Last month, as world leaders prepared to gather in France for the G7 Summit, French officials had Donald Trump on the mind.<\/p>\n
Using its privileges as host, Paris worked diligently to avoid any hiccups that might upset the U.S. president. First, it delayed<\/a> the meeting from June 14 to June 16, ensuring that it wouldn\u2019t interfere with Trump\u2019s 80th birthday celebration, or the cage match on the White House lawn that accompanied it. Then, French President Emmanuel Macron went \u201cout of his way\u201d to design an agenda to \u201cappeal to the sort of things Trump wants,\u201d as one analyst told<\/a> Reuters.<\/p>\n Last, and perhaps most bizarrely, French officials delayed the ceremonial transfer of the remains of French Resistance hero Marc Bloch, who was set to be reinterred at France\u2019s illustrious Panth\u00e9on in the heart of Paris on June 16. This decision was consequential; it meant that, instead of carrying out the ceremony on the anniversary of Bloch\u2019s murder by the Gestapo in 1944, officials had to pay tribute a week later, delaying a national tribute of exceptional historical significance for one of France\u2019s greatest historians and patriots.<\/p>\n In the end, France ultimately gave up honoring Marc Bloch on the very day of his martyrdom in order to adjust its schedule to the imperious wishes of the White House and, ultimately, to welcome the U.S. president to nearby Versailles in an effort to curry favor with him.<\/p>\n These decisions reflect a sorry state of mind. Even when it comes to our own national history, France has grown accustomed to treating constraints originating in Washington as overriding priorities. Yet nothing required the ceremony to be postponed or the agenda to be reshaped. <\/p>\n The relationship that should bind two great allied republics too often resembles one of political dependence, in which Paris is less concerned with defending its own interests and values than with deferentially anticipating Washington’s wishes.<\/p>\n This situation serves neither France nor the United States.<\/p>\n A common misconception is that America’s interests are best served by compliant allies who implement decisions made in Washington without question. That is the logic of empire, not of sovereign nations joined in partnership. The United States has far greater need of allies willing to speak candidly than of vassals eager to please, as recent history has repeatedly borne out.<\/p>\n When Jacques Chirac’s France refused to join the 2003 invasion of Iraq<\/a>, it was accused of betraying the Western alliance. With the benefit of hindsight, who can seriously argue that Paris was wrong? No weapons of mass destruction were ever found, nor any relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. The war shattered the Iraqi state, fueled the rise of jihadist terrorism, strengthened Iran’s regional influence, and cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars \u2013 not to mention the vast number of American and Iraqi lives lost.<\/p>\n France’s refusal was undoubtedly unwelcome in Washington. Yet it proved salutary. It served as a vaccine against hubris \u2013 a timely reminder that no power, however great, is immune to error. It also echoed the enduring lesson of Thucydides’ \u201cHistory of the Peloponnesian War\u201d: no democracy can ultimately prevail abroad while violating the very principles it claims to uphold.<\/p>\n It was precisely this lesson that General de Gaulle understood when, in his 1966 Phnom Penh speech,<\/a> he denounced the Vietnam War. He was not seeking to weaken the United States; he was trying to spare it a strategic disaster. He reminded Americans that no foreign army can indefinitely impose its will upon a people determined to shape its own destiny. History ultimately proved him right.<\/p>\n This Gaullist tradition did not consist in systematically opposing Washington. It meant supporting the United States whenever shared interests converged \u2014 and saying no when it embarked on a dangerous course.<\/p>\n It is precisely this capacity for independent judgment that has gradually disappeared.<\/p>\n The Ukrainian crisis offers a striking example. At the 2008 NATO<\/a> summit in Bucharest, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel initially understood the risks. Both opposed extending the prospect of alliance membership to Ukraine and Georgia, knowing that Moscow regarded such a move as a strategic red line that risked triggering a major confrontation on the European continent.<\/p>\n Had France firmly maintained that position and continued to promote a European security architecture encompassing Europeans, Russians, and Americans alike, the Ukrainian catastrophe might well have been avoided. Instead, Paris gradually abandoned this vision in favor of growing alignment with NATO enlargement and, inevitably, a logic of confrontation.<\/p>\n The same mistake was repeated with NATO’s missile defense system<\/a>. By agreeing in 2012 to join a project purportedly aimed at Iran<\/a> but viewed by Russia<\/a> as a hostile strategic deployment, France helped fuel a new arms race. After President George W. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the priority should have been to rebuild strategic trust. Instead, we chose the opposite course.<\/p>\n The same pattern emerged over Iran. When President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action<\/a> (JCPOA) in 2018, France should have firmly opposed the decision. It should have defended an agreement that was working, reduced the risk of war, and refused to force French companies out of Iran at Washington’s behest. Once again, deference prevailed over independence. <\/p>\n The successive crises that have engulfed the Middle East<\/a> \u2013 and above all the recent war against Iran, which was interrupted, if only briefly, with the Memorandum of Understanding<\/a> \u2013 have demonstrated the cost of that failure. The conflict ended in what many observers regard as a strategic setback for the United States, a conclusion reached by analysts as different as Robert Kagan<\/a> in his widely discussed Atlantic essay “Checkmate in Iran” and John J. Mearsheimer<\/a>.<\/p>\n Even worse, should the recent resumption of hostilities evolve into a prolonged conflict, the consequences could extend far beyond the Middle East, triggering a severe global economic crisis in which Western economies would almost certainly bear the heaviest costs.<\/p>\n