The Voice of Reason Is Speaking French

Sacré bleu—the voice of reason is speaking French.

While the Obama administrations and its flunkies wring their hands in chagrin at Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory in Tuesday’s Israeli elections, the French government—that’s the French Socialist government—must have been relieved.

The French Socialists find Barack Obama to be hopelessly naïve in the matter of the Iranian nuclear threat. They are counting on Congressional Republicans—you know, the ones who incurred the wrath of the great Obama by inviting the Israeli prime minister to address Congress—to stop Obama before he allows the Iranians to get the bomb, thereby provoking an arms race throughout the Middle East.

One suspects that the French government was silently cheering the open letter that Senator Tom Cotton and 46 other Republicans sent to the ayatollahs. Desperate times require desperate measures.

You will recall that the government of Socialist president Francois Hollande had no problem calling Islamist terrorism by its name. Our own president has twisted himself into knots to avoid associating Islam with terrorism… thus leading the world to believe that he is a coward.

Anne-Elizabeth Moutet reports:

French leaders think the U.S. president is dangerously naïve on Iran's ambitions, and that his notion of making Iran an "objective ally" in the war against ISIS, or even a partner, together with Putin's Russia, to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis, is both far-fetched and "amateurish."

When Claude Angéli says that both France's Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, and its President, François Hollande, have told friends that they rely on "the support of the US Congress" to prevent Obama from giving in to Iran's nuclear ambitions, it is the kind of quote you can take to the bank.

French diplomats worry that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, every other local Middle East power will want them. Among their worst nightmares is a situation in which Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia join the Dr. Strangelove club.

Moutet adds the views of French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius:

Laurent Fabius -- once François Mitterrand's youngest Prime Minister; today's François Hollande's seasoned Foreign Minister -- is "fed up with Barack Obama's nuclear laxity" regarding Iran, a Quai senior diplomat told Le Canard Enchaîné's usually well-informed Claude Angéli, who can be relied on to give the unvarnished French view on matters foreign. "Just as in 2013, France will oppose any agreement too favorable to Iran if this turns out to be necessary. Fabius made this very clear to John Kerry when they met on Saturday March 7th."

This, Angéli points out, is far from the "soothing communiqué" issued at the end of the Kerry-Fabius meeting in which both men supposedly "shared" the same view of the Iran negotiations. The communiqué itself may have come as a surprise to a number of French MPs and Senators from their respective Foreign Affairs Committees. Fabius himself, in a meeting last week, made extremely clear his deep distrust ("contempt, really," one MP says) of both John Kerry and Barack Obama. Another of the group quotes Fabius as saying: "The United States was really ready to sign just about anything with the Iranians," before explaining that he himself had sent out, mid-February, a number of French 'counter-proposals' to the State Department and White House, in order to prevent an agreement too imbalanced in favor of Iran.

And that’s not all.

So when Claude Angéli says that both Fabius and President François Hollande have told friends that they rely on "the support of the US Congress" to prevent Obama from giving in to Iran's nuclear ambitions, it's the kind of quote you can take to the bank. French leaders think the U.S. president is dangerously "naïve" on Iran's ambitions, and that his notion of making Iran an "objective ally" in the war against ISIS, or even a partner, together with Putin's Russia, to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis, is both far-fetched and amateurish.

The French are still smarting from the last-minute reprieve Obama granted Syria, as the French air force was about to bomb the Assad regime's military positions back in 2013, because the U.S. President had been convinced by Russia that they had succeeded in making Syrian President Bashar al-Assad give up on the use of his chemical weapons. "Our Rafale fighters were about to scramble," a French air force officer is quoted as saying; "Hollande was furious."

The French might not like Israel. The French Socialists might not be drawn to American Republicans. But, Hollande and Fabius are experienced diplomats. They have not just arrived on the world stage. And they understand, better than many Americans, that Barack Obama is a bumbler, hopelessly out of his depth.

People like Obama do not care about the results; they do not care about the outcome; they care about the appearance.