Conrad Black: Obama’s Foreign-Policy Follies ... Wrong on France, wrong on disarmament
[Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.]
The revelation, thanks to WikiLeaks, that the United States has promised — as part of the recently ratified New START agreement — to identify precisely the Trident nuclear-tipped missiles it sells to the United Kingdom, incites again serious doubts about this administration’s notions of arms control. Its rush to disarm, and to hand over the assured military secrets of its closest historic ally, to buy the evanescent and fraudulent amity of the Russians, and conspicuously to fail to deter Iranian assumption of nuclear capability, are, each in themselves, and doubly so when aggregated together into a comprehensive policy, dangerously mistaken.
President Obama’s recent announcement that America’s closest ally was France, like the strident bluster of the administration’s King Lear–like attempts to meddle in Egypt, raises new doubts about U.S. foreign policy. The reference to France was an insane formulation that has not been accurate since shortly after the departure, from what was then the American Confederation, of the Marquis de Lafayette, in 1783.
For the first third of the Cold War, France was too enfeebled to be of much assistance as an ally, and after the return of Charles de Gaulle and the founding of the Fifth Republic, France’s foreign policy has been devoted altogether to the harassment of the United States. Admittedly, the French were unceremoniously left to be embarrassed at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, though they long protested that they needed no assistance before abruptly requesting the use of atomic weapons on the Vietnamese Communists. And, with the U.K. and Israel, France was rather heavily renounced after the undeniably mad enterprise of the Suez invasion. And when de Gaulle returned to office in 1958, he had not forgotten that Roosevelt had kept a prominent ambassador to the tawdry, Ruritanian fascist imposture of a government in Vichy almost to the end of 1942, and had not acknowledged that the Free French de Gaulle led had any status at all until a few weeks before millions of Parisians deliriously welcomed de Gaulle in August 1944. And de Gaulle’s proposal for an executive committee of NATO, consisting of its nuclear powers — the U.S., the U.K., and France — was shuffled off a bit negligently by Eisenhower to be dismissed by Kennedy in his cavalier effort to take over direct command of British and French nuclear weapons.
All of that does not obscure the fact that Americans were the principal liberators of France in 1944, with the British and Canadians (whom de Gaulle also went out of his way to discommode, including using a state visit to observe Canada’s centenary in 1967 to urge the secession of Quebec and breakup of the country), and does not justify the cataract of outrages that France has rained upwards at America these 50 years...
Read entire article at National Review
The revelation, thanks to WikiLeaks, that the United States has promised — as part of the recently ratified New START agreement — to identify precisely the Trident nuclear-tipped missiles it sells to the United Kingdom, incites again serious doubts about this administration’s notions of arms control. Its rush to disarm, and to hand over the assured military secrets of its closest historic ally, to buy the evanescent and fraudulent amity of the Russians, and conspicuously to fail to deter Iranian assumption of nuclear capability, are, each in themselves, and doubly so when aggregated together into a comprehensive policy, dangerously mistaken.
President Obama’s recent announcement that America’s closest ally was France, like the strident bluster of the administration’s King Lear–like attempts to meddle in Egypt, raises new doubts about U.S. foreign policy. The reference to France was an insane formulation that has not been accurate since shortly after the departure, from what was then the American Confederation, of the Marquis de Lafayette, in 1783.
For the first third of the Cold War, France was too enfeebled to be of much assistance as an ally, and after the return of Charles de Gaulle and the founding of the Fifth Republic, France’s foreign policy has been devoted altogether to the harassment of the United States. Admittedly, the French were unceremoniously left to be embarrassed at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, though they long protested that they needed no assistance before abruptly requesting the use of atomic weapons on the Vietnamese Communists. And, with the U.K. and Israel, France was rather heavily renounced after the undeniably mad enterprise of the Suez invasion. And when de Gaulle returned to office in 1958, he had not forgotten that Roosevelt had kept a prominent ambassador to the tawdry, Ruritanian fascist imposture of a government in Vichy almost to the end of 1942, and had not acknowledged that the Free French de Gaulle led had any status at all until a few weeks before millions of Parisians deliriously welcomed de Gaulle in August 1944. And de Gaulle’s proposal for an executive committee of NATO, consisting of its nuclear powers — the U.S., the U.K., and France — was shuffled off a bit negligently by Eisenhower to be dismissed by Kennedy in his cavalier effort to take over direct command of British and French nuclear weapons.
All of that does not obscure the fact that Americans were the principal liberators of France in 1944, with the British and Canadians (whom de Gaulle also went out of his way to discommode, including using a state visit to observe Canada’s centenary in 1967 to urge the secession of Quebec and breakup of the country), and does not justify the cataract of outrages that France has rained upwards at America these 50 years...