Let Them Eat Yellow Cake

If there's one lesson President Barack Obama has learned in the last month, it's the following: It's best not to mess with the French when you're talking about nuclear issues.
 
Just last year before his thumping electoral victory, the media was awash with claims that French President Nicolas Sarkozy had accused then Senator Obama of holding policies on Iran that were "utterly immature" and comprised of "formulations empty of all content."
 
Sarkozy lambasted Obama again at the September 2009 Security Council Summit when the U.S. President called on the world to "never stop until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of the earth." Sarkozy's response: "President Obama dreams of a world without weapons... but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite." He added, "Iran since 2005 has flouted five Security Council resolutions. North Korea has been defying Council resolutions since 1993."
 
It must have dawned on Obama that your initials don't have to be G.W.B. to provoke such Gallic affection.
 
The dispute allegedly emanates from Obama's decision to delay a joint press conference with his British and French counterparts until after he had chaired a U.N. Security Council meeting on nuclear non-proliferation. It later became clear that the joint press conference was to announce the discovery of a clandestine Iranian nuclear plant in Qom. Standing on a platform announcing this revelation with Obama was perhaps a little too much to take for Sarkozy, especially after his American counterpart had lectured the world on non-proliferation.
 
That being said, other than maybe Fashoda or the Dreyfus Affair, Obama would have struggled to broach a subject more sensitive to the French psyche than nuclear issues. For the past few years the French have been leading the way on nuclear negotiations with Iran, and basking in the glory of the Bush administration's reluctance to engage with Tehran.
 
It's not that Paris is hostile towards Obama's overtures to Tehran--they support American engagement with Iran. However, Sarkozy is a little alarmed by the mixed signals coming from Washington that seem to suggest existing nuclear states should aim to eradicate their arsenals unilaterally, whilst states that seek nuclear weapons, such as Iran and North Korea, should be welcomed in from the cold.
 
This is not an altogether naive strategy, but surely this can only work when Iran and North Korea offer to give up their clandestine nuclear programs. And that's just wishful thinking, especially when your adversary is open to talks but has all but ruled out even the possibility of discussing its nuclear program. Thus, the last thing we should be doing is disarming. We need to show teeth, not be knocking them out.
 
Nuclear weapons are not only a status symbol to the French, but to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle they are "what makes France great." One could even claim that nuclear weapons replaced France's Empire as the totemic symbol of national pride. Apart from the United States, the French are the only other Western nation to have independently developed their own indigenous military nuclear capability, le force de frappe. Thus, anything nuclear is a source of great pride in France, whether it is investing in power plants or attempting to prevent Iran from weaponizing its existing capability.
 
Just look at the history.
 
Whenever I hear Americans claim that French foreign policy is designed to undermine the United States, I remind them that it was de Gaulle, not Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who offered his full support to President John F. Kennedy during the nuclear stand-off with the Soviet Union in October 1962. Like his predecessors, what Sarkozy does expect is that when it comes to nuclear issues he should be treated as an equal. And after hearing Obama's UN speech, why shouldn't he?
 
As if the United States had not had enough of Utopian foreign policies, Obama's dreams of nuclear disarmament come at a time when Iran and North Korea are showing no signs of halting their voracious pursuit of nuclear weapons. De Gaulle once claimed that without an atomic bomb no country could properly consider itself independent. Luckily for us, Sarkozy understands this and that nuclear disarmament at this moment in time will leave the West rudderless, and a nuclear Iran inevitable.
 
(Image from Agência Brasil by Ricardo Stuckert; French President Nicolas Sarkozy in New York on Sept. 25, 2009)
 
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