Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Defending the French

Dan Mahoney has a defense (sort of) of the French view of things (In an Australian newspaper; isn’t the blogosphere great! Got it through innocentsabroad). It’s perfectly sensible, even if I think he overdoes it: He stresses that these guys are no knee-jerk anti-Americans, they’re not cowards, and they’re just seeking to push their countries’ interest. OK, maybe. In the end, though Mahoney ignores much that is implied in the French position vis-a-vis Europe and America. Mahoney ends up blaming the Germans for misguiding the French. Still, worth reading. I’d still like him to answer the TNR piece I mentioned yesterday, as well as Krauthammer. Here are a few lines.

"In my view, French foreign policy is guided by considerations of national interest that are not reducible to crude anti-Americanism, no matter what the talking heads say. And French intellectual life long ago ceased to be dominated by the crass anti-Americanism and leftism that Revel rightly continues to excoriate.

I, for one, believe that it was a terrible mistake for President Jacques Chirac to abruptly shift course several weeks ago at his summit with Chancellor Gerhard Schroder. For the first time, he seemed to identify French policy with the kind of humanitarian pacifism that has become the official German position. The French have had to backtrack ever since, with Chirac most recently insisting that France is ’not a pacifist country’."

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