If the French acted early, making their own assessment of shared intelligence, that was in part due to a smaller footprint. France fought in Afghanistan alongside NATO allies from 2001. “We are all Americans”, launched The worldthe front page of after September 11. He then withdrew all of his troops in 2014, in part to focus on his own counterinsurgency efforts in the Sahel. Yet the Kabul decision was also easier to make as the French have less qualms about doing their own thing, even when it annoys America. As Europeans reflect on the troubling implications of the Afghan fiasco and what it says about reliance on a one-sided America, the mood in Britain and Germany is both shocked and hurt. For the French, who learned from the Suez Crisis of 1956 the lesson that they could never fully trust America, a conclusion reinforced under the Obama and Trump presidencies, Afghanistan served to confirm what they suspected for a long time.
share France’s point of view. When Emmanuel Macron took the stage in job function email database the paneled amphitheater of the Sorbonne shortly after his election in 2017 and pleaded for “European sovereignty” and a “capacity to act autonomously” in matters of security if Europe does needed, his voice was alone. In Germany and the east, Mr Macron’s plea was viewed with irritation: yet another pesky Gaullist attempt to undermine NATO and supplant America as the guarantor of European security.
The spirits have moved a little since, since Mr. Macron has sought to reassure his friends that his idea is not to replace but to complete the transatlantic alliance. Even so, just last year, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the German Defense Minister, wrote bluntly that “the illusions of European strategic autonomy must end”. In Britain, meanwhile, Mr Macron’s appeals have been ignored as irrelevant for an island nation newly free to forge its own global role. Pooling European sovereignty over defense was something Brexit was meant to avoid.
TIT ANNUAL The July 14 ritual is an
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