La Nouveaux Ennemi?

Last night I watched part of "Ike: Countdown to D-Day" on A&E. Tom Selleck played the title role, and seemed to do a good job of capturing the cold, hard commanding core that lay behind that million-dollar smile (of course, the purpose of the smile was to hide the core, so I can't be positive that Ike was really like that). But one scene caught my attention: one of numerous conferences between Eisenhower and Churchill, tying down last details for Overlord, in which Churchill bad-mouths Charles de Gaulle: "the man acts as though Vichy doesn't exist, ignores the fact that Jews are being rounded up and put in boxcars. But he guards French priveleges zealously."


How low our ally has fallen in our eyes.


Instapundit linked this denunciation of France by Gerard Henderson in the Australian Sunday Morning Herald. It is harsh indeed, covering the ignominous history of the 20th Century French military (WW1, WW2, Vietnam, Algeria), and makes the charge that the French (and German) economy is actually detrimental to European growth as a whole.


I could actually go farther, and say that, as a military ally, the French have been useless for much of the last 200 years. In point of fact, the last time the French army was up to the task of defending France by itself was the 1790's (if you recall, even Napoleon suffered invasion and defeat). France has never been strong enough for the role she assigned herself, as grand arbiter and Master of Europe. She has tried militarily, culturally, and now economically, to take this role, and every time has come up short of success, and every failure has invited rot, chaos, and collapse. French history is a predictable swing of phoenix and ash.


How Olympian I sound, damning these poor people whom I claim to know from the tales of their ancestors, seeing Clotaire I in Jacques Chirac. Yet it has become a habit for we Americans, especially of late. Our seeming mutual cultural dissonance has since 9/11 and Iraq exploded into mutual contempt. They hate us for our arrogance, our willingness to disregard international opinion, our addiction to great crusades, our inwardness/ignorance, and most of all for our power. We hate them for their arrogance, their blindness to the threat of the age, their inability to escape the worn and usless paths of negotiation with devils, their corruption/cynicism, and most of all for their weakness. It is difficult, without a historian's eye, to tell which of us has the right of it. Are we too naive or are they too jaded, we without enough historical experience or they with too much of it? And are we, with our Girls Gone Wild and our shows about nothing, so far from them as we would like to think?


I cannot say. Even the historian of the future will likely see the question through a glass, and darkly. I can only fall back to the dictum of Machiavelli, who postulated that states begin to die when they cease to grow, to fight.


Whether the one product of la belle payee that I've that the great pleasure to meet over the course of my life would agree with me, I do not know.