Sarkozy unlikely to cozy up to U.S.
PARIS -- Nicolas Sarkozy was elected to the French presidency on Sunday by a majority that provides a mandate for change that will carry him through his first hundred days and beyond. No one since Francois Mitterrand, the Socialist president elected in 1981 after more than three decades of Gaullist rule, has had so convincing a mandate.
Obviously there will be opposition. But the French electorate ordinarily gives a new president the parliamentary majority to carry out his program, and that will almost certainly be the case for Sarkozy when a new National Assembly is elected in June.
French attention will be on his promises to change the structure of employment, social benefits and union legislation during his inaugural summer and fall. It is reasonable to think that he will get the substance of the legislation he wants. Then one will await the results.
The main interest for Americans and the American government is whether French foreign policy will change. The answer is yes, but not as much as people may think.
The subject was almost entirely absent from the campaign debates.
That is an indication that the policy of outgoing president Jacques Chirac enjoyed a large consensus of support.
Sarkozy prominently presented himself as a friend of the United States during an American visit last year, and criticized the manner by which the Chirac government had opposed U.N. Security Council support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but he has also said that he agrees with France's decision to oppose the war.
On the night of his election victory he said, "I want to tell (Americans) that France will always be by their side when they need her, but I also want to tell them that friendship is accepting that one's friends can act differently." He added criticism of the Bush administration for its stubborn refusal to do more on climate change.
When national leaders change, there is an inclination to overrate the importance of human relations. People think that international affairs are heavily influenced, if not ruled, by the personal opinions and mutual relationships of leaders who like to refer to one another as their great friends, and put on silly clothes for group photographs. Americans have not forgotten George W. Bush's peering into the soul of Vladimir Putin the first time they met, and finding him good.
Sarkozy might like Americans more than Jacques Chirac did, but Chirac really did like the United States, worked there for a time as a young man, and speaks serviceable English -- none of which is true of Sarkozy, whose English is primitive, and who should know better than to try to speak it in public.
However, as his election-night speech indicated, France's national interests and public opinion will determine French policy, once the protocol niceties are set aside.
The French public also generally likes Americans, more so than many other populations in Europe. But on the whole it dislikes very much the policies, as well as many of the leading personalities, of the George W. Bush administration.
Furthermore, there is a body of analysts, diplomats and intelligence and military specialists whose duty is to make cold appraisals of the value and utility of what France is doing in Afghanistan, Central and East Africa, the Balkans, and in its relations with the United States and Russia.
They will report to President Nicolas Sarkozy. The politician Nicolas Sarkozy sees very well what undiscriminating commitment to the support of American policies and the Bush administration has contributed to the destruction of Tony Blair and the reputation Blair will take into retirement, and probably into the history books.
American appeals for closer transatlantic relations, as at a U.S.-EU summit in Washington at the end of April, characteristically assume that European criticisms and opposition to the U.S. reflect a perverse inability or personal unwillingness of the French and others to understand the rightness and justice of American policy.
Thus calls for more support for the United States on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, Afghanistan and other issues, or for greater military spending in Europe, frequently ignore that Europeans may have well-founded disagreements with some of those policies, or even be alarmed by them.
This is the case with the American program to install anti-ICBM missiles in Eastern Europe, seen by most European governments as uselessly provocative of Russia, and by many in the European security and military services as an implausible defense against a strategically illogical threat that does not yet, and may never, exist.
There is mounting doubt in France, and in the Netherlands and some other NATO countries, about the rationale, tactics, likelihood of success, and political costs of the NATO intervention in Afghanistan.
French commandos worked in direct collaboration with American special forces in Afghanistan from 2002 until very recently, but the Chirac government's military advisors now have expressed concern that a slide is underway toward a repetition of the Iraq disaster.
There is question about the utility of continued French (and NATO) activity there. President Sarkozy is unlikely to overrule their judgment simply because he likes Americans, and least of all because he wants an invitation to the Crawford ranch.
(Tribune Media Services)
