does, on Israel’s security. “I have the reputation of been a friend of Israel,” he told the ambassadors meeting. “Well, it is true: I will never bargain Israel’s security.”

Sarkozy is from a Jewish Greek family on his mother’s side.

Such a blunt statement is again a break with political traditions created by De Gaulle in the mid 1960s. In 1967, De Gaulle imposed a French weapons boycott on Israel following the Israeli attacks on Arab neighbours and vast occupation of their territories.

Former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who was close to Chirac, has condemned the “radical change in French foreign policy towards what seems to be an alignment with U.S. positions.”

The political opposition has been more severe. Laurent Fabius, leader of the Socialist Party, has called Sarkozy “the lapdog of George W. Bush.”

A French diplomat, who asked not to be identified, told IPS that it was strange to see Sarkozy looking to get close to a president “unpopular beyond recovery, besieged by a hostile Congress, and with a mandate that will finish in a little more than a year.”