The French Way (21 page)

The French public, despite their government's refusal to let the Americans use its airspace, supported the raid—far more than did other West Europeans. Where roughly two-thirds of the French approved the operation, just as many West Germans and British disapproved.
And half the French, unlike the Germans or the British, endorsed another American attack if the Libyans continued to sponsor terrorism.
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There were anti-American demonstrations in the streets of London, Bonn, and Rome, but not Paris. In taking military action against Gadhafi, the French people sided more with Washington than with Paris. Chirac faced dissent from within his parliamentary majority when leaders of the UDF, including former president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, backed the Americans.
Le Figaro
gave a full-throated endorsement of the bombing, arguing that madmen like Gadhafi only understood force and reminding its readers where appeasement led.
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On the left,
Liberation
said the raid was justified, but the West needed to address the roots of terrorism—with which
Le Monde
agreed, writing that terrorism would not be stopped by bombs from the sky.
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Neither the public nor the media gave much support to their government's refusal to cooperate with the Americans, so in this case Mitterrand and Chirac were at odds with their own electorate.

The main diplomatic arena of the period 1985-87 was not fighting terrorism but arms control—especially combating Reagan's move to protect against the devastation of a nuclear war, his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), first broached in 1983, which centered on the construction of a protective “shield” in space that could destroy attacking ballistic missiles. France, at first, did not take the scheme, dubbed “Star Wars,” seriously, but by 1985 it was clear that the Americans were acting in earnest and Paris had to decide whether or not it would participate in the project's development.

The SDI challenged the basis of mutual deterrence and threatened to render French and British nuclear forces obsolete.
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The threat of retaliation, not defense, was the key to deterrence. “Star Wars” raised several questions for the French. Would Western Europe be as well protected by this “shield” as the United States? Once the United States could protect itself from Soviet missiles, would it be even less reliable as Europe's defender? Here was the bogey of decoupling.
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There were also technical problems that cast doubt on the scheme's feasibility. And
if it were effective, wouldn't it leave West Europeans at risk from Soviet short-range missiles and conventional forces? Furthermore, French officials thought it “inopportune” to alarm the Soviets when the superpowers were in the midst of serious disarmament negotiations: the Soviets might retaliate with new offensive weapons and thus relaunch the arms race. Signaling its adherence to the principal of nuclear deterrence, in 1985 France launched its sixth nuclear submarine.

At the annual meeting of the G7 at Bonn in May 1985, President Reagan again ignored French insistence on limiting such summits to economics rather than turning them into a “global political directorate.” He directly asked Mitterrand to sign on to the SDI, using the language of “subcontracting” to describe Europeans' participation in designing the technology. Mitterrand, after expressing his objections, responded just as directly: “It's no.” The notion of acting as “subcontractors” especially irritated him. As the summit progressed, disagreements continued over Nicaragua and American reluctance to call an international monetary conference, but then Reagan forced another issue on Mitterrand, proposing a new round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The French had warned the U.S. government against setting a date for new trade talks before preliminary negotiations were complete fearing renewed pressure on France to dismantle its agricultural subsidies. Commercial talks with the United States, Mitterrand confided to his government, forced France to make concessions because one could not reject everything: “that's why the ‘no' must precede…negotiations.”
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The debate intensified with the British, Germans, Italians, and even Jacques Delors, the (French) president of the European Commission, siding with Reagan. Mitterrand, in the words of his aide, “exploded.” As Mitterrand exclaimed at the time, “It's not healthy that allies dictate our policy. Certain [countries] accept it. Not me….I hear it said that no one wanted to isolate France. Very well. But that's what's happened in this room. It's not healthy. Just as it's not healthy that European affairs are judged by countries far from Europe. I'm ready to open a public controversy if this continues If these summits don't return to their initial
form, France will no longer attend [them] ”
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The United States had

its way on opening trade talks and at dinner that evening the heads of state got into storytelling and, as Reagan later observed, “a good time was had by all-(all except Mitterrand).”
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“Star Wars” bewildered Mitterrand. He told Gorbachev that “Reagan's conception of SDI is a product either of humanitarian reverie or [it's] propaganda.”
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French analysts attributed the scheme to domestic politics like Reagan's need to pass his defense budget.
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Mitterrand received conflicting advice from his experts about the feasibility of the SDI, but in the end France, alone among the allies, officially refused to cooperate in developing the project—although French firms were permitted to compete for SDI contracts. Chirac disagreed with the Elysee and argued that France should participate and avoid being left aside—to which the president replied, “If you insist, I will call a referendum about it and I will win.”
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At first a majority of the French wanted their country to participate in research, though many misunderstood the project's purpose, but opinion shifted as opposition in the media mounted and by 1986 they accepted government policy. Almost two of three French people wanted their nation to take the lead in developing an independent space defense; less than one in five opted for the American version.
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Mitterrand turned to Europe and urged creating a cooperative high-technology program called Eureka as a way of coordinating research and development. Eureka was to provide Europeans, especially the West Germans, with what was, at least ostensibly, a civilian alternative to the SDI's military research.

Despite the appearance of a more conciliatory leader in Moscow, the French remained deeply skeptical of the Soviets and proved less amenable to Gorbachev's charms than did other West Europeans. When asked to compare Gorbachev and Reagan in i985 the French public gave the American president higher grades than most other West Europeans for trustworthiness, flexibility as a negotiator, understanding European problems, and desiring peace—yet all of these endorsements were tepid, with only a quarter or a third awarding high
marks to Reagan and most saying neither leader deserved them or registering no opinion.
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In October i986, the French government received a reminder of its marginal status in the Cold War. At the Reykjavik Summit with Gorbachev, the U.S. president appeared so eager to reduce the superpowers' nuclear arsenals, and perhaps eliminate all nuclear weapons, that he raised the possibility of negotiating away the French deterrent—or at least making it obsolescent. Reagan and Gorbachev agreed tentatively to sharp reductions in their strategic missiles and to the double zero option for Euromissiles. Trying to allay Soviet fears about the SDI, which Moscow opposed, Reagan offered the technology to the Soviets. Even though the talks collapsed because Reagan refused to relinquish his “Star Wars” project and Gorbachev's doubted American promises to share the new technology, it seemed like the Americans and the Soviets were up to their old tricks—deciding the fate of Europe without the Europeans. The fear of a superpower condominium had returned. From a European perspective the Reykjavik Summit also raised the specter of the superpowers, secure behind their shields, fighting with conventional or nuclear weapons on the European continent. Chirac worried that “decisions vital to the security of Europe could be taken without Europe really having any say in the matter.”
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Unlike his prime minister, Mitterrand was, in a subdued way, favorable toward Reykjavik for advancing disarmament and the double zero option—which he had come to embrace. The summit appeared to the French press as a major setback—especially for Reagan, who some thought may have been outsmarted by Gorbachev.
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In the aftermath of the summit in Iceland, Chirac's government and the Elysee engaged in a long duel over the double zero option for Euromissiles. The prime minister thought Gorbachev intended to “Finlandize” Europe in order to hold it “hostage” and cautioned against any action that might lead to the withdrawal of American nuclear forces from Europe.
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The Quai d'Orsay noted Soviet advantages in conventional weapons and short-range missiles and warned, rather
wildly, against the “denuclearization of Western Europe.”
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Mitterrand acknowledged that removing intermediate-range missiles raised the old bogey of decoupling, but he countered that he, and his fellow socialists, had always favored reducing the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers and the double zero option did not directly touch the force de frappe.
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Moreover, deterrence, in the form of superpower strategic forces, remained in tact.

On this issue the French president enjoyed the public's support because it did not view the Soviet Union as an immediate threat and was inclined toward disarmament and detente. They backed the double zero option more strongly than did their government, even if they were rather cynical about Reagan's motives and skeptical about Soviet compliance.
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A majority even wanted France to follow the lead of the superpowers and reduce its arsenal of nuclear weapons.
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It was not until 1987 that the decadelong debate over Euromissiles ended. The signing of the Washington Treaty in December of that year, negotiated by the Americans and the Soviets, adopted the double zero option and eliminated all intermediate-range weapons; it won massive public and media support in France as well as Mitterrand's endorsement.
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Yet Chirac and some French military leaders disapproved of the treaty because it seemed to weaken deterrence. Mitterrand ignored them; he vowed that France would maintain its strategic nuclear capability, arguing that the goal of deterrence was “to prevent war, not to win it.”
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As for “denuclearization,” he argued, should it happen, that would be far in the future.

At this point Mitterrand, according to one of his biographers, had lost confidence in Reagan, whose rash approach to negotiating with the Soviets and his unilateral treatment of France convinced Mitterrand that the U.S. president was visibly “losing his grip.”
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Mitterrand worried less about Gorbachev's proposals about totally eliminating superpower nuclear weapons some day than he did about the White House: “the principal danger is the dream and madness of Mr. Reagan, who accepted at Reykjavik the complete withdrawal of nuclear forces.
We came close to catastrophe.”
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In fact, the Reagan administration had largely ignored both Mitterrand and Thatcher in negotiating with Gorbachev over arms control.
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Then came a debilitating scandal. On November 13, 1986, “the great communicator” went on television from the Oval Office and informed the American people that his administration had been secretly selling arms to a sponsor of international terrorism, the Iranian Islamic Republic. The president denied that the United States had sent weapons to Iran as ‘'ransom'' for Americans held in Lebanon, yet he admitted that one of the reasons for the transfer of arms was to win Tehran's help in obtaining ‘'the safe return of all hostages.'' He trivialized the sales, saying the weapons were strictly “defensive” and so few that they could all have been transported on a single cargo plane. Reagan seemed clumsy and ill at ease. French journalists, like much of the American public, were not impressed with his performance. They recognized blatant hypocrisy and incompetence in the White House, contrasting the image of Reagan in 1979 ranting against then president Jimmy Carter's attempt at negotiating with the Iranian revolutionaries with Reagan's humiliating admission that he had been secretly working with Tehran.
L'Express
reminded readers how the Reagan administration had advocated a hard line against states that supported terrorism and had exhorted its European allies to do the same—yet, when it wanted, it not only negotiated with Tehran but supplied Iran with sophisticated weapons, submitted to blackmail, and bargained for hostages. The hostage swap, according to the weekly, was only the latest in a series of diplomatic faux pas, such as the “muddle” at the Reykjavik Summit and the clandestine delivery of weapons to the contras in Nicaragua that “called into question Reagan's competence.”
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Le Nouvel Observateur
declared that “the president's cowboys have gone too far,” referring to the clandestine program “run by a team of amateurs from within the White House itself.”
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In Paris a spokesman for Chirac's political party smirked, “Those who give morality lessons would do well to sweep in front of their own door before criticizing others.”
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Toting up Reagan's
foreign policy
Le Monde
could identify only a few successes, like the invasion of Grenada, while listing many “reverses and setbacks,” including the headlong flight from Lebanon, the amateurish efforts at backing the anti-Sandinistas, the Reykjavik fiasco, and now Iran.
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The scandal deepened in 1987 with new disclosures about the complicated dealings with Iran, including the revelation that profits from the weapons sales had been used to subsidize the contras. In an embarrassing television address in March 1987, Reagan acknowledged his responsibility and conceded that his policy had “deteriorated” into an exchange of arms for hostages. By then a large majority of the French thought the scandal had compromised Reagan's ability to lead the alliance.
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