After reading that article, I had a few quick thoughts.
First, I think President Sarkozy is doing a great job. He has taken steps towards making France more involved and productive, domestically and internationally. Since I'm not a French citizen, I can't pass judgement on Sarkozy either way, but I definitely think he is a step up from previous French heads of state/government.
Reading the news and looking at history, I understand the relationship between France and the U.S., but I can't help but feel baffled by the whole thing. France and the U.S. are so closely linked by history, culture and conviction that any kind of ideological divergence seems impossible. However, I believe America would react similarly if it were in France's position post World War Two. On a more abstract level, I think the same case could be made for the Iraq-U.S. relationship. Few ties exist between the U.S. and Iraq, but, if you will excuse the cheesy colloquialism, Americans and Iraqis are kindred spirits. Americans, the French and Iraqis are more similar than they want to admit.
The Economist had an interesting infographic on their website today which is somewhat related to the NATO-France relationship.
Economist.com
If that graph does not illustrate the point well enough, the U.S. Navy currently has 11 aircraft carriers in service, the rest of the world's navies have 10 (average U.S. carrier tonnage > 100,000 tons, everyone else average carrier tonnage <<< 100,000 tons); plus, the only active 5th generation fighter aircraft and long-range stealth bombers are flown by the U.S. Air Force. Supremacy seems like an understatement. On a less serious, and completely unrelated, note, I found this cool demographic map on wikipedia.
Words fail me...
Update:
On the military spending graph, the U.S. Department of Defense released a report today on China's military. You can see a summary and link to the report on BBC.com. The DoD presents different spending estimates than the Economist (see page 44 of the report), who appear to be using official estimates from the Chinese government. If you are trying to decide who's numbers are correct, good luck. Both governments clearly have some agendas at work, but whether China spends $120 billion or $60 billion, that U.S. column in the graph from the Economist still towers above the others. Still, the DoD report is a good read for those of you interested in these sorts of things; I imagine a Chinese government report on the U.S. military would be equally fascinating.
6 comments:
Awww, France. :D
I lol'd at that map. What's up with Wisconsin?! It's like, half-and-half, and I'm going to be in the "wrong" half next year. -_-
Then I look at Alaska, and lol more. XD
That was a huge project... it came up in a bunch of my linguistic classes. I can't believe that economist bar graph.
Ok, all of the following offered in a spirit of free and interesting debate.
First off, I think the article was, honestly, really unfair. I know you know all these stats Dan so please consider it reminders, not a lecture. But it still bears repeating. For every American who died in World War 2 three Frenchmen were killed. The combined British Expeditionary Force and French Army were overrun / driven out by the Germans...but no one rags on the British as "abandon monkeys" like we do the French, even though their successful defense was largely a product of geography. And then D-Day happened after the Russians had burned their entire country to the ground and lost 20 million people fighting the Nazis, apparently so that British and Americans can feel self congratulatory about defeating the Germans and think France should be so grateful to us for showing up 4+ years after the fact...I just didn't really like the tone of the article starting from the Johnson quote. France has been so derided by many Americans, with no acknowledgment of the massive sacrifices they made in the twentieth century, that any caustic wit about how ungrateful they are strikes me as a knife in a friend's back.
One of the lessons France took away from World War 2 (and World War 1) was that, if they depended on the United States for defense, they could count on our aid about the time their country had been totally razed / conquered. As such, they saw fit to maintain their own freedom of action, and I find it hard to blame them. It was simply a rational response to French experience. Tying themselves to NATO added no strategic benefit (France gets overrun by Russia either way if Russia wants to overrun France, NATO mobilized against Russia whether France is part of it or not) while limiting their independent ability to perhaps ward off or avoid such calamities by distancing themselves from any NATO/USSR conflict and maintaining the threat of an independent nuclear arsenal. When it's your country with the hundreds of miles of traversable land border, your defense policy is going to differ from that dominated by an island nation and an (effectively) island superpower.
Ok, second item - can you explain further why you see Iraqis and Americans as kindred spirits?
Awesome charts of course. The US Navy is nuts, although apparently with the entire Seventh Fleet holding in the Sea of Japan right now they had to send a destroyer from the Gulf of Aden to hang out with the Impeccable in the South China Sea - feeling a bit stretched I'd imagine.
Thanks for that response, Jackson. As I'm sure you know, I am among the group of people that doesn't understand why Americans (huge generalization but I feel like the phenomenon is fairly widespread) display such a unjustified dislike for the French. The article is a bit undiplomatic, but I felt it serves as a good starting point for a rational discussion.
Clearly, post WW2 French military policy was driven by rational reactions to the "New World Order." The part that surprises me is the wave of anti-americanism that gripped France and continues to linger today. I find that as irrational as Americans disliking the French.
The more I think about it, the more I feel that the re-merging with NATO is more a formality. The biggest NATO project at the moment is Afghanistan and France already has over 3000 troops on the ground. Joining NATO makes more sense for France now than at anytime during the Cold War.
One thing I didn't like about the article was how it wanted to throw the U.K. into the mix, but the U.K.-France relationship is very different from the U.S.-France relationship. The U.K.-France dynamic has a much longer history and makes lumping the U.S. and U.K. together seem grossly uninformed.
The U.S.-Iraq connection is much harder to define. To be honest, I almost feel like retracting what I said, but I can't. "Kindred spirits" is probably not the best way to put it and quite honestly sounds like a neo-conservative talking point. Iraqis and Americans share two major qualities: everyone has a gun and no one wants to be told how to do something. For me, these are not the most endearing qualities and it is downright impossible to get along if that is the only common ground (unless they run into each other at an NRA convention). Iraqi society is one of the most friendly to Western culture among Arab nations. Iraq also has a lot of educated, liberal people.
Perhaps none of those common qualities actually matter. In fact, when the dust settles in Iraq, the Iraq-U.S. relationship will be more like the Saudi Arabia-U.S. A relationship driven by oil money and shared anti-terrorist policy. The idealist within me hopes something more is possible, but a military occupation is not an ideal condition for idealism.
I love using navies as my metric for relative military strength. I suppose they aren't terribly accurate when considering land-locked countries, but my list of historically influential land-locked nations is really short (the only one that comes to mind at the moment is the Mongol nation under Attila & Co.). Navies are blunt instruments of showing off strength, but they still hold a splinter of romanticism. The U.S. Navy is indeed insane, which perfectly reflects the U.S. military budget.
Yeah, I feel like part of the cause of the France/America friction is that our countries have really different ways of approaching the world even though we both come from revolutionary democratic backgrounds - I think it makes each of us expect the other to be more like ourselves and then to get upset when they aren't. France has a long history of viewing things from a realist, raison d'etat point of view while the US has always had a very strong moral/idealist bent to our international relations. (In general) We think that if the French don't agree with us they must be betraying democracy since we always claim to be acting for idealistic reasons - the French think that if democracy's in evidence at home, one should just choose the policies that work for one's country and keep the peace.
Well, my interpretation anyway.
I see what you were getting at with Iraq. The fact that Iraq was at least coming from a secular background gives me some hope as well, but as you say we are unlikely to see anything better than a Saudi-type relationship, if that. Worst case scenario is probably the Iranian Islamic Revolution replayed in Iraq with our new Embassy/Death Star being converted into the Ayatollah's new palace.
The only good thing about France is their food. :o)
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