PARIS -- Once every five or six weeks, a French presidential adviser named Maurice Gourdault-Montagne flies to Washington to meet with his American counterpart, national security adviser Stephen Hadley. They spend several hours coordinating strategy on Iran, Syria, Lebanon and other hot spots, and then the Frenchman flies home. In between trips, the two men talk often on the phone, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Welcome to the French Connection. Though the link between the top foreign policy advisers of Presidents Bush and Jacques Chirac is almost unknown to the outside world, it has emerged as an important element of U.S. planning. On a public level, France may still be the butt of jokes among American politicians, but in these private diplomatic contacts, the Elysee Palace has become one of the White House's most important and effective allies.
It's not all that surprising. While the political and media classes of the two nations may be embittered at one another, the spooks and the lower-level diplomats have a good working relationship. Read between the lines of the reports on pre-Iraq War intelligence, and you'll see, for instance, how helpful France was in discovering Saddam's uranium overtures to Niger and alerting the U.S. agencies (which promptly screwed the pooch).
Look, we can work with France. So long as the U.N. remains, and it's not going anywhere, we have to work with France. It's the difficult but indispensible team member. It is one of the few nations left willing to use force, when it suits it to do so; more importantly, it has contacts around the world that America is too isolated, or too lazy, to cultivate.
I think we've mostly played them wrong for the past two generations. France doesn't ask that much: she asks that you treat her like a serious figure, and that you say it like you mean it.
The whole modern (post-1944) history of France is incomprehensible without reference to honor, specifically to the French need to maintain the fiction that their country remains in the first tier of world powers. And this is understandable; to accept demotion would be an irrecoverable slight to honor and a consequent reduction in France's power to protect itself, or influence world affairs.
France will in one moment taunt the United States, and the next turn around and waggle its nuclear fig leaf in the direction of the Tehran mullahs. As de Gaulle once put it, "France cannot be France without grandeur." What but honor, and fear of losing it, is at the root of that? "The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority," John C. Calhoun once wrote. De Gaulle, if he had read that, would have nodded in agreement.
Pricking the French ego may be amusing for a while, but where does it get us in terms of our world goals? Suffering the snubs of their insufferable media-philosophes may be grating, but if that's the price of their cooperation, I'll take it.