诛仙小说七脉会武排名:In Libya, an Odd-Couple Alliance - Focus disc...

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In Libya, an Odd-Couple Alliance

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At home in France, he has long been called “Sarko l’Américain.” But it took an American president and the threat of a massacre in Libya to give President Nicolas Sarkozy the chance to channel his inner American. With his call for military action against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, his recognition of the rebels and his readiness to arm them, Mr. Sarkozy has looked every inch the swaggering world leader, less a latter-day Charles de Gaulle than a Gallic Ronald Reagan.

For President Obama, too, Mr. Sarkozy has been an enabler, but of a different sort. By thrusting France so far out front, he has allowed Mr. Obama to claim credibly that Libya is now a model of multilateral cooperation, not merely the third Muslim country the United States has gone to war with in the last decade. Pulled reluctantly into the conflict by the urgent pleas of European and Arab leaders — none of the pleas more urgent than Mr. Sarkozy’s — Mr. Obama has managed to sound almost European.

It is an unlikely geopolitical Alphonse-and-Gaston routine, featuring two men who are outriders in their own political landscapes and who have each taken a risk by going against the conventional wisdom in Paris and Washington. But the routine also has broader implications because it augurs a world in which the United States, militarily stretched and fiscally depleted, can no longer afford to play global policeman alone.

“It would be tempting to say Sarkozy the American is encountering Obama the European, but it would be wrong,” said Dominique Moïsi, the founder of the French Institute for International Relations, who helped popularize the nickname “Sarko l’Américain.” For these two very different leaders, “this is a marriage of convenience.”

It is also a marriage rooted in well-advertised conviction. When Mr. Obama introduced himself to Europeans, in a speech in Berlin in July 2008, he described himself as a “citizen of the world.” His address, given in the twilight of George W. Bush’s presidency, was most memorable for its citation of the “burdens of global citizenship.”

Ticking off the dangers of nuclear proliferation, drug cultivation in Afghanistan, violence in Somalia and genocide in Darfur, Mr. Obama said that no country, including the United States, was powerful enough to tackle them alone. It was a rejection of the unilateral policies of the Bush administration, but it was also a challenge to Europe. “If we’re honest with each other,” he said, “we know that sometimes, on both sides of the Atlantic, we have drifted apart, and forgotten our shared destiny.”

Mr. Sarkozy, for his part, has long professed admiration of the United States, going so far as to vacation at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire in 2007, shortly after he took office. In 2009, he reintegrated France into the command structure of NATO, a largely symbolic step that nonetheless made it easier for him to push for a NATO-led operation in Libya.

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In the years before Mr. Sarkozy took office, no two countries in the Western alliance had drifted further apart than France and the United States. In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, declared that France’s refusal to support the American invasion was a choice between “two visions of the world” — America’s “swift and preventive” force and France’s patient diplomacy.

This time, Mr. Sarkozy was the one to issue a call for a swift military response to prevent a slaughter in Benghazi, Libya. Mr. Obama resisted, worried that it would foment an anti-American backlash in the Muslim world. With a budget battle looming and the United States trying to extricate its fighting forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, he was loath to commit troops and treasure in a country that his defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, said was not a vital interest of the United States.

It was Mr. Sarkozy’s willingness, along with that of Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, to play a lead role in enforcing a no-fly zone that helped change the equation for Mr. Obama. That allowed him to announce a military intervention coupled with a promise that the United States would pull back within days and turn over major operations to a NATO-led coalition.

“The Europeans keep saying, ‘We’re ready to lead, we’re ready to lead, we’re ready to lead,’ ” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former policy planning director at the State Department who now teaches at Princeton. “Finally, we’ve found a Frenchman willing to step into the role.”

Certainly, Mr. Sarkozy has his own reasons for seizing the initiative. He is trailing in the polls and faces the prospect of being a one-term president. His opponents, particularly on the right, play to French fears of an influx of refugees from Libya and other North African countries. His government was late in reacting to the revolt in Tunisia, a former French colony, and his government was derided as being too cozy with that country’s ousted despot, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

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But Mr. Moïsi said it would be unfair to say that Mr. Sarkozy is driven only by political calculations. This president also wants to be an historic figure, he said, and has a grand view of France’s place in the world. France, like the United States, is founded on the principle of universal rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen offers a persuasive case for protecting Benghazi.

Such ideals are also at least partly behind France’s intervention in another former colony, the Ivory Coast, where French peacekeeping troops, operating under a United Nations mandate, besieged the presidential palace to oust President Laurent Gbagbo, after he refused to vacate the office he lost in an election.

For Mr. Sarkozy, there are huge risks to all these adventures. Libya could slip into a stalemate between the rebels and Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. Having recognized the rebels early as legitimate rulers of Libya could boomerang, given how little the West knows about them. Mr. Sarkozy could face the wrath of voters if the United States is viewed as having shifted too much of the burden to France.

There are dangers for Mr. Obama, too. Critics in Congress say he has thrown the United States into a mission with an ill-defined goal. For all his talk about partners and burden-sharing, the American military still constitutes the bulk of NATO’s fighting force, and as such, is essential in the operation. Without Mr. Obama as his wingman, Mr. Sarkozy would lose much of his swagger. Then, too, the idea of a military operation not led by the United States does not sit well with some Republicans.

Above all, these two men are a contrarian’s delight: Europeans marvel at an American president who needs to be dragged into a foreign conflict; Americans with vivid memories of Iraq do not know what to make of a French warrior.

Could it be, then, that French fries deserve to be called “freedom fries” after all?

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