France, the US needs you again!
French and Canadian, I lived as an adult for two decades in Canada, a decade in the US under Governor then President ‘Dubya’ Bush, and a decade now in the UK.
In Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the Frenchman in me picked up on the 1781 siege of Yorktown, which brought the American Revolution to a close: In it I saw British General Cornwallis surrender to combined Rebel and French forces under Washington and Lafayette — hence “Lafayette nous voila” — in combination with British Admiral Graves’ failure to break French naval superiority and to resupply Cornwallis’ flagging British troops. Add to that Benjamin Franklin’s many fund-raising trips to the French royal court — the original super PAC? — and I see France as the unheralded ally, who helped if not saved the American Revolution.
What they didn’t teach you in school, however, but David McCullough made clear in 1776, is how close the see-sawing was among Washington and Cornwallis — not unlike 150-odd years later on D-Day, General Eisenhower with both victory and defeat speeches in each of his breast pockets according to Laurence Rees’ Behind Closed Doors — and a much more nuanced picture of the American Revolution emerges: Not only were important allies the story behind the story then, but also history is most important today …
Yet another Medium post inspired the headline picture and indeed this story. Halfway down Only France can save us, Gregory Lusted raised the specter of “a possible alliance between Russia, U.S. and France” next year. And since comparisons abound in the news with WWII, it didn’t take much for me to Photoshop a famous AP photo… But while Yalta heralded the close of WWII, Lusted and others in the press argue that the three actors above may do just the reverse in a purported Yalta 2.0 — though due to current events in Ukraine yet still with Putin’s predilection for the Black Sea, might it not be, say, Sochi instead? — and many thus hope that that will never happen.
Lusted points out that while Brexit and the recent US elections both saw disaffected electorates rocket the anti-establishment to power, the French extreme Right is nothing new; if anything it’s François Fillon who came from behind the last week’s new Center-right French Primaries!
Is it not the disaffection against the extreme Right, which might help France stem the Populist tide in Europe?
That in turn may buttress EU, NATO, IMF etc. according to Lusted, and deny the chaos sought by Putin also according to Sarah Kendzior, who tweeted @summerbrennan’s Storify on cyber-threats… That reading list clearly shows that ‘the cyber’ is the invisible elephant in the room — it threatens the US both internally (questioning electoral results) and externally (foreign national involvement) — so if France can stop the Populist ‘domino effect’, then might the US not benefit from their alliedship again almost 250 years later?
