POLITICUS - Sarkozy and the political potshot
POLITICUS
Sarkozy and the political potshot
By John Vinocur / THE GUARDIAN
Published: November 17, 2008
Nicolas Sarkozy tries. He has sprayed concepts, some of them good ones, like buckshot from a scattergun at international issues and problems.
Sarkozy can be bold, emotional and refreshing. But if you go back to July, when
In Europe, over the past months, his modus operandi has met with a reticent reaction from
A Sarkozy plan to create a Mediterranean Union with
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Approaching the wider stages of the G-20 financial crisis meeting in Washington over the weekend and an EU-Russia summit meeting in Nice last Friday, Sarkozy's energy and eagerness - in truth, his thrusting at importance without the caliber of influence, consistency or number of divisions (to quote Stalin) to carry it off - was similar.
For starters: His attempt to take advantage of the presidential interregnum in the United States and turn a meeting on global economic misery into a new world financial charter bearing his imprint just didn't happen.
Yes, the inclusion of
But the meeting's regulatory recommendations came with individually stated caveats that they would be used "as appropriate" by participant countries. And reality said that instead of a 100-day action plan Sarkozy insisted a week earlier was imperative for the
As a measure of Sarkozy's effective international weight, this was foreseeable.
What was not was Sarkozy's effort to become what the French press called "mediator" between
On Friday, startlingly, he said the Americans' (and Czechs' and Poles') plan to install an anti-missile shield against Iranian nukes "would bring nothing to European security." When Sarkozy made the comment, he was on a podium with Dmitri Medvedev, who the week before threatened to target missiles on EU and NATO countries. The Associated Press reported the Russian president smiled and pointed at Sarkozy in approval.
This was the same Sarkozy who has called Iranian nuclear weapons "inadmissible" and wants
Before he did, Denis MacShane, who was Prime Minister Tony Blair's minister for Europe, attending a meeting of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in
In fact, in a more generous interpretation, this was Sarkozy being Sarkozy, attracted to grand pronouncements and marking out a patch in history for himself, his mouth running ahead of reflection or his diplomats.
An adviser to Sarkozy offered this positive spin: "People are starting to understand how he works. He has an idea, says something serious, but not diplomatically, and then if necessary he'll correct himself. If there's a hullabaloo, he couldn't care less."
A senior
Still, Sarkozy's remark came in the context of his chairmanship of an EU-Russia summit meeting at which the EU lifted its suspension of talks on a strategic partnership agreement with Russia even though Moscow's troops are still in Georgia.
Piling the missile-shield remark on top of that was enough to tickle the suspicion among the EU and NATO members of the old Soviet bloc that the Sarko “l'Américain” of his 2007 election campaign was molting into the Sarkozy of equidistance between the
Medvedev himself, behind Sarkozy's back, suggested he would not take bets on where the French scattergun might point next.
At a public discussion in
It was the same Medvedev who a day earlier had pointedly shot down Sarkozy's notion of his greatest success during his time as Europe's postulant Master of the Universe: stopping the Russians from occupying all of
To set history and Sarkozy's ego straight, Medvedev said, "I made the decision to stop operations" - before Sarkozy came to
Just FYI: The next scheduled French leadership semester at
It’s a great article isn’t it?
GZ/08