
Françoise posted the following comment to
my previous post on Sarkozy's foreign policy speech yesterday:
Je découvre votre blog avec grand plaisir. Il est extrêmement intéressant d'avoir l'opinion d'amis "non-français" sur notre pays.
Je retiens votre petite remarque (sarcastique ?) : "Was the word "failure" mentioned in Kennebunkport?"
Je ne sais pas ce qui s'est dit (dans "l'intimité") à Kennebunkport, mais tout ce discours de politique étrangère m'apparaît plein de contradictions, dans le texte lui-même et par rapport à l'attitude du président français pendant son séjour aux États-Unis.
Quelle est votre analyse à ce sujet ?
Thanks for your comment, Françoise. Your question provokes a somewhat lengthy response, so I'm putting it here in the main thread. First, I agree that Sarkozy's speech is full of contradictions. Indeed, it's quite interesting to read the innumerable reactions it has provoked, since each of the many commentators seems to focus on a different aspect of the speech as the most important point, suggesting that the address is something of a Rorschach test, which tells us more about the reader's preoccupations than about the president's.
The New York Times, for example, emphasized the threat of force against Iran. European commentators were far less interested in this aspect of the speech, and while several mentioned Sarkozy's "strong" statement on Iran, none saw a threat to use European force. Indeed, what Sarkozy said was that negotiation was the only way to escape from "a catastrophic alternative: the Iranian bomb or the bombardment of Iran." Was he thinking of an American bombardment of Iran? Of an Israeli bombardment of Iran? Or of a French/European bombardment of Iran? He didn't say. What he did say was only that an Iranian bomb was "unacceptable" to him, leaving the rest highly ambiguous. (For François Heisbourg's rather more appreciative take on the Iran statement, see
here.)
Now, ambiguity is sometimes useful in diplomacy, but it can also be very dangerous, particularly when the ambiguity involves the use of force.
Le Figaro characterizes Sarkozy's policy in a headline as "voluntarist" and draws a parallel with what is sees as his "voluntarism" in the domestic arena. I'm not quite sure what is intended by this adjective, unless it is to suggest that Sarko means to be an active presence in the foreign policy arena, seeking to anticipate and perhaps precipitate events rather than responding to them. So, for example, rather than wait for an opportunity to display lessened hostility to the United States, he chose to vacation in New Hampshire to make a point of the reorientation. But if this is voluntarism, he may be overdoing it. He could have indicated his willingness to help the United States out of its current impasse without fawning over a discredited president, to the point of rubbing his shoulder affectionately--I believe that the body language of the Kennebunkport encounter mattered more than the diplomatic language of the two leaders. Yet having thus aligned himself with Bush, he proceeded in his speech yesterday to describe the Bush policy as
un échec, a failure, which is quite accurate, only to proceed to an ambiguous statement about Iran, leaving observers to wonder whether he is now aligning himself with Bush's increasingly bellicose pronouncements on the Iranian question or persisting in the previous Franco-European course of mounting sanctions coupled with negotiations. The ambiguity strikes me as deliberate, and insofar as it encourages the
va-t-en-guerre faction in the United States, regrettable.
Much more interesting is the proposal for a Mediterranean Union, which came in for considerable attention in his speech. Sarkozy seems to have it in mind to foster a bloc of moderate Muslim states in North Africa as a counter to the "failed states" of Syria, Iraq, and Iran. He would like to join Turkey to this bloc as a substitute for Turkish membership in the European Union. And he sees Europe--but more importantly, France, with its longstanding cultural ties to the Maghreb--as the principal interlocutor with this new bloc, a stable regional counter-power to the turbulent Crescent. It's an interesting proposal, and one which I think will receive much development shortly under the leadership of Jean-David Levitte, who, far more than Kouchner, will I think be the key man in the emerging French foreign policy. Kouchner is the showman; Levitte is the strategist. Kouchner will figure in the splashier initiatives. Levitte will articulate the
grand dessein. Kouchner's recent
faux pas after his Baghdad visit demonstrates that he is still a neophyte in foreign policy, but it scarcely matters, since Sarkozy is in effect his own foreign minister.
That's all I have time for just now.