In what conceivable way is France qualified to pronounce on friendship, loyalty, or even the European project? Its friends are corrupt African dictators and guilt-racked Germans; its loyalty to itself; and France has turned the European project into a vehicle for national vainglory and agricultural subsidies.
France has a Napoleon complex: it puffs up its chest, teeters on elevated heels, a dwarf country with public delusions of grandeur, and private self-doubt. There’s no need for the rest of Europe to humor it. If the continent is truly to be a force in world affairs, and a counterbalance to overweening US power, France first needs therapy.
Indeed. A reader emails that he saw de Villepin on French TV claiming that international law virtually requires that France be let in on postwar reconstruction contracts.
UPDATE: The French are worried.