So what is it that we think Sarkozy will do — follow the United States blindly into a new war? It seems not. Sarkozy addressed France’s American friends by saying “I want to tell them that France will always be by their side when they need her, but that friendship is also accepting the fact that friends can think differently.” And, of course, under Jacques Chirac’s presidency France did cooperate with the United States in Afghanistan and has cooperated with us broadly on intelligence-sharing and counter-terrorism. So what’s the difference supposed to be? ~Matt Yglesias

Yglesias asks a good question.  The answer is: no significant difference at all.  Americans, their journalists included, think every foreign election has to have something to do with them, and they seem to be interested in those elections mainly for what they tell “us” about the future attitude of the next foreign leader or government towards America.  That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it makes for pretty uninteresting analysis of foreign elections when, unlike the election Germany in 2002 (where Schroeder used his opposition to the war, which his opponent also shared, to save his re-election), the election in France had virtually nothing to do with America, U.S. foreign policy or Franco-American relations.  Read the transcript of the Sarkozy-Royal debate, and you will find scant mention of les Etats-Unis.  That’s because this was a French election about domestic and European policy. 

It is as if foreign journalists had become terribly excited that the outcome of the utterly boring, conventional, domestically-driven 1992 election signalled something meaningful in the area of foreign policy.  Like America, France has an establishment that pursues a certain set of goals overseas regardless of changes in domestic politics, and a qualified Atlanticism will remain part of that establishment perspective so long as one of the major parties holds power.