Well, if the French get anymore wimpy and adverse to conflict they’re going to invade Poland. There are roughly two views of “Europe,” as represented mainly by France. One is largely a neo-con view. It holds that Europe is exhausted and militarily weak, and opposes the U.S. in Iraq chiefly out of pique at our awesome strength. “Europe” spends so much time “irritating” and “annoying” us because it is incapable of power politics on its own. The implication of this view is clear: Forget about Europe, since that’s all you can do when people are being annoying. The other view, best represented by John O’Sullivan, is that the current situation is all about power politics, about France exploiting the widespread anti-American, appeasement sentiment on the Continent to secure its dominance of Europe and make it an explicitly anti-American project. This view gets more confirmation by the day, the latest being Chirac’s extraordinary chest-beating rebuke and threat toward the pro-American nations of Eastern Europe. Indeed, the neo-con view of France is mostly false: it is a country that believes deeply in the concept of national interest, has no qualms about using force (although its ability to project it is very limited), and feels little guilt at its colonial history. If you look at the 1990s, France was much more willing to put its ground troops at risk in Bosnia and Kosovo than the United States. And, after France and Britain froze the U.S. into inaction early in the Bosnia crisis, Chirac later relentlessly pounded Clinton to do more, saying at one point that the position of leader of the Free World was “vacant.” The rhetoric now from France about war almost being a failure is situational hot-air meant to cloak its venal and self-interested position on Iraq with high-mindedness.

Another thing about France: it’s capable of high diplomatic duplicity, demonstrated again and again lately, in the service of its national interest. The implication of the O’Sullivan view—explored at length in the current NR–is that France’s machinations can’t just be shrugged off as whining, but must be answered with a concerted push, involving trade, diplomatic, and security policy, to detach the rest of Europe from the Franco-German project.