Happy Bastille Day

Mark Steyn takes a look at the recent actions of our "ally" France.

You can’t beat the Americans on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and other supranational bodies. If you make sure the embryo institutions of world government are built in France’s image, America’s strength will be as irrelevant as that of the class freak or the town misfit.

In other words, this is the war, this is the real battlefield, not the sands of Mesopotamia or the Hindu Kush. And, on this terrain, Paris figures, Americans always lose. Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French machinations, as in the first Gulf War. Through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively effectively. It’s time the rest of us were so clear-sighted.

Clearly, the US needs to see that France is no longer (if it ever was) and ally, but a direct competitor - enemy may be too strong a word - and that we need to treat it as such.