6/05/2004 11:17:28 AM|||Nathan Moore|||

I am glad to see, despite his microlevel speaking issues, that George W. Bush is quite good in the delivery of soaring rhetoric. His speech at Colorado Springs was awesome, as well as his press conference with Silvio Berlusconi. In fact, all his speeches focused on freedom and the ongoing war have been exceptional. This, quite frankly, seems to be because those are subjects he has deep, unwavering convictions about, and he is not an actor, whether that be in the Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton vein. At once it was thought a liability - I believe it to be his greatest strength.

I am curious as to the content of the D-Day address. Oh, how upset will the French be at the inevitable comparison of D-Day and the liberation of Europe and the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan! It's apt, and accurate, and needs to be said. The French are defensive because they are ashamed - ashamed that their current geopolitical status and desire for future French hegemony (unrealistic as that is) requires a dangerous forgetfulness. They feel the comparison is somehow, I detect, unfair. To be such self-styled sophisticates, it amazes one to consider how childish the French elite view of the world actually has become. The French have always had an overinflated view of their self-importance, but never to the point of such self-destructive behavior.

Of course, the French world, and view of it, is much different now than it was twenty, or even ten, years ago. It was almost instantly begrudging, but the French relationship with the United States after World War II existed positively for very high-states reasons. There was some French intransigence and free-riding, such as de Gaulles' pullout from the military arm of NATO, and the refusal to allow Allied use of air space in the bombing of Libya, but there was little doubt as to where allegiances ultimately lied. This is no longer the case.

Since the end of the Cold War, the French have turned their attention to more local matters. The rise in influence of the European Union has changed the French goal. No longer is the nation concerned with liberty outside its borders and attacks from without. It has found a way to minimize the size of its operative world, and to once again hold sway over the path of the continent where it had seen its influence and power eroded for most of the last one hundred years. This is an unfortunate limitation, for a culture that has played so significantly in the history of Western Civilization.

France has attempted to shrink its world and remove the one factor of being a nation-state it has been dismal at in modern times - military proficiency. America's presence, especially on the anniversary of D-Day, on French soil, reminds the French political aristocracy of this fact - that in the real world outside their overly bloated EU bubble that they are the poster child of impotence and uselessness. Denial is the enemy of true progress.

Let George W. Bush remind them of this fact.

|||108645440869562543|||The March Continues