America's friend again: France!

Under Sarkozy, it's hard to use 'French' as a campaign slur.

By James R. Gaines

from the September 28, 2007 edition

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Washington - Who's a better friend to America – Britain or France?

With a certain high-school-like insecurity, Americans have been changing their answer for two centuries. That's understandable. After all, the US has alternately been at war and in love with both countries.

In the last presidential election, the answer was quite clear. Republican attempts to smear John Kerry as "French" showed where America's affections lay. The beginning of the Iraq war had made British Prime Minister Tony Blair a stateside hero and turned French fries into Freedom fries.

Today, in the 2008 campaign, one Republican campaign strategist is trying to use the French insult again, this time against Hillary Rodham Clinton. It's tempting for a GOP operative to pin the tail on the Socialist, cheese-eating surrender monkey.

It's also totally out of step, because in the past year, France and Britain seem to have started trading places in America's heart.

Under the turbocharged presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, France isn't that old France anymore, while England's new Prime Minister Gordon Brown seems to be trying to assume the role of former French president Jacques Chirac.

A member of Mr. Brown's new cabinet warned a distinguished Washington audience not long ago that the time was gone when a country's prestige could be "measured in what [it] could destroy. In the 21st century ... we must form new alliances." The incoming foreign minister, a well-known critic of Britain's policy in Iraq, lost no time saying that Britain needs "to build coalitions that ... go beyond the bilateral blinkers of the normal partners."

As a British source in Washington commented to the Guardian about these distancing messages, the Brown team was going to assert its independence "one policy speech at a time.... It's a smarter way of doing it than [to] have a knockdown argument."

Meanwhile, Britain has moved, as Brown puts it, "from combat to overwatch" in three of the four Iraqi provinces under its control, and he is clearly impatient to leave the fourth as well. His position on the "military option" in Iran is leery at best.

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