Embassy Row

What does France want?

A British politician yesterday recounted a story about the great 19th-century French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, who served kings, revolutionaries and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and gained a reputation for duplicity in diplomatic affairs.

Upon learning of Talleyrand’s death in 1838, another famous diplomat, Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich of Austria, is reputed to have quipped: “I wonder what he meant by that?”

Geoffrey Van Orden, a conservative member of the European Parliament, added, that with the French offering to rejoin NATO’s unified military command after more than 40 years, “One might ask, ’What are they up to now?” ”

France, which withdrew its troops from NATO control in 1966, is offering to reintegrate them if the United States supports more independence for an exclusively European defense force under the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) of the European Union.

Proponents argue that the ESDP will allow Europe to address security threats that NATO declines to support. Opponents, such as Mr. Van Orden and his colleague Christopher Heaton-Harris, see the ESDP as a French-led attempt to undermine the Western military alliance.

“The ESDP is a great deceit,” Mr. Van Orden, a retired brigadier general, told a Heritage Foundation forum on U.S. policy toward the European Union. “It is essentially about politics and has very little to do with military capability. It will undermine the NATO alliance, which, some will argue, that it is intended to do.”

Mr. Van Orden noted that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has won friends in Washington with his pro-American view but that his government is pursuing policies that will weaken U.S. influence over European military affairs. He downplayed France’s offer to deploy a battalion, about 700 troops, to Afghanistan.

“The United States should put its support behind strengthening NATO,” Mr. Van Orden said. “European defense policy will be detrimental not only to U.S. interests but to all Western democracies.”

Mr. Heaton-Harris, also a British conservative member of the European Parliament, said he is “constantly fascinated” by U.S. attitudes toward France.

“It is an interesting love-hate relationship you have with the French,” he said. “But don’t you think you should spend more time building relationships with individual member states [of the European Union]. … Your best friends [in Europe] are probably Poland and the Czech Republic.”

Despite objections from Russia, those two countries agreed to host a U.S. missile-defense system to protect Europe from attacks from Iran and other rogue nations pursuing nuclear weapons.

Diplomats detained

Police in Zimbabwe yesterday detained the U.S. ambassador and several of his diplomatic colleagues after they visited a hospital to check on victims of political violence that broke out after last month’s disputed presidential election.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack complained of police “harassment” against Ambassador James McGee, who was questioned for nearly two hours along with diplomats from Britain, the European Union, Japan, the Netherlands and Tanzania.

“If you have foreign diplomats accredited to Zimbabwe who are facing this kind of treatment,” Mr. McCormack said, “you can only imagine for Zimbabwean citizens what life is like if they make an effort to speak up to voice their opinions.”

President Robert Mugabe, who has held power for nearly 30 years, is expected to face a runoff election with opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who has accused Mugabe supporters of unleashing violence against members of his Movement for Democratic Change.

• Call Embassy Row at 202/636-3297, fax 202/832-7278 or e-mail jmorrison@washingtontimes.com.