Frogs in France

FRANCE BLOCKS NATO WAR PLANNING, blares a February 10 CNN.com headline. But click through and you find a story about how France, Germany, and Belgium vetoed moves to prepare Turkey for war with Iraq. The headline is startlingly inaccurate, but in today's climate not at all surprising. With baseball's opening day still almost two months away, Americans in recent weeks have adopted an off-season national pastime: France-bashing.

Jonah Goldberg of National Review has revived the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" from its Simpsons provenance to describe the French, and now bloggers can't get enough of it. George Will, who doesn't often borrow from Rush Limbaugh's lexicon, recently called foreign minister Dominique de Villepin "oleaginous" and quipped that de Villepin's response to Colin Powell at the United Nations Wednesday showcased "the skill France has often honed since 1870--that of retreating, this time into incoherence." The New York Sun published a column last week claiming that France's "Last Great Coup" was the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928, which "roped" the United States into defending France from Germany. Richard Perle has groused that France has lost its "moral fiber." And on and on. All this obsessive loathing sounds oddly familiar. It reminds one of, what is it again? Oh, right--France's purported obsessive loathing of the United States.

The latest attacks on France make two core accusations. The first is that the French hate America so much they fill their froggy heads with nothing but thoughts of how to stymie us. But this "hate-America-first" charge is simplistic. It's true: The French often seek to limit American power, sometimes in seemingly pointless and irrational ways. But it's not so much because they can't stand America's muscular capitalism, military might, and can-do attitude. It's because they love France. How else to explain the fact that the French were anti-British, anti-German, and anti-Spanish (to list only the most recent targets in France's quest for relevance-cum-dominance) long before they became anti-American.

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Like Americans, the French believe that their eighteenth-century revolution more or less gave birth to modern liberty, and that their homegrown philosophical values are worthy universal ideals. They enthusiastically export French language and culture abroad and vigilantly defend it at home. They believe that France--and the idea of France--matter.

Like the rest of us, the French realize France is not the global power it was 300--or for that matter 100--years ago. They see another country contending for the title of champion of liberty and democracy. And, realizing the strength of the competition, they do what anyone else would do in the same situation: They play their trump cards--among them a veto at the Security Council and a nuclear arsenal--to wield disproportionate influence on the world stage. They don't do this out of a desire to humiliate or frustrate the United States, but out of a desire to prove that France still matters. The worst fate the French can imagine is to be ignored.

The other typical anti-French criticism is that France only looks out for itself: In Iraq, it only seeks to protect its oil contracts. In Ivory Coast, where France is desperate to broker a peace agreement among the nation's warring factions, it's only out to preserve its colonial glory. In the EU, where its seems to perpetually boss around its bigger and far more economically significant neighbor Germany, critics complain that France is selfishly protecting its interests and milking the Union's budget for all the euros it can get its filthy hands on.

Fighting