Projecting PowerĪs the era of nuclear standoffs has faded, France has shifted to more contemporary tools. And it is a pattern that France has followed ever since, with no less a sense of existential stakes, up through this week’s events. It is a formulation more complex than independence: It acknowledges and even exploits reliance on the United States. Nuclear strikes were designed to support an expected American intervention and, if necessary, to compel it through escalation - a fitting summary of France’s ambition to simultaneously support, act apart from and coerce the Americans. He oversaw France’s emergence as a nuclear power, ejected American troops from France, withdrew from NATO, and tried to persuade West Germany to loosen its ties to that same alliance.īut in practice, France’s nuclear posture was simultaneously “national” - designed to deter the Soviets with no outside help - and grudgingly “recognized, if tacitly, the relationship between the decried American deterrent and the French one,” the scholar Philip H. influence at every turn, the better to assert French leadership instead. The arrival of the nuclear era, with its threat of total annihilation, convinced the French that they would have to secure their own way in the world, even if it would sometimes upset the allies whose help they would need to do it.Ĭharles de Gaulle, president from 1959 to 1969, sought Washington’s help in unifying Western Europe against the Soviets. The war and its aftermath, which left Europe divided between American and Soviet forces and saw Washington exerting new pressure on its now-junior allies, many of which it also militarily occupied, convinced the French that accepting a future as one of many in an American-led alliance, as the British and West Germans had, would mean subjugation. The planned submarine sale follows a long line of moves calibrated to project French power, maintaining the country’s ability to steer its own fate, while aligning with the allies whose help Paris knows it needs, paradoxically, to stand on its own.
Though Americans sometimes see French willfulness as animated by vanity or a desire to reclaim long-lost imperial pride, French leaders are keenly aware that they lead a medium-sized power in a world dominated by larger ones. Reconciling that dilemma between independence and reliance has animated and bedeviled French strategy ever since World War II left most of Europe subjugated to foreign superpowers.
#Total annihilation free how to#
For France, this week’s geopolitical drama - its nixed submarine sale to Australia, and its furious response to the United States’ jumping the deal - encapsulates a problem the once-mighty nation has struggled with for decades: how to assert itself as an independent power, which French leaders see as essential, while maintaining the alliances on which they know France relies.
0 kommentar(er)
